9. Staying in the Pocket

And today, we're gonna talk about staying in the pocket. Now if you are a band geek, if you were a band nerd like me, you may have heard this phrase. Staying in the pocket when I was in band. Talked about staying in the rhythm, in the groove of the song, and almost had this instinctual quality to it. Like, you're not necessarily counting out every beat.

You're not necessarily mentally keeping yourself in rhythm, but it's just like letting your body flow and staying in the the movement of the song and the band. And I find that this phraseology works so well in business. So if you're like me, you can have your overthinking moments. And I won't even say overthinking because sometimes it's just our thinking moments, our mentally strategizing, taking in the data and saying, okay. What course of action do I wanna forge from the information that I have?

But I know for me, sometimes it can feel safer to be in that space, and I can lose sight of the wisdom of my intuition, of my subconscious mind, of my body, and what it's telling me through impulses and tightening and opening and all of that stuff. And so this episode is dedicated to us in those moments when we have gotten out of the pocket and fallen into overthinking. So what is it even why why do we what do we how do we know the difference between being in this maybe overthinking, halting, start and stopping state and being in the pocket, being in flow. And why? What differentiates them and what's the benefit?

So if you have ever been in those moments where you need to make a decision and you are weighing the pros and cons and going back and forth and pulling different people in your life, you feel stressed and tight and, like, out of control, honestly. You know, that doesn't feel great. And whatever decision we make typically doesn't even feel super expansive. It it feels like, okay. I made it.

I made the decision. I think I collected enough data. I hope I did, but this is what I'm doing. And then we have a whole gigantic list of the reasons why we did what we did. Like we're we're almost defensive about it internally and externally to a degree.

I find that when I'm in that space, I have fallen out of the pocket. I've lost touch with my my instinct around business, my instinct around my life. And I'm trying to substitute, cerebral exercises for that instinct. So staying in the pocket on the other hand looks like really aligning with abundance. Recognizing that for most decisions, it's not life or death, and for most decisions, even if a particular opportunity may not be available once we choose one path, the benefits of both paths are still open to us.

Right? So if we are stressing about whether or not we should hire this person versus that person. We are seeing a reality where we hire person a and we get this benefit. We hire person b and we get this benefit. And we'll also see these trade offs.

And we're stressed and we're wondering. When we're in the pocket, when we're connected to abundance, we recognize that the benefits that both provide to us are still available to us in the world at large. Even if we go with person a, the wonderful things person b could bring to the table are still can still be found. There are still ways to add connectedness and to have more of a team player atmosphere. There are ways to bring in that artisan skill and that particular perspective on design.

Right? And we also might find as we sink back back into the pocket that we actually wanna hire both, and there's a way to make it happen. When we're in the pocket, we're in creativity, we're in, play, we are in, connection to what we desire and have the faith and belief that we can receive that. It may not look exactly how we imagined, but we believe it can be met. And so we become more creative.

We look at alternative options. We bring people into the conversation, and it can feel almost like a game or like a puzzle. How can we make this work? So I'm talking about the pocket. The pocket.

The pocket. What does it actually look like to shift out of this tight, head spinning space into one that's more expansive and grounded. So I did an episode on fear and uncertainty. I think it was actually just before this one. And there's a lot of overlap between the two.

And, but what we're talking about today is almost like double clicking further into the alternative state to fear and uncertainty. So a lot of what was discussed in that previous podcast episode are is super relevant to this conversation here. But I'm gonna give a few more really specific ways that we can help ourselves move back into the pocket. So one, I would say, anchor into and remember, journal about, visualize times when you felt like you were in the pocket. When one synchronicity happened after the other.

When one opportunity followed another. When you had a day where one blissful thing followed the other, one thing resolved itself out of the after the other. If you had a moment where something was bothering you or a problem that needed to be solved and it you whether through choice or through an inability like not having the resources, you couldn't take care of it right away and it actually resolved itself and you received that confirmation of like, okay, things can work out without me having to always be the one pushing them forward. Anchoring into the times that we have experienced this abundant is so crucially important. Our brains love data, and sometimes we fight against that.

And we want ourselves to be able to shift without providing that data. Like, it should be enough that I want this, and that I think I should think this way, to think that way, but that's not always the case. Sometimes we need to show our brain data, and it's it might feel conflicting to to talk about being in the pocket and leaning into our intuition and the instinctual flow and the expansion and then talk about providing data for our brain. But really the ideal is that we are integrated and connected and all of these faculties within us are online. And absolutely, we'll have certain challenges we experience, certain joys we experience, certain moments we experience where maybe our brain takes a lead or our body or you know our spirit.

But ultimately we are wanting them to be integrated. So as you remember times you've been in the pocket, produce those, write those down for your brain. Show it that things have worked out in the past, I can trust myself. Give it examples of times when you have stress and agonized, and everything worked out irregardless or you were way over prepared or the course you set had to be routed anyways and so all that work on the front end was rendered unnecessary. And this is not to give us a sort of fatalistic, like, sense of nothing I do matters anyways.

Absolutely not. But we wanna retrain our minds to recognize that so often our over functioning doesn't benefit us, doesn't benefit anybody else. Functioning, sure, right? Like, we're not advocating here for turning off the brain, for stopping strategy, but we want to take ourselves out of overfunctioning and back into that pocket. A second tip for getting us back into the pocket is spending time in nature with nature, contemplating nature.

So I I really take a lot of my cues from nature because we are in nature. We are part of nature. We are nature. And we see so often in most of nature, in most of the species that inhabit this earth, except for humans because we create a lot of our own problems, there is this instinctual flow. And for a while, I had on my phone background a picture of a bee coming up to a flower and, the words instinct meets instinct on it.

And I it I was soaking in the idea in the sense that everything on this planet has an instinct that guides it towards the light, that guides it towards flourishing and growing. Look at nature. Everything in nature is geared towards its own flourishing, its own reproduction, its own expansion. And we are no different. We do, however, have a lot more mechanisms going on where we sabotage like hell each other and ourselves, like our species, our ecosystem, and ourselves.

And I've been thinking about that a lot, but that'll be a whole other existential that one will be a little fatalistic and existential. So but I see that the bee comes to the flower and receives what it needs and also helps the flower reproduce and continue on its genetic material, you know. And I think about us like that as well, that we have the ability to tap into this instinctual flow where not every moment will feel so divinely and perfectly aligned, but the overarching swoop of our life can feel that clear in our bodies. It doesn't mean we won't have hard nights. It doesn't mean that we will have questions and, wonderings about what makes the most sense.

But I do firmly believe that we can tune into that inner voice, that inner wisdom, and it can guide us. And so when we are and that, I mean, that is fundamentally being in the pocket is letting the waves of instinct carry us. And so when we are feeling dissociated from that, getting back into nature intentionally and watching how nature dances with itself can help remind us how we can dance with life. We are we are just as much nature as the bee, as the opossum, you know, as the tree that's reaching for the sunlight. And when we remind ourselves of this, we can ground in that reality and it can help rearrange and recode our bodies.

I feel like I mean, mother nature is our sustainer. She's our healer. She's our mirror. She's our elevator. She's everything.

And when we spend time in her with intention, it can literally recode us and and change the way we interact with our world. And this last piece of advice for getting in the pocket is more about what often hinders us from getting in the pocket. Okay? When we think about that instinctual flow, there are so many things. I'm sure if I if I was sitting across from you right now and I asked you, what are one or two things that you would want in your life right now that would make things better for you?

What's one thing you wanna do, an opportunity you wanna take? You would share with me and it they would be delightful. And I would not be surprised if at least one of those things is available to you. But there is concern about what people think. There's concern about letting people down.

There's concern about not upholding responsibilities. There's concern about how you will look and how you will appear. So this third and final piece of advice for getting and staying in the pocket is being willing to confront our people pleasing tendencies. So I say that I am a recover I am a people pleaser in recovery, just like an alcoholic. You're always in recovery.

Same for people pleasing. And this has been one of the biggest lessons of my, twenties, now in my thirties, was shedding. Shedding guilt, shedding over identification with other people's emotions, shedding over identification with appearances and looking the quote unquote right way and acting the quote unquote right way. So obviously, I'm not talking about being a psychopath and destroying people a lot. I'm destroying destroying people's lives.

Right? But isn't it so interesting how so many of us have internalized and localized within ourselves this voice of judgment, this voice of restriction, this voice of holding us back from the things we truly want to do. Society places that within us, our families of origin, religion, cultural ideals. And it's so interesting that a lot of these pieces have developed as we as humans have developed and advanced. And then we spend so much time untangling them and getting back to our natural state, unbridled, deeply connected to ourselves, flowing with our instinct.

But it is such a necessary part of our journey, especially as entrepreneurs. Because entrepreneur will entrepreneurship will get you upside down, inside out, fuck you up. And the thing, your strongest tool on your entrepreneurial journey is your inner wisdom. Is your ability to fall back into that pocket and trust that who you are, how you are wired, how you look at the world is effective to building a flourishing business and flourishing life. And so we need to be intentional about removing and untangling, decoding, deciphering, transmuting the dense places within us that are that still have more allegiance to other people's perception of us than to our own vision and our own desires and our own well-being.

Little tidbit I'll throw out here specifically for the ladies that women struggle and suffer from chronic illnesses at a significantly higher rate than men do. And there is grow a growing body of work that shows the linkage between stress, particularly emotional stress, particularly internalized stress and chronic illnesses and autoimmune disorders is what I mean specifically, autoimmune disorders. This is not simply a, matter of, oh, it'd be nice to live my life for myself and not still be living out of the echoes of my mother's voice. But, yeah, take it or leave it. This is about our health.

This is about our well-being. This is about, beyond business. This is about enjoying your one and only life. You know? This is a soapbox that can go on forever, but I won't.

Not today, at least. So getting back into this pocket, finding it, locating it, getting back into it, we wanna remind ourselves of the times that we've been in the pocket of flowing, of moving. We want to lean on mother nature as a resource to show us what it can look like to let instinct meet instinct. And then finally, we want to do the work to transmute the places within us that are still so aligned with people pleasing and sacrificing our own wisdom to keep the peace. I hope this has been helpful, and I, as always, love to hear from you.

We're on LinkedIn. We're on Blue Sky. I know none of the, like, really hip places, but me and tech big tech is it's a whole conversation. That's another one to come to. I keep on saying that.

I've got a I've got a whole list of content for days, weeks, months to come. But I'm Edie with Via Diora, and until next time.