The Silent Dream Killer: Get Off Autopilot

Day 3 of my 14-day 6 AM Check-in live series is done, and I opened with a question I ask a lot of my coaching clients:

If nothing changed in your life, and you woke up five years from now and everything was exactly the same as it is today, how would that make you feel?

Almost every one of them says the same thing: “Like I’ve been stuck this whole time.”

What they really want

My clients come to me wanting to open a group home, start a consulting business, or start investing in real estate. But when we dig into why now and what changed, most of the time the business isn’t really what they want. They want their life to change. They just can’t name who they want to become yet, so the business is their gateway.

So the real question becomes: how do you get unstuck?

The silent dream killer

There’s a silent dream killer inside most of us, and it’s the feeling that it’s too late. You’re in your 40s or 50s. You’ve always done for everybody else. So you keep going on about your daily life, stuck on autopilot, doing the exact same thing every day.

Think about your drive to work. You know every pothole, every tree, every blade of grass. You could almost do it with your eyes closed. You get to work, put your things away, grab a coffee in the break room, chitchat for two minutes, turn on your computer, check your email. Same thing, every day.

For someone who wants a different life, autopilot is dangerous, because nothing changes.

The perfectionism trap

The other thing keeping people stuck is perfectionism: waiting on the perfect timing, the perfect plan, or looking perfect on camera. Girl, everything is not going to be perfect. It’s just not. If you stay in that trap, you go deeper and deeper, and before you know it, those five years have come and gone.

Shake up your routine

I once asked a client what had to change in her life before she could become the person she wanted to be. She sat there for what felt like minutes and said, “I don’t know.”

So I gave her one thing to try. Tomorrow morning, don’t do what you normally do. If you normally brush your teeth first, don’t. Open the door, walk outside, and walk around on the grass for a little bit. Get grounded. Feel the air. Then go back in and do your routine.

Then, when it’s time to drive to work, take a different route. Go the long way. Take the scenic route.

You’re tricking your brain out of autopilot. It starts saying, “Hold on, this is new. This is different. I think I like this.”

That’s exactly why I’m getting on my Peloton and going live at 6 AM with my morning voice and the bags under my eyes. I’m not camera ready, and I don’t want to be. I’m the first partaker of the change I’m talking to you about. I’m not going to be the same person five years from now. I’m not even the same person I was yesterday.

Your challenge today

• Do one thing differently this morning: a different first move, a different route to work, or skip the break room.
• Keep finding new ways to break autopilot, and notice how your body responds when things don’t have to be the same, or perfect.

Try it today, and tell me tomorrow how it went. We’re doing this for 14 days, weekdays at 6 AM Eastern, live on YouTube.