Today we welcome back into the studio Sue Ryan. She is a dear, dear friend of mine and for the past 40 years she has been helping individuals, from entrepreneurs to Fortune 100 companies to C-suite leaders and over 700 organizations of all sizes and multitudes of industries navigate transitions in their business. And she's a rock star. She simply is a rock star.
Sue Ryan:Well. I don't know if Osby Osbourne would agree with that.
Jennifer Johnson:Well, there you go, you're phenomenal. Thank you, and I'll go with rock star. Yeah, just go with the rock star. Claim it, own it. I'm going to claim it. Today. I want to talk with you about habits. Yes, ma'am, okay, and not just any habits, but habits that we can find for ourselves to create a better business environment, for ourselves to create just a better life. Sure, right, sure. And do you have any thoughts on what successful habits of, or how should I phrase this? Habits of successful entrepreneurs?
Sue Ryan:Yes.
Jennifer Johnson:Do they all have something in common? No, wow, yes, no. Thank you, ma'am.
Sue Ryan:I'm going to disrupt your podcast.
Jennifer Johnson:Please disrupt it.
Sue Ryan:I could talk about specificity of. They get up at five in the morning, they make a list, they have the priorities, they have all these different things and yet that, to me, is an endpoint. I talk about cause and effect. When you are in alignment with what's most important and you create the habits that work for you, you create your own and you live with them and you live from them and they fit you and they're very efficient. If I try to copy your habits, that does not mean it's the right habit. So my thing is you want to understand yourself in a meaningful way and you want to get back to what is important for you in your life. And how are you going to know how to create the habits that work and support you, because otherwise you will be striving to be like someone else, you'll hold yourself in judgment, you can't be fully present, you can't be in alignment, you're not making the wisest choice, you're chasing, you're chasing and you're chasing somebody else, not yourself. My one tip for today a big, huge thing, and I've got something I put together on it. I am incredibly passionate about this because I lived in the absence of it and I strove and strove and strove and I did all the mechanical things until I learned what this is.
Sue Ryan:When we are very, very young, our personalities are forming and the beliefs that we have. The truth that serves us when we're very young is being formed in us, and some of it comes from our genetics, some of it comes from our early childhood environment, some of it comes from our family environment and we develop these beliefs of it comes from our family environment and we develop these beliefs and, as our little personalities are forming, these beliefs get established and then, throughout our younger years, we're developing new beliefs and they become automatic patterns running us. So, by the time we're like in our early 30s, over 90% of who we are are a set of automatic patterns running us and we're not aware of them because, unlike when you go to the, you get life insurance policy, you get a car insurance policy, you get a condo policy or home policy, and six months ahead of time they say, hey, your policy is going to renew. Has anything changed in your life?
Sue Ryan:We're not normally encouraged to evaluate what we believe to be truth, and the analogy I use is when I was seven years old, I wore pants that were a certain size. Well, they don't fit me anymore. So why would I think that the beliefs that were in my life would necessarily believe me? So when I talk about creating habits, I go back to the source. What is it I believe is the truth for me? And this is raising it to our level of awareness. So the first thing that we do is we start becoming aware. What is it that we believe? What is it that we believe to be true? Why do we believe that to be true? Now, some of those are really great.
Sue Ryan:A quick example that I use is when we were very young, we were taught look both ways before you cross the street, and that was to keep us. It was from a place of love, to keep us safe. And now, thank goodness, I learned that, because now I automatically look both ways before I cross the street, or I would be as flat as a pancake. So, just as powerfully as those that are valuable, some of those, I'm not worthy, I'm not good enough, and when we're very young, we haven't learned discernment yet. So when somebody says you're a bad person or you're no good, we believe that to be true, especially when it comes from a person of authority, and then we don't have this thing that goes. You know, in first grade they don't say okay, now let's look at anything you believe. And when we get to sixth grade, okay, let's look at our beliefs. So I'm big on evaluating beliefs and I'll walk through that if you'd like.
Jennifer Johnson:I mean, I think it's great, and it's not something that we're not even, as individuals, aware of. This right, like you said, we are on pretty much autopilot. It's like breathing. We don't have to think about it. We just go about our daily business, doing what we do, because that's what we've always done, until something breaks down and we have to go. Well, wait a second, what's happening?
Sue Ryan:This is one of the things I work so much with people navigating transitions. And if you're going to a new space with old habits, that are patterns that are running you, how can you be the best version of yourself? My passion in life is people continuously become the best version of themselves, and so you go back and you start. Just, it's so simple. You start raising to your level of awareness what do I believe to be true? Why do I believe that to be true? What do I choose to believe to be true?
Sue Ryan:And then you start creating new habits based on what that is. So you start believing that that is what is true. Then you start programming yourself for that. You practice it over and over and over again. That becomes an unconscious pattern of behavior and now you know you keep checking in on things and checking in on things. And then you get an accountability partner, or multiple ones in different areas of your lives, in areas that you're not aware of, and they can help raise your level of awareness, which also helps them do the same thing and that's great advice.
Jennifer Johnson:But now, how do we know that we need to do this? I don't know gut check or this check, like how do we know that we need to do it and how often do we need to do it?
Sue Ryan:Excellent question. You can do it as often as you choose to do it. The number one thing you want to be doing is becoming aware. The first level of this is consciousness and awareness, so it is becoming really aware of what you're doing, and one of the things, for example, I caught myself the other day. Somebody suggested something and they said you know, you ought to pick up pickleball there it's a great way to meet people and I was like I've got a lot of things going on in my life. You know I don't. And I stopped and I said whoa, that was an unconscious pattern of behavior. Is that I'm too busy to pick up something new? And I said I choose to stop and intentionally explore that.
Sue Ryan:So, like we had spoken about in the other podcast, sometimes we become aware of it through somebody else's, an accountability partner, somebody else who can see in us what we can't see in ourselves when we're intentional in our day, when you, literally, you're looking at it and say, okay, okay, I just brushed my teeth and I have no idea what I did. I just went through that conversation. I said this about something. So, in all of these different areas, we start raising our level of awareness of it. I created a guide. I'll give you the link for it and people can go through it. It is gradually starting. It's creating your level of expectation that you are going to evaluate things in your life and nothing is off limits. One of the other great ways of doing this and I call it the wheel of life alignment and they've got these exercises called wheel of life balance where you look at pies in your life and you give you know this is health and fitness, this is spiritual, this is perfect. All of those things. You start looking at those and you start becoming.
Sue Ryan:What do you think about money? What do you believe about money? And you ask yourself my beliefs about money came from the way my parents did or didn't teach me and that's just what I believed. I didn't question that. I didn't go back and do it and it's not like it's the absence of that. It's like is that still the truth for me? That's something I learned many years ago. So you become unquenchably curious and ask yourself what else is possible and ask yourself is this really true for me? And you can write those down on a piece of paper and you can carry them around with you and in so many different areas and you create the level of expectations with other people around you, especially your friends, to ask the same thing.
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Sue Ryan:And into some of the common habits that we were talking about. When you're creating a habit and a habit is and, by the way, getting back to like the word habit when I say a habit is one of the things that we want to make sure we're doing is getting our own definition of words. So this is a huge thing. If we want to create a new habit, we want to become aware of what our other habits are. So start listing out what are your habits. Then identify how it's working for you, why you believe you have it. If you were to replace it with something, what would you replace it with? And just you know, like, make it like a checklist. So like, this is a great habit.
Jennifer Johnson:It's becoming aware of them is the problem because, and I don't mean it in a problem wise, but that's the challenge, because we have to stop and be still enough to go. All right, I need to do this exercise. I really want to know what I'm doing.
Sue Ryan:Exactly, and some of it is. You don't even know that you're doing it. The interesting thing when I get people doing these exercises, they're surprised at the number of things they do. They're not even aware they do it and some of it is they've gotten in the habit of going to Starbucks and when they're doing that, going to Starbucks isn't really the end thing. They're checking this, they're doing that, they're at Starbucks while they're doing this and what?
Sue Ryan:It's a piece of something else, and so part of it is becoming intentional in your life and raising to your level of awareness and then asking yourself what is it I choose to believe? Does this support or sabotage me? Where is this in what I am looking to accomplish when you're working? So when we talk about things that we want to have as a habit, you say, okay, well, what does a habit mean for me? How does a habit serve me? So you want to get really really clear on what kind of habit you want, not even the specific habit like brushing your teeth every morning. But what do I want a habit to do for me? What is the purpose of a habit in my life? And if you have clarity on how it supports, not sabotages, you. Then you start looking at everything you're doing through the lens of this is a habit and it's not working so well for me. And then you say what does Choose what works for you? And then you say what does Choose what works for you? And then you continue to reset your expectations and so not everything becomes a habit. Sometimes it's an interim process that you're doing. I'm experimenting with this.
Sue Ryan:A lot of people talk about losing weight and they say, well, I'm going to get in the habit of doing this and the habit of doing this, and then they think that they have to do this and then start doing it for a long period of time. You know, a habit for me could be that I'm going to you know I don't do this, but I'll just give an example. A lot of people will drink a cup of coffee in the morning and they'll put creamer and things like that. And then they think, okay, I can never have that anymore.
Sue Ryan:When something to your level of awareness and you're at choice with it, it doesn't mean you have to create a new habit. It means you could become aware of something you're doing and you're choosing and you're saying this morning, I really do feel like having a cup of coffee with that creamer tomorrow? No, I don't, and you're at choice. So it's not the the necessarily having to have everything be a habit. And it's not that you have to replace a habit with a habit. You could replace it with a pathway.
Sue Ryan:I'm choosing to do something different. I don't know what that habit's ultimately going to be, because I'm not there yet. However, the pathway is going to be conscious actions I'm taking toward the outcome I choose to have and what you're doing in the process for that which is taking you to a new place and you're discovering new things and along the way, you may say this is kind of working for me, I think.
Sue Ryan:I'm going to keep doing this or no, I think I'm going to try something else. So again, a big part of what happens is that habits tend to be places where we have judgment. It's either good or bad. When we just accept this is what I'm doing. This is what I'm doing, and okay, I used to do this and this is what it is. I'm at choice. I can do this and always stay at choice.
Jennifer Johnson:I love that.
Sue Ryan:Thank you.
Jennifer Johnson:It works and I like how you said it. Basically is what you're doing serving you? Is it doing anything for you? Maybe it's hindering you from something else.
Sue Ryan:And if it's a long-held belief like I'm not worthy. Oh, those are the worst right, those are the worst. And then you've created habits that support you not seeing yourself as worthy, not taking actions based on being worthy, and you know, and, and like if you were saying that if and I've had people where they come they'll say, well, you know they'll, you'll ask them a question and they preface the answer with well, I'm not really good at that and I haven't done this and I haven't done it and I'll say stop, I've done that.
Sue Ryan:I'm sure you heard me.
Jennifer Johnson:I've told you to stop. You have, but again that it took somebody to tell me that, to break me from it, and you wrote a book about that?
Sue Ryan:Yes, and yet what happened was, until you were able to break that, you didn't even know you were doing it.
Jennifer Johnson:And I, honestly, if I I don't know if I would have found it on my own- so often we don't because we can't see in ourselves.
Sue Ryan:Yeah, it's a habit, it's an un. A habit is an unconscious pattern of behavior and we get into those so often not even knowing whether they serve us or not. That's not the point of a habit. A habit is a thing. It's not good or bad, it just is. It's what we apply to it and we say, well, it has to be either good or bad when we have. And then we're talking about entrepreneurs and we're talking about female entrepreneurs. One of the greatest things you can do is when somebody is saying something and you know it doesn't serve them, and it's just this thing that they just keep saying. You is saying something and you know it doesn't serve them, and it's just this thing that they just keep saying. You say, stop Right there, exactly, and wake them up and say if you didn't believe that to be true, what would you choose? What?
Jennifer Johnson:action would you choose and I've heard you say that before and that's very powerful when you actually sit down and think about it. It is If you didn't have that negative word, know, negative word in your mind, what else would you choose to believe is true here?
Sue Ryan:What would you put there instead Exactly, and how's that working? And again I go back to this Dr Phil saying because it really is great so how's that working for you? And it's humorous because when you do and you think about it from that perspective.
Sue Ryan:It's like, yeah, not so good and yet okay, and I talk a lot about borrowing confidence, borrowing courage and borrowing strength. When we're looking at replacing or creating a habit or creating a pattern of behavior, a pathway to something that's better. We may not be strong enough yet on our own and we do not have to be as females, as entrepreneurs however you want to classify it when we reach out to each other and say I am working on this and I appreciate you being another set of eyes and ears and another heart to support me in this. That's where women can raise each other up so quickly. We can hold each other accountable, we can invite people into the consideration of an alternative perspective and when they say something and we can tell that they're not at choice, we can say do you really feel like you were at choice with what you just said? And if you were at choice, what would you say or what would you do?
Jennifer Johnson:Beautifully said. Thank you. Our conversations are always beautiful. I love that. I love you. If our listeners want to get a hold of you, how can they?
Sue Ryan:do so. My email address is sue at sueryansolutions and my website is sueryansolutions. They can go to my website and get a message to me and get on my calendar and I am grateful for the opportunity to speak or coach or listen or whatever I can do to help people.
Jennifer Johnson:That's my passion and I can say that firsthand. I know it's your passion. You're a phenomenal individual. Thank you, absolutely.