You know that sinking feeling you get in your stomach when you see someone on social media or in real life who has something you desperately want? They’re making big money. They just bought a new house. They got married. They had a baby. They started a business. They look great in a bikini. Whatever it is. It’s something you want and your brain starts worrying. Some of you may feel envious, jealous, almost sick to your stomach. Some of you may feel hopeless, helpless, kind of full of despair.

However you react to this very human experience, today’s episode is going to teach you how to alchemize that terrible feeling into a productive sense of inspiration and motivation. It’s like a magic trick you can perform on your own brain. So let’s get into it.

Welcome to UnF*ck Your Brain. I’m your host, Kara Loewentheil, Master Certified Coach and founder of The School of New Feminist Thought. I’m here to help you turn down your anxiety, turn up your confidence, and create a life on your own terms, one that you’re truly excited to live. Let’s go.

I vividly remember the moment in my coach training when I learned the phrase proof of concept. I was talking to my teacher about my future coaching business, and I was explaining sadly that I had thought I could be a coach for lawyers, but I had Googled and there was already a coach that specialized in working with women lawyers. To my mind at that time, that meant that was it. The slot was taken, there was already a coach doing that, and I would never catch up obviously. She had a head start, she was probably better qualified, she was definitely more experienced. And my coach said, “Awesome.”

So I looked at her blankly because how is this awesome? This was actually obviously a really big problem. “That’s proof of concept,” she said. “That proves that coaching lawyers is a viable business strategy and coaching niche.” This blew my mind because it turned everything on its head that I had assumed. The fact that someone else was doing what I wanted to do, it turned out that was not bad news for me. It was actually good news because it showed that it could be done. It was proof of concept.

And of course she was right. There were plenty of lawyers who still wanted coaching. And I had a thriving one-to-one coaching practice within a year. I eventually broadened my niche, but there are now tons of coaches who work with just lawyers, because there’s so much business to go around just in that industry. Since then, I have used this phrase so many times to help me turn jealousy, envy, or feelings of compare and despair into inspiration and motivation. And today I want to teach you how to do that too.

So step one is a little revisit of some concepts I’ve taught in earlier episodes about the idea of compare and despair, envy, and jealousy. We have to know what material we’re trying to alchemize in order to alchemize it. So when we’re feeling envious or jealous, it’s not just that we want something that someone else has. It’s that we believe that we cannot have it.

If you think about it, if I see someone else happily married for instance and I’m happily married, I’m not jealous or envious. That’s something I want and I have it already. If I see someone being a world class soccer player, I’m not jealous or envious. That’s not something I have, but I also don’t want it. If I see someone have a purse that I really like that I’d like to own and it’s available and I can afford it, I’m not jealous or envious because I know I can just purchase it if I want. It’s available to me. It’s only when I see that someone else has something I want that I think I cannot have that I then experience envy or jealousy.

This is important because we tend to fixate on the thing itself and we ignore the embedded thought and premise that we cannot get, create, or experience the object of our jealousy or envy. There’s a kind of hopelessness, helplessness, out of control feeling that comes from that is embedded in jealousy and envy and that’s why they feel so horrible. Humans can tolerate most feelings if they learn to and practice it, but I think helplessness and hopelessness is the hardest, and it often comes from the belief that we can’t impact what’s happening to us.

So when we notice that we are feeling envy, jealousy, or desire for what someone else has in a way that feels bad for us, that’s a great sign to look inwards and ask ourselves a few important questions. I’m going to give you those questions verbatim that I recommend you ask yourself and explain how to change your thoughts around envy and jealousy right after this quick break.

Okay, so if we know the underlying psychological framework, how do we alchemize these feelings? The first step is to ask yourself the following two questions. Number one, why do I want this? And number two, why do I think I can’t have it?

The first question will show you what emotional weight you are putting on the thing. Apart from things like food if we’re starving or sleep if we’re exhausted, which are true biological needs, we only ever want something because of how we think we would feel if we had it. But when we want something because we think it will make us feel good about ourselves forever, make someone else love us, or otherwise somehow get us out of the human condition of feeling both good and bad until we die, then our desire for it isn’t a true desire. It’s just an attempt to manipulate our own emotions.

The second question is, why do I think I can’t have this? This question shows you where you have limiting beliefs that are holding you back. These could be beliefs about yourself. I’m not good enough. I’m not smart enough. I’m not attractive enough, etc. Kind of scarcity beliefs about yourself. Or they could be scarcity beliefs about what is available. There’s not enough money. There aren’t enough men or women or whoever to date. There aren’t enough jobs. There aren’t enough literary prizes. Literally whatever it is you want, your brain can tell you that there isn’t enough.

In order to alchemize all of this into inspiration and motivation, you have to practice believing that it’s possible that there is enough. Expert level would be practicing believing in the abundance of whatever it is you want and whatever traits you need to develop, but starting with enough is great. And this is where proof of concept comes back in. Whatever you want, if somebody else already has it, is doing it, is experiencing it, that’s proof of concept. That means it is possible.

Of course your brain wants to tell you no, it was possible for them, not for you. And that’s why we have to be aware of the scarcity beliefs and practicing thoughts to counteract them. For instance if we use my coaching example from earlier, which may apply to some of you today, it’s possible there are enough clients to support more coaches than currently exist. Or it’s possible that I can get clients even if other coaches exist, even in my niche. Or if we’re talking about dating, it might be it’s possible that there are still good potential partners out there for me. Or it’s possible that of all the people in the world, one or two are a good match for me.

These are both more about external scarcity. Some thoughts to counteract internal scarcity, the thought that you’re not good enough in some way, could sound like, “It’s possible I’m more intelligent than I think,” or, “It’s possible I have skills waiting to be developed that I don’t know about yet,” or, “It’s possible that I don’t have to be world class in any of these skills to succeed.” Another good technique for yourself is to look at past places you’ve been resourceful, learned new things, or succeeded at something. All of those are good evidence that you can learn something new and do well.

I have one last more advanced thing I want to teach you about this, but let’s summarize where we are so far. When you feel envy or jealousy, it’s a sign that you want something but think you can’t have it. You have to ask yourself first why you want it. If the answer is to feel better about myself, prove myself, show I’m good enough, anything like that, getting the thing is not going to actually solve the emotional problem. You need to work on your thoughts about yourself. If the answer is that you want to grow or explore or it seems fun or meaningful or you want to see who you become, something not about lack, then the next question is why you think you can’t have it. The answer to that is going to show you where you need to work on your thoughts about internal scarcity, something in you is not enough to get what you want, or external scarcity, there’s not enough to go around of whatever it is.

So here’s the last layer I want to add for those of you who are maybe a little more advanced, particularly relevant when you’re talking about something external like a business or professional or artistic endeavor. And this is especially important for when you want to do something where there doesn’t seem to be a lot of proof of concept already out there. What I didn’t understand when I was starting my business and I learned this whole concept, but I do understand now, is that a market or an audience is not static and fixed. My thought was that if a lawyer coach existed, she had a monopoly on the market of lawyers wanting coaching as if that was a fixed number. But in fact, a market is partly created by our efforts to show up and offer our services or our art or our perspective, whatever it is we’re offering.

When I started my podcast, it was originally called The Lawyer Stress Solution, and I was naming a problem that women didn’t even know could be solved. They knew they were stressed, but they didn’t know there was a solution other than quitting their jobs. So it wasn’t just that there was proof of concept that an existing market was there. I helped create more of a market for myself through what I offered, how I talked about it, and how I connected with women and showed them something they hadn’t even known was possible to want. And this is true if you’re creating art that hasn’t been made before, coming up with ideas that haven’t been shared before. Even in a corporate type environment, people make up new roles all the time based on the kind of work they want to do. They sell the idea of that new role and why it’s essential, and then eventually it just becomes considered a normal standard role.

So if there’s something you want that you don’t see out there yet, if there isn’t proof of concept out there, that doesn’t mean the thing is not possible or doable. It just means you’re the person who’s going to be proof of concept to everyone who comes after.

Okay, last thing for those of you who have been listening and for whom my coaching example really hit home, I’m hosting a live Q&A call tomorrow about becoming a coach and my brand new Socratic Coaching Certification. Most coach certifications teach you how to coach other people, and you need that. But the biggest problem new coaches have is a lack of confidence in their own coaching ability. So this certification not only teaches you a thorough curriculum of tools that you can use with your clients, but it teaches you how to be more confident as a coach.

I’m obsessed with this. I love teaching people how to coach and helping them become amazing coaches, and I love that we’re solving the problem that so many other certifications have. This is the first time I’m teaching it, so I’m going to be teaching it live, a lot of hands-on support from me. I don’t know how often I’ll do this in the future, but for this time, I’m teaching it live and we’re going to have an in-person component that’s an optional add-on to your experience.

You can get a link to register and all the info for the Q&A call by going to unfuckyourbrain.com/qacall, all one word, or text your email to +1 (347) 997-1784 and the code word is QAcall, all one word. So it’s unfuckyourbrain.com/qacall or text your email to +1 (347) 997-1784 and the code word is QAcall. You can ask me questions about becoming a coach, you can ask me questions about what’s being offered in our specific certification, about the program, about how it works, what you’re going to learn, about any, any questions you have about getting certified as a coach or our program, you can come to the call and ask those questions.

I am so excited to teach this certification. It is really an incredible level of quality and excellence in coaching tools, but also in equipping you to actually be confident in your coaching. Because if you’re not confident in your coaching, none of the rest of it matters. When you are confident in your coaching, then you are guaranteed to keep going and to succeed. I’ll see some of you there and I cannot wait to train some of you in this program.