The Messy Middle & Gold At Your Feet

Ep: 234

When change is on the horizon, but we’re not quite sure what that means in the present moment, our first impulse is to try and find the answer.

Researching, asking around, filling up your time and energy with actions.

And while all of that keeps us busy through those messy middle periods of uncertainty, it doesn’t leave very much space for the unknown.

When you learn to get comfortable with the unknown, then you might pause just long enough to recognize the gold beneath your feet. 

Today on The Bridge to Fulfillment®, Blake shares her personal, and present, messy middle story, explaining what’s going on behind the scenes. Her investments in personal and professional development are leading to some big changes.

In this episode, she’s sharing what she’s learned so that your life can benefit and you, too, can experience the transformation that you’ve been seeking. You’ll hear the big ah-ha moments that have come as a result of embracing the messy middle. She shares how opting to be patient and receive the right answers, rather than trying to force them, yields results that are naturally more in alignment with your purpose and values.

If you want to start creating life on your terms, then it’s time to embrace the messy middle. 

You might be surprised at what you discover beneath your feet.

What You’ll Learn:

  • How The Bridge to Fulfillment® is evolving (1:07)
  • What Blake has learned through her personal and professional development  investments (2:30)
  • The path forward for this work and what you can get from it (5:16)
  • Finding joy in the “messy middle” (6:55)
  • Keeping an open loop and creating space when you face uncertainty (9:58)

Favorite Quotes:

  1. If you’ve listened long enough, you’ve heard the same things that my clients have been telling me for years: ‘I came here because I thought you were going to change my career and instead you changed my life.’
  2. Ultimately, what I’ve experienced and gone through in my life, the lessons I’ve learned, and the path I’ve been able to walk…I wish everyone had the level of peace, freedom, joy, confidence, space, and ability to be present in their life in the way that it’s unlocked for me.
  3. Our brains are wired to want a solution. So anytime we’re in a circumstance where we don’t know the answer, we’re going to move as quickly as possible to research and find the answer. Whether that’s actually the best answer for us or not.
  4. You cannot receive if your hands are full.

Additional Resources:

For programs and opportunities to work with Blake, go to www.BlakeSchofield.com

Transcript

Blake Schofield 0:05
Hi, I’m Blake Schofield, founder and CEO of The Bridge to Fulfillment®, mom to three, USA Today top 10 professional coach, and former corporate executive who got tired of sacrificing my life for a comfortable paycheck. My mission is to expand women’s perspectives and empower them to achieve greater impact at home and work without sacrifice. This is The Bridge to Fulfillment®.

Blake Schofield 0:39
On today’s episode of The Bridge to Fulfillment®, we’re going to be talking about the messy middle and how often there’s gold hidden right at your feet. So I’m going to give you a little bit of a dive into some of what’s been going on in my world. Because ultimately, what I’m sharing with you today is the messy middle, the transition from what has been to what will be. For the last six years I’ve been running The Bridge to Fulfillment®, really helping professional women transition into more fulfilling careers and lives without taking a pay cut or starting over. And last year, I really stepped into two things, to really be able to continue to develop my skills, my potential, and my impact. And also really to identify what was next for me, in my life and in my career, my business.

Blake Schofield 1:36
And those two things were working with Dr. Jeff Spencer, who if you’ve heard me on the podcast, I’ve talked about him quite a bit. He is really the world’s leading performance coach, a former Olympian nine time Tour de France mindset coach and they want to believe eight of nine years he’s coached over 40 Gold Medal Olympians, Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong, Bono from U2, and a ton of Fortune 500 CEOs, and me. And he really has cracked the code on goal achievement. And what he taught me fundamentally shifted the way that I look at life where I spend my time and how I achieved my goals. And the second investment I made was in a program called CCA, Certainty Certified Advisor program, really with the goal to learn how to be successful across any industry and in life.

Blake Schofield 02:30
And what I learned through that journey, and alongside my teammates, fundamentally has shifted the way I view life. I learn and I’m able to create the results I want for my life. So last year, when I went into these two programs, I ended up launching a business called Ascend, actually a year ago this month. Really with the understanding that if I never had make money again, what would I do. And ultimately, what I said is I would help people understand what alignment is, and I would teach them, I would help them get aligned. And then I would teach them how to realign themselves. So they weren’t dependent on other people, but ultimately had the knowledge, skills, and tools, to be able to know what was right for them and continue to adapt as they grew and had opportunities came that would come in their life. And I built that business using the principles of Dr. Jeff and CCA. Walking in and allowing its space to become what it was meant to become. And that journey has been unbelievable in terms of what it’s opened up for me.

Blake Schofield 3:36
But what it also did was open up a really interesting space where the work I had been doing in The Bridge to Fulfillment® and was known for is just one way of which I help people. And the people that are in my you know, day to day life, my entrepreneur friends, those that have been working with me in Ascend, have a greater understanding of my skill set and what I actually do. And there began to feel a big disconnect between the two, a business in The Bridge to Fulfillment® where I was only helping professional women, helping them from what appeared to be the surface of changing their jobs. But if you’ve listened long enough, and you’ve heard enough of my clients stories, what you consistently hear the same things that my clients have been telling me for years. It’s all the quote unquote, life coaching stuff that really transformed me. I came here because I thought you were going to change my career and instead you changed my life. It’s wonderful that I transitioned to this new job and made money but what it’s changed for me personally has changed my life. And things that I kept hearing over and over again, I wish I could give this to every single person I know. This should be a college course. And man, if every single woman had access to this, I really believe we’d roll the world. And then in Ascend, I’m helping purpose-driven executives and CEOs really transform their life, their time, their energy. Really help them get clear on their highest purpose, the path, and the steps to get there. And so there was this push pull.

Blake Schofield 5:16
And so a couple months ago, it became clear to me what the real path is. How to strip away the stuff that is meaningful, but not the heart of what makes the work I do so special, and how to really align things to create a much bigger impact. Because ultimately, what I’ve experienced and gone through in my life, the lessons I’ve learned, and a path I’ve been able to walk, my heart is that I wish everyone had the level of peace, freedom, joy, confidence, space, ability to be present in their life, and the way that it’s unlocked for me. And so today, The Bridge to Fulfillment® as it’s been known as now, quote, unquote, under transformation. And I’m still running my business and Ascend through one on one work, through business partnerships and consulting, through events, and just this week, I opened up a very small beta group community to continue to teach these lessons and build out an entire ascension ladder. So that I can help reverse engineer my journey and provide practical steps for moving from a life where you feel like you don’t have the time, the energy, or the ability to really create what you want to creating life on your terms to ultimately becoming a co-creator of your life.

Blake Schofield 6:55
And so today, I sit in the messy middle. And it’s a joy to be sitting in the messy middle. But it didn’t used to be. In fact, all of the times in my past, in my life, when I sat in the messy metal, I felt anxious and settled, my mind would not shut off. And for you, you may be going through a messy middle, and you may be struggling in that way. And so what I’d love to do is share with you what my experience has been, and what I have learned, so that perhaps, you can begin to see that the messy middle often is the gold sitting at your feet, and the very path to create far greater impact, joy, and fulfillment in your life. You see, for much of my life, like I think most of us, whenever I didn’t have clarity on where I was going, or what I was doing, I would get into a mental spiral. I would start researching and I would feel like it was my duty to solve that problem. My mentor Jeff Moore, shared this analogy with me many times, when I would call him feeling a lack of clarity, feeling either overwhelmed or maybe and in cases like I wasn’t succeeding. And he talked to me about those old hand blenders, remember those old hand blenders you would use before the electric ones. Or you could even think of an electric one. If you take a hand blender, envision being in the ocean, and you’re the floor ocean floor and you take a hand blender to the ocean floor. What happens to the sediment? Right? It goes everywhere. And with that sediment and sand and everything going everywhere, what happens to the water, the water gets really muddy. And now all of a sudden you can’t see anything.

Blake Schofield 8:51
Well, that’s often what I would do when I was faced with places of being in the messy middle. The unknown is I would spend so much time in my head trying to solve the problem that I was the hand blender to the bottom of the ocean floor. And then I would get so overwhelmed that the water was so dirty, I wouldn’t know where to go, I would feel this huge sense of urgency that I must solve the problem immediately. Because I was so uncomfortable, and the discomfort of the unknown. You’ve likely heard me share this Virginia Satir quote, most people prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty. It is our discomfort with the unknown. That is actually the problem, not the unknown itself. What I’ve also come to learn and understand is that our brains are wired to want a solution. So anytime we’re in a circumstance where we don’t know the answer, we’re going to move as quickly as possible to research and find the answer. Whether that’s actually the best answer for us or not.

Blake Schofield 9:58
My mentor Nick talks often about keeping open loops. Meaning anytime something happens, and I’m presented with information that I don’t know, or maybe disagree with, I don’t try to solve it, I don’t go Google, I just allow it to sit for a while as an open loop, something that doesn’t need to be closed. Now learning and appreciating the power of open loops, and the power of getting comfortable with the unknown, is unbelievably powerful. Because here’s what I have come to know to be true. As human beings, unless you’ve learned how to overcome it, and by the way you can, you likely are a black and white thinker, all or nothing. So when we’re faced with circumstances that are disruptive, we see two options, this or that, failure are winning, success or complete destruction. And often, we move so quickly because of our lack of comfort, lack of ability to keep open loops, and desire to have an answer that we actually create risk. We decided to quit a job or miserable end, we spend money on something, we paint ourselves against a corner, instead of sitting in the discomfort. One of the biggest things I’ve learned is that you cannot receive if your hands are full. When we sit in circumstances of the messy middle, and we know where we are today isn’t where we want to be. And we don’t know what’s next, the best thing we can do is create space.

Blake Schofield 11:43
Stop saying yes to things. Remove the things that are unnecessary and allow ourselves to sit in receptivity. What is life showing us? What are we learning about what we really want versus we don’t. And to have restraint, I don’t need to act immediately. I can allow time for things to start to show up. Because they will if you give yourself space to be receptive. The challenge is that we’ve been taught as a society that we have to go, go, go go. In order to be successful, you must do, and do more, and do more. And it’s those belief systems that keep us trapped. Keep us overthinking, overworking, over schedule. So if you find yourself in the messy middle, understand your natural human impulse is going to want you to make a decision now, it’s going to try and force you to get clarity and create actually more disruption. And it can be uncomfortable sitting in the unknown. But if you can understand that, and make a choice instead, to not act immediately, to have restraint, to create space, so you can listen and really see what’s showing up in your life. And allow yourself to be receptive, and your hands to be open to what may come, miraculous things can show up.

Blake Schofield 13:23
And so for me, I’m really excited about this phase and where the business is, and where I am, in my own development, my own ability to create impact and help even more people. Because I’m clear on the big vision. And I’m allowing space for the how, and the right people, and the right steps, and the right circumstances to show up. And sitting in that level of trust and receptivity with my hands open, opens up far more possibility than I ever could by trying to engineer it myself. Thanks so much for being on this journey with me. I’m excited to continue to share with you as things develop and continue to come on this podcast and share lessons and learnings, bring in inspiring people, to really help you begin to see how there’s so much more possibility for your life. And then ultimately, you have the ability to truly transform and create the life that you want. So again, thanks for listening, and until next time, have a great one.