So this week we're going to talk about under thinking this sounds like a crazy idea. And I'm totally down with it sounds like a crazy idea. But here's what I've been thinking about the last couple of weeks. One of the things we talk about out in the world on the internet and books and all the things, especially as entrepreneurs is overthinking, we are excellent at overthinking particularly women, particularly moms, particularly with various people with busy schedules. Or maybe you're like me, and you were always like that wrong, or you were a parent or any other thing. I am an expert, overthinker. 

And so I was thinking about this, of course, overthinking it, and talking with a client recently, and I said, you know, I think that it would be interesting to explore the opposite of overthinking, which would be under thinking. And so today, what I want to talk about is exactly that. So for me, the way I picture this is I think about like a, like a dimmer switch, right? If you think about something on a slider that slides up and down, the very top of the dimmer switch the on direction is overthinking. Right. And the very bottom is way under thinking. 

And so for us, it's our dimmer switch tends to be towards the overthinking side, under thinking. And in thinking about under thinking I'm gonna use the word thinking about a billion times here, this episode is really all about sliding the dimmer switch just down a little bit, right, to just turn down the volume on the spinning in your brain so that you can get some more things done. You are an over thinker, this is for you. All of our thinking is really about, like trying to do things right, isn't it? 

We overthink when we want to make the right decision we overthink when we want to make sure we handle all the possibilities we want to we overthink to try to help ourselves avoid problems in advance. Right? We do all this thinking to try to plan for all the things that could go wrong. We want to make sure we captured all the possibilities and you don't we don't get surprised. 

We overthink so that you know we can we can catch all the potential errors, we can do all the things and we know what we never had all the potential errors, we still get surprised things still don't go to plan. And so yeah, thinking about some of what's possible, trying to plan all of that I'm not saying to stop all of that. I'm not saying to give up thinking entirely. But the overthinking isn't really helping. It's just using up extra time. Like we're never going to plan away surprise. We're never going to overthink our way to the correct decision all the time. You know, if you remember school at all, I still teach college kids math. And what I hear for them all the time after tests is you know what? I had the answer right the first time and then I overthought it right. 

How often do you talk yourself out of the thing you knew was the right thing to do? Because you thought about it too freakin much. So I want you to imagine what life would look like, with less overthinking with just dialing it down a little bit to onder. Think a little bit? What would it feel like? What would be different? I know for me, if I think about overthinking less, I gained back time almost immediately, I came back sleep for sure. Because if I'm gonna be overthinking it is at 11pm. It happens when I'm tired. And then I get stuck in those loops. And then my brain is going going going and I shouldn't be sleeping, sleeping sleeping or not. I did it just last night.

When I overthink. The other thing I do is I lose focus. So if I were to over under think a little bit more, I get back time I get back sleep, I get back focus, which is fantastic. I want all of those things back like permanently. And that's not going to say that I'm going to be perfect at this but like thinking a little less actually gets me a lot of good things. And then here's the other question, think about what's scary about under thinking so your brain is like alright, logically under thinking could be a thing. I could think last thoughts. Right? We overthink because we want to be right. We want to choose correctly. 

We want to make a good decision. We overthink because we have been taught that if we don't do our research very carefully and look at every option under the sudden that we're going to miss out on a good deal or we're going to miss something important and then we're screwed. But that's not ever been true, right? Like when I picked a wedding venue we looked at one We looked at exactly one wedding venue and then signed up. And it was a big thing. Right? It's like when you go to a restaurant that has three choices on the menu, you're still gonna have an amazing meal if you choose everything for you, and then if they had 30.
 
So it's, you're not going to choose wrong, you can trust yourself to choose, right. But it is scary to consider thinking less, because we're taught that more thinking is more correct. That's not real. Because really, we talk ourselves out of things, because of overthinking we do stuff. We make things extra hard, we do things that are not going to work out, right, because we bought too much about them. Right, and then we have to backtrack. So we're doing twice as much thinking and double work, just because of the overthinking. Oh my goodness. So if you are like me an excellent in highly skilled ninja black belt level over thinker, what do you do to under thing, because like, it's not just if you're a natural over thinkers, and under thinking feels really scary. 

So here are the things that my favorite strategies for for doing this in a way that I know for a fact save me time, saves clients time, every time I teach this to a friend, it saves them time, like saves time, but it also helps you succeed more and accomplish more in less time. Right and get further faster. 

When you're not thinking you can Arnold. First, you have to notice yourself. And I know like you listen to this podcast in any kind of regular way. You know that I talk a lot about noticing but you got to hear your brain. When you drop into the like spin cycle that is overthinking you have to pick it up. Because we don't know we're overthinking sometimes, and we can't sort of work against it. We can't combat it in any useful way. If we don't notice it's happening. So you know, I've had to train myself to sort of notice when I start to spin when I lay down in bed at night, and I start to go Uber, Uber, Uber Lyft. But the book of Bla bla bla bla and I'm like, Oh, holy cow, there it goes. And that I I know what to do with that point.

Like, I take my headphones off my bedside table and I put them in my phone and I turn the meditation app on, because there's the only thing that is going to shut up my brain at night when I'm trying to sleep. But like you got to notice when your brain starts to cycle endlessly, right that like that, and you are in the middle of the workday, or you have some things going on, you're trying to get some stuff done. You're like, whoa, what's happening? 

There are a couple of questions to ask. The first is why am I stuck here? Like what's stuck here? Like, why is my brain stuck in this? It's like you're stuck in your car stuck in mud, and you're just spinning the wheels? Like, why am I spinning my wheels here? What exactly is happening? So you notice it? And then you step back? And it's like, Okay, let me be curious what's actually happening? Then, what do I want to change? Like, okay, if I'm spinning my wheels in the mud? Do I want to keep spinning them? Is it getting me somewhere to expand them? Do I need this period of time to spin? And then can I move on? Right? It's not saying that you're never going to be here. But it is like, Okay, do I want to change something? And what is it?

 And then, you know, how do I get to the solution I want? Because let's say you're overthinking a decision you're gonna make? Well, how do you get to make the decision? Right? How do I get to the solution I want, I want this to be decided, right? So I can continue to overthink the research. Or I can just be like, Okay, do I have enough information right now to make a decision? If I do, I'm going to decide if I don't, that I know I need to do a little more research. But I'm going to give myself a time cap. And that leads to strategy number two. First is noticing yourself. gotta hear it. The second is time caps. So here's the thing, sometimes, and I suggest this to clients all the time in various ways. I give myself time to overthink, I schedule it. Like if I so I am in the process of looking for new speaking opportunities and these kinds of things. 

And in my calendar over the next couple of weeks, I have time to research. But what I do in that research time is I give myself you know, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, and then I make a list of what I find and I decide what's worth pursuing. I give myself 45 minutes to research and three minutes to decide. Literally, that's it. And often, you know, I want to talk with clients about things like this. I give them even less. So I'll say to them like okay, you have to make a decision on X thing I had an example of this last week and I cannot remember what she was deciding she was trying to decide something I said okay, how long do you think you need to research and she said, like, Oh, no 20 minutes or an hour, I think she said an hour. And I said, Okay, give yourself an hour and 15 minutes, give yourself a little extra time to play with. 

Right? So that your brain feels like it's got the space it needs, schedule it in, set a timer, give yourself a 75 minutes. And then at the end of 75 minutes, when the timer goes off, set the timer again for five minutes. And at the end of that five minutes, you'll have to have designer in the thing is most of the time, you don't need anywhere near that five minutes. You know, right away, you know what the decision is because your brain has been preparing to make the decision because you knew you're gonna get the time cap. Most of the time I do this now, I'm checking off as I go, like which things I want to pursue wishes I don't. Because my brain is already like, oh, yeah, we're gonna have to decide at the end, what we're doing with this, knowing I have to make a decision means that I'm already preparing for it, instead of just like, aimlessly floating around looking at every option under the sun and thinking some more. Okay, so that's the second one time caps make a tremendous difference.
 
But sodas just like thinking, okay, you know, I need some time to like, marinate in this, I need some space to overthink it. And then I need to call it right, you can have the time, your brain sometimes just needs to like motion around for a while, I always think of it like goes into the mixing bowl in the back of my brain and just needs to be sorted a little bit. So sometimes I need that time. But at the same token, I don't need an endless amount of it. And I don't even do any more research. Like I can't I can't look at the possibilities. I can't, because it's not going to help me it's just going to make it worse, right. 

Here's the last one. And this is I think the hard one. This is one I work really hard at as a business owner. 

This is when I talk to people about all the time. But one of the fastest ways you can stop overthinking is reducing the amount of time between thinking and doing. Now in practice, for example, for me, this is something I do all the time. If I give myself the time to overthink, I will write you are the same. If I have the time to overthink, I will take it. But if I don't have the time, if I don't have enough space to overthink it, because I have other things going on in my attention that I need to get done. I just go inside the thing. And I do it. And like nothing worse happens. Because I did oftentimes it works better than I expected because I didn't screw around with it. So for you. This really for me has become one of my superpowers. Because now I like have a thought do a thing move on. 

There's no overthinking it, there's there's very little thinking periods just like have a thought, write it down, share it. Move on to my dad. Right? I do that most cases for me it's about posting things or making offers or saying to people, Hey, would this be useful for you? I don't overthink it. I just say it and I move on. And then I and then I overthink it after I retroactively overthink it. But then like my brain goes, well, it's already done. So you're gonna have to just deal with it. Right? So who are you think about? You know, the common areas in which you overthink? Is it marketing messaging? Is it your offer? Is it your pricing? Is it your whatever it is? Is it visibility? Is it reaching out to connect with people? Is it where is it? And where can you decide what needs to be done, do the thing and close the amount of time that you have to think to something very, very small. 

So you don't have the time to play with. Often when I need to do this what I do. And this is I don't know if this is the best practice, but this is how I do it. What I do like literally what I do is I schedule my time to do the writing or make the post or make the offer or do the outreach back to something that has a hard stop time. Or a start time. So like I will give myself 15 minutes to do that thing right before I have to start with the content. Because I know at the end of that 14 minutes I have to be done. Like there's no I'm not going to be like oh client can you wait 10 minutes while I finish this thing? I've been overthinking it. Like that's not gonna work. Although they would laugh. That's that's not great. For I schedule it like right at the end of the day, right where I know my kids are gonna walk in the door and I have to get up to make dinner because we have baseball practice every night until the end of days. 

So I tend to think that I know I'm going to overthink or I'm going to be tempted to overthink I give myself a really small window for and I make sure that window is like an actual window and not like one I'm just manufacturing. I make sure it backs up to something that I can't get out of. And so then when it when that window was closing, I have to get it done. And it's a little pressure right to do the thing. And it doesn't always work. But it works more often than not. And in that way, I don't spend as much time overthinking. And the beauty of it is, when the next thing starts, I stopped thinking about what I was doing anyways, because I switched into coach mode, or into connecting mode or whatever I'm doing next. And by the time I come back to that thing, I did it I'm it's done. 

Like it's posted, it's out in universe, it's shared, it's asked for its whatever, right? So you know, it's a strategy. Okay, so here's my hope for you, I hope for you is that you're thinking a little less, like, do the thing. Because really thinking about it more isn't, isn't making the decisions you're making any better. It's not making the choices easier, it's not making anything simpler, thinking harder. So let's think a little less, and get more done. And try more things and fail a little bit because we have to fail to succeed, right. So that is what I'm rooting for you to do. One other quick thing is starting May 1, I am running a workshop, combined with a little challenge that offers if you know you are not making enough offers, this is for you, you can come on into my Facebook group or find me on LinkedIn, it's gonna go on my email list, it is going all the social places. 

 So if you want to sign up for this workshop and challenge it's going to be a grand sum of $23 where you're gonna get the recording and all the tips and tools and tricks and things that are going to come in the 15 Day Challenge. And then the live q&a and workshop and all the things it's going to be fabulous. It's about making more offers more simply and it is going to melt your brain in a good way. So if you would like that column, get it Come and join us in the challenge. It's going to be worth every freaking Penny and then sign in. 

Okay, super fun. This is going to be super fun. So if you are interested in that, let me know. I'm happy to get you signed up. And if you are not with me all your places Facebook, LinkedIn, in my Facebook group, which is the same name as this podcast, please come join me all the places. I can't wait to talk to you there, sir.