How your beliefs can limit your career (and what to do about that)

[crosstalk 00:00:35].

Letha: Right.

Shelly: When I say an intentional career or job, what I mean by that is many of us go to school majoring something, we come out and if we’re lucky, we get a job in what we majored in. A lot of us don’t. We find ourselves interviewing for jobs that look interesting, and we get hired. Next thing you know, we’re there 5, 10, 15 years. Really. Do we stop and say, “Is this still lighting me up? Is this still feeding my soul? Is this job something that makes me proud and happy to come to everyday? Is it thank God it’s Friday?”

Letha: Shelly, why do we stay in jobs in which we’re not happy? Why don’t we ask ourselves those questions?

Shelly: So, I’m going to talk about beliefs, because I listen to people all day long. Many of whom stay in jobs that they hate, and it’s always about our beliefs. I want to go back to what happens when we’re young. I was working with somebody the other day, and he said to me, “I always dreamed of being an actor.” I know I wanted to be an actor from when I was little. I used to put on plays and make my parents watch my plays. I used to make my siblings be in my plays.

Shelly: When I got into high school, I joined the drama club, and my teacher said I was quite good. He said … It makes me cry. He said, “I ran to my parents,” and he said, “I want to go, I want to major in acting in school.” They said, “Oh, very few people make it in acting. You’ll end up being a starving waiter. We’re not paying for you to go to school to study acting.”

Letha: Yeah.

Shelly: The same thing is true with being a professional baseball player. I had a client who wanted to be a professional baseball player. He loved baseball, and his parents said, “Very few people make it.” Now, I’m not saying those things aren’t true, but it doesn’t mean you won’t make it, and it certainly didn’t mean that you shouldn’t try, because how many people leave this world regretting not going for it, not at least trying.

Letha: Really.

Shelly: I think about one of my client’s mother said to her, “You have to be thin, tall, and beautiful to be an actress or an actor.” I think about people like Danny DeVito or his wife, Rhea Perlman, or these millions of many, not millions, but these many people who are actors and actresses who are not classically beautiful, but they’re not model beautiful.

Letha: Right.

Shelly: I think that as kids, we conclude things that we can’t be those things, that we can’t do those things. It’s the same thing with wanting to be an entrepreneur. So many of us are told like my father, “Get a good job. Jobs have security,” and I have so many people that I work with who stay in jobs because they’re afraid. They think that having a job is more secure, and it’s not. Companies go out of business. People get laid off. You can get fired, so it’s not even true that it’s more secure. When you have your own business, you have way more control of how things work out financially, of what kind of business you have.

Shelly: That’s what I find that they’re writing a book about entrepreneurs and that they have, that keep them from being successful entrepreneurs, and it’s always beliefs.

Letha: Sorry.

Shelly: No.

Letha: What do I do though? What do I do? I’m the person who works every day 9:00 to 5:00, and like you say, put in all those hours, and I’m really unhappy. What are my steps? How do I get out of it if I discover, “This really isn’t what I want to do?”

Shelly: Yeah, so the first thing is whatever you can do to look at your beliefs and to actually ask yourself, “What would I have to believe to stay in a job that I don’t like? I’m not capable. I don’t have what it takes. I’m too old. Nobody’s going to want me.” Any beliefs that you have, if you wanted to be going to sales and be successful in sales, you might have beliefs that, I just worked with somebody who had the beliefs that selling is dirty and you have to lie to people to be successful in sales. Just sit down and journal and ask yourself, “What beliefs do I have that are in the way?”

Shelly: Then it’s worked with me or do natural confidence, or however it is that you could get rid of those beliefs, I really urge you to do that. So, that’s really where people are stuck, because if you didn’t have beliefs you’d say, I hate- Oh, the other thing is money, money beliefs, “Nobody’s going to pay me what I’m worth,” or you may have, if you’re asking for what you’re worth.

Letha: Right, I won’t be able to make it. Yeah, right. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shelly: Yeah, I need the money. I have to stay here, because money is scarce and hard to get. So, there’s lots of beliefs that have us stay in a job that we don’t love.

Letha: Shell, if I have my list, I think that’s a great idea for anyone to do just to come up with that list. Now, what do I do with that list?

Shelly: So, the first thing that you do is you find a way to eliminate the beliefs. Then once the beliefs are out of the way, then you can sit down and say, here are the questions, “What lights me up? Do I love being with people or do I love being alone? Do I want to sit by myself and work, or do I want to work being in an environment with a lot of people?” What are the things when you look back at your life, was there anything that you ever really wanted to do? What did you play as a kid?

Shelly: Look at the things that you enjoy. It’s interesting, Morty used to tell my girls, “Find something that you love doing, and then find somebody to pay you to do it.”

Letha: I do remember that.

Shelly: So, instead of looking for a job or saying, “I can’t make my- I love arranging flowers.” Well, who could you work for? A party planner? There’s lots of ways.

Letha: Yeah.

Shelly: If you say, “I have a client who loves crafting, and she said when I craft, I realize that my stress levels go down. I’m not eating because my hands are busy,” she said, and it’s really therapeutic for me. I said, “Well, why don’t you do that for a living?” She said, “I used to.” Then we got into a conversation. Now, she’s back to crafting, and she’s doing it. She’s selling it as a way for people to get rid of their stress, and work through their issues by crafting.

Letha: She had or she got rid of the beliefs that were in her way of pursuing that dream, that crafting that she used to love, [crosstalk 00:09:19].

Shelly: Totally, and Oprah Winfrey, what does Oprah Winfrey love to do?

Letha: Talk.

Shelly: Talk, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right.

Letha: She’s really good at it.

Shelly: She loves to talk. She became probably a billionaire talking.

Letha: Yeah. She’s inquisitive. She’s really inquisitive. She loves to learn, yeah.

Shelly: She loves to learn.

Letha: Yeah.

Shelly: As she grew, that’s so insightfully because she loves to learn and all of a sudden she discovered personal growth, and she took her show, which was a mega success, and shifted it to personal growth.

Letha: Yeah.

Shelly: She knew she was going to lose people doing that, because not everybody’s into it, but she found her audience. She found her audience.

Letha: She found her bliss. That’s what she wanted to do.

Shelly: She found her bliss.

Letha: That’s cool.

Shelly: That’s what I think is possible. When I get up, one of the things that I can honestly say is when I lost Morty, for those of you who may not know, my husband Morty was my co-founder in Lefkoe Institute, and he died three and a half years ago. I just didn’t know how I was going to go back to work. I was so devastated. The minute a person got in front of me, and I knew that I could help them be freed, which is what turns me on-

Letha: [crosstalk 00:10:59] contribution yup, absolutely.

Shelly: Yeah, contribution. That lights me up. It doesn’t have to light you up. It’s not noble. It’s not better than. It’s just what turns me on. When I know people can get stuff out of the way and live their bliss, as you said, that juices me. That turns me on, and it is what got me through my husband’s death. Doing something that makes a difference, doing something that I feel makes me alive. So, I strongly urge that you sit down, you journal, and you start an inquiry. You may not get it in the first round. You may get it more, but keep asking yourself questions, what do I love? What kind of people do I love being around? What is it that nourishes me, you know, that being around kids, maybe you should go back to school and become a teacher. Maybe you can be a teacher’s aide.

Shelly: I have a friend, Debbie who’s a physical therapist and joined the medical school with my brother. She was 40 something years old and she said, “God, I always wanted to be a lawyer.” Went back to school and became a lawyer. Interestingly enough, she just retired.

Letha: That’s so inspiring. So inspiring.

Shelly: She had a good 20 something years as a lawyer.

Letha: Wow, that’s really cool.

Shelly: Everything is possible. That’s the thing. You work and you go [crosstalk 00:12:34].

Letha: Especially like you said, once I get what’s in my way out of the way. One of the ways to do that is certainly to work on your beliefs. I’m sure no it helped me.

Shelly: I want to close with this story that my daughter would hate, but I love. So, Britney has totally done her work, and she’s very confident. She’s not cocky, but she’s confident. She decided that she wanted to go into sales and be very successful and make a lot of money in sales, and that’s what she was going to do. She went out for a job as the director of sales enablement for a tech store down.

Letha: Right.

Shelly: When she first found the job, she didn’t know what sales enablement was, and she had never been in sales. She read up of what sales enablement was and she went on the interview. She had one interview, and then two, and then three. They kept calling her back to meet with somebody else. Well, her ninth interview, in sitting in front of the CEO of the company, and he’s looking at her resume, clearly she’s not qualified for this job. She says to him, “What qualities would you like to see in the person that you hire that you haven’t seen in me yet?” He looked at her and he said, “Listen, I can hire you as director of sales enablement, but I’m giving you the job with the knowledge that you are going to grow into it very soon.”

Letha: Very cool.

Shelly: Because there’s just something about you. That was the thing that everybody saw something in her that they couldn’t hire her because she wasn’t qualified, but they couldn’t let her go. Here’s the point of the story, our beliefs stop us. If anybody would have asked me, “Is Britney going to get that job?” I’d say, [crosstalk 00:15:09] we would say yes knowing Britney, when anybody else would’ve said no, there’s no way.

Letha: Really?

Shelly: Because they didn’t have those beliefs. She has a belief, “I’m smart, I’m a good learner. I can learn anything.”

Letha: I can do this, yeah.

Shelly: I can do this, and that it was possible because she was raised that anything was possible. Don’t let your belief stop you. Go for your dreams and have the life you love.

Letha: Have that intentional life that you want with intention. Absolutely. Thanks, Shell.

Shelly: Thanks everybody.

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The Lefkoe Freedom Course – Waiting List for September 2019

Previous things that used to frequently upset me no longer do because through this course I truly got that my experience of life comes from the meaning I’m giving everything in the moment, and that meaning is not the same as what’s actually happening in the real world, and now I can also change that meaning whenever I want to do something else I’d enjoy more.

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