Welcome to the Mindset Coach Academy Podcast. I'm Lindsey Wilson and I am a high-performance Mindset Coach, a mom, a former professional athlete, and an entrepreneur. I help coaches and high performers optimize their mindset to improve their coaching, their performance and those of their athletes, and their lives. Here you'll learn all about mindset, how to live it, how to teach it, and how to sell it.
Hi guys and welcome back to the Mindset Coach Academy Podcast. My name is Lindsey Wilson and today we're going to talk about a concept called solution blindness. This is something that we were just recently talking about in our insider mastermind with my certified coaches, but it's also something that I've experienced and I bet you have as well. So I want you to think about if you are looking for your keys or your sunglasses or your phone, how many times have you gotten so convinced that you couldn't find it, that you might have actually seen it or at least been really close to seeing it as in you were like in the vicinity of it, but you didn't look somewhere obvious and you just were so convinced that you couldn't find it that it's like you made it happen. We all do this. We all get so convinced of a result that it's very difficult for us to see the solution. So I'm going to give you another example.
This is a little bit embarrassing, but I'm going to say it anyway. Okay, so in my business, I do some videos for Facebook ads or what have you, right? And I just got introduced to this app and it's a teleprompter app and one of my students, Bianca, told me about horizontal recording. It's better for Facebook ads and they can slice and dice it and give them more room for error, right?
But the teleprompter app, like the text would only go vertical. So I'm like at I'm doing it outside. There's like airplanes going overhead.
So I'm trying to like time it right so that I can do the recording. And there's also like this unhoused person in the corner of the play field that like occasionally yells at me. Okay.
So there was a lot of distractions and I was trying to get these videos done before I like go pick up my daughter from camp. So I turned it horizontal and the text for the teleprompter stayed vertical. Okay, so I'm like reading it sort of upside down. But by this time I know the script like kind of so I could kind of see a word and like I kind of knew what sentence so it wasn't that big of a deal. I was able to get the videos done, even though I couldn't really read the script.
And it was fine. But I was talking to Stacy the other day and I was like, I can't get the teleprompter app to do the copy of the transcription the teleprompter horizontal. So can I just do the videos vertical? And she was like, and I had tried like change the settings like doodoo. Like I had been trying on my phone in the app to figure out a setting that would make the text change depending on whether you're landscape or portrait, right?
And and nothing worked. Okay, so I finished this the things and then I told Stacy, I don't know how to change it. The horizontal I don't think it does it. I don't think it I don't think that the app even allows you to have text go horizontal.
And she was like, that's not possible. Like, it's an app, of course, it allows you to do that. So she googles it on the with the app and gets to the like FAQs. And sure enough, the literally the first question on the FAQs was, how do I get the text to lay horizontal? She sends me the link and I feel like a complete idiot, because I didn't look so anyway, basically what you have to do is you have to go into your phone settings. Okay.
And it's like the easiest fix ever you just allow your phone to do something right it's in the control center. I felt like an idiot. Okay. But here's what my brain did. Because of everything going on. And because I was like a little bit rushed and trying to get it done. And it wasn't a make or break like I didn't have to figure it out that moment. I could do it without. I convinced myself that the app just didn't allow horizontal text. Like that was just there's nothing I can do.
There's no way to troubleshoot it because I already tried it didn't work. And the at no place nowhere said anything about horizontal landscape text, right? Meanwhile, she's over here googling it and she finds it in two seconds. My brain was so convinced that it wasn't fixable that it didn't look for solutions. Okay. When you believe something is sort of, you know, written in stone, like there's no way to fix it. It is unfixable. It's never going to happen.
The writing's on the wall. You stop looking for and seeing solutions. And the reason that we do this is because of something called a motivation try it.
We learn about this in all of our programs. And basically what it says is more one thing it says is your brain does not want to waste energy on something that is not going to work out. So I'm going to stop trying to find the solution. If I don't think that there is a solution, that's a waste of time.
Okay. It's a waste of energy and energy is really important from a survival standpoint. So I tell you this because we all do it.
We all do it. Now fast forward a couple of days to I'm working with my students in our mastermind. So these are my certified coaches that all have their own businesses and basically are entrepreneurs, right? And so in our mastermind, we're all read always thinking about how to run our business better, how to get clients, how to retain clients, working on our own mindset regards to that sales, marketing, all the things, right? And I was talking to one of our students the other day and he had gotten into this position in his brain that the income goal that he wanted was not possible with his business model. So one of the things that he was concerned about was the afternoons was difficult to get in a certain number of clients, meaning a lot of them were athletes, they had school during the day and he just felt like he had done the math. He had written down how many hours he could work, how many clients he could take, how many hours basically and just kind of done the math and figured out, well, I can't reach this income goal. So he believed that that was truth, that there was no way to reach the income goal based on the business model that he had.
And here's the challenge that he was experiencing and everybody will experience this as I mentioned before is once you believe that, your brain stops trying to creatively find solutions and essentially you have solution blind spots. So that's where coaching, whether that's me or one of his peers can say, okay, but is it really true that athletes can only do trainings for these three hours? Is it true that you can only make money that way? Is it true that you need to work with every athlete every week in order to make that money?
Is it true that you can only make this amount of money with every athlete? There's all kinds of questions that once you sort of get above the doubt and because when you're in it, you have these blind spots. And so really what we did with him is he said, okay, if you had to solve this problem, there wasn't another option. You can't quit, you can't choose a totally different client to work with, you have to put on your CEO hat and solve the problem. Maybe you'll still do something else later, but right now, creatively, you have to allow your brain to find the solution.
Whether you act on them or not is another thing, but just allowing your brain to find the solutions. And so he was able to do that. And he was able to start thinking about, you know, one raising his prices, like allowing his brain to think about how can I still deliver at this high level, because we want to keep the same impact. How can I create a relationship or a training that allows athletes to get the same level of impact, but working with me with less of my time? Is there a way to create different programs or group calls or resources or shorter check-ins or different types of check-ins? Is there a way to raise my prices in a different way and add in different clients that, you know, aren't only in these three hours in the afternoon?
Can I meet with clients in the morning before school? Like all of these solutions started coming to them. Again, whether he goes with them or not, he moved from, this is an unsolvable problem. And once you believe that, your brain shuts down creativity. Once you believe that it's an unsolvable problem, your brain shuts down creativity. Because back to the motivation triad, it doesn't want to waste energy on a losing proposition.
Right? Why is it going to keep trying if the results are inevitable? The brain doesn't like that.
Okay? So we have to know that about the brain. But it's challenging because, again, it's blind spots. His brain didn't say, oh, my brain is not seeing the solutions. His brain was telling them there weren't any solutions. Right?
And so that brings a sense of safety because it's like, oh, nothing to do here, nothing to see, can't do anything about it. Let me go over here and do something totally different and get out of this discomfort of not being able to solve this problem. The problem's unsolvable.
So if I go over here and work with a totally different client, quit, go get another day job and stop this business, it actually brings a sense of relief and safety because it's like, oh, I was right. It's unsolvable. It's not my faults. Instead of staying in the discomfort of like, I don't know what the solution is, but I know the solution's there. I know that there are solutions. I know that my brain is hiding them from me. I know that I've blind spots. So the challenge, of course, with this, as always, is the awareness and then curiosity without shame.
Because once we get to that place of, oh, this is what my brain's doing, non-judgmental, it's just doing that, then we can then ask the right questions, meaning, well, this is what my coach used to say to us all the time. He said, well, if you, because I'd say, oh, I don't know, you know, like, what could you have done better in the game? I don't know. I don't know. Right? It's just like such an out, right?
He's like, well, if you did know. So I might ask my student, okay, there's no solutions. You don't feel any solutions. No, I don't know what the solutions are.
Well, if you did know, or you can ask yourself, what might someone else think? If I did believe that this was solvable, what would the solution be? It kind of brings me back to one of the things we've talked about before, which is everything you want is in a warehouse down the street. This is such a powerful concept. If you believed, and by the way, everybody can believe this, if you believe that your goals, your deepest desires, the things you really want in your life were all in a warehouse down the street and all you had to do was keep going, how would you think about problems and obstacles and failures and times when you weren't sure there was a solution?
How would you think and how would you show up if the results were guaranteed? They're not, we know they're not, but if they were, then you start thinking in a different way. You start thinking with a solution mindset, which unlocks your creativity that is just not accessible if you believe that the end is already decided. Because again, your brain doesn't want to waste energy.
Your brain is not going to waste energy on something it doesn't believe is going to work out. So, and this is so much of what we work on in our trainings, is we work on the belief first. It doesn't have to mean we believe 1000% with no doubts ever.
Sometimes we just have to practice if I did believe. If I did believe there was a solution, what would I do? So, for you, maybe you're not a entrepreneur, maybe you're not, maybe you're a coach, maybe you're an athlete, maybe you're whatever. There's a place in your life where your belief that it's not going to work out, your belief that the obstacle is the end. You believe that this problem has no solutions. That belief causes you to not see solutions. They're called solution blind spots. And we all have them. Welcome to the club of having a human brain. So that's what I want to talk about today.
The more we can be aware of it, the more we can have curiosity, and the more we can realize that if we believe we would find more solutions, it unlocks a crazy amount of creativity to find solutions because they are all around us. All right, guys, that's what I have for you today. Hope you loved it. If you did, hey, come on over to Instagram @lindseypositiveperform. We're doing some super fun things on Instagram. We're doing a 21 day challenge. I don't know if it'll be up by the time you guys listen to this, but we're doing a lot more promotion with our certified coaches. So it's really cool because you can see what our certified coaches are doing with their own businesses after going through our trainings and potentially doing our insider program. And all it's like, you guys, we have our army out in the world creating massive transformations, massive impact with athletes and coaches.
And it's like this ripple effect. This was my lifelong dream of getting mental training to the athletes that really need it. And we are doing it. Our certified coaches are doing it one athlete at a time, one team at a time.
And it's like so cool to see them living their calling and their purpose. So if you're interested in being a mental performance coach and joining this movement, go to positiveperformancetrain.com and check it out. We also have a free ebook called How to Become a Mental Performance Coach, which really breaks down some of the big questions people have. What am I going to charge?
Where are my clients? Can I do this for real? Do I need to get a degree? All of the things in that free book. I think it's about 60 pages or so. And it's totally free. And it's going to answer so many of the questions that you have that you're probably like Googling or like trying to learn on the internet. Just download that book.
It's got so many of the answers and maybe some questions you didn't know to ask. All right, guys, we'll see you next week for the Bindsake Coach Academy. Take care. Bye for now.
Speaker 1: Hey, guys, if you have ever listened to this podcast and thought, gosh, could I do that? Could I be a mental performance coach? I want you to get your hands on our free guide called How to Become a Mental Performance Coach, even without your sports psychology degree.
Go to positiveperformancetraining.com forward slash guide and get your free copy today or click in the show notes. I'm going to tell you one specific reason you've got to get your hands on this book. And it's this. We have a six step mental training framework that takes all of the guess work out of what to actually work on with your clients. Now, you may be a coach with a ton of experience. You may have read all the books, all the podcasts, all the things. And I'm telling you that this six part framework is the thing you need.
It will take all you know, all you've dreamt of teaching and coaching and distills it down into six steps. You guys, I've done this for a really long time. Simple wins. And it took me a really long time to come up with this and I'm sharing with you totally for free. Generally, this is what we've taught our certified students to use and I'm giving it to you for free. So go get your copy now positiveperformancetraining.com forward slash guide and learn about our six step positive performance mental training framework. Go use it and then look at the rest of the book. There is so much good stuff in there. Go get your copy today.
