Ep256. Making the Uncomfortable Comfortable: How to Stop Blocking Goodness From Your Life.

This episode takes the conversation around giving and receiving to a deeper level. Building on last week's exploration of the five ways we block ourselves from receiving, Mike uncovers the emotional reasons behind those blocks and reveals why so many generous, caring, and successful people struggle to receive support, abundance, love, ease, and opportunity. 

At the heart of this episode is a powerful realization that emerged while writing Mike's upcoming book, Built to Give. Rebuilt to Receive. The issue is rarely the external circumstance. More often, we block goodness from entering our lives because we're unconsciously trying to avoid certain feelings. Understanding these emotions becomes the key to becoming a better receiver and experiencing a higher quality of life. 

Key Takeaways

1. We often block goodness from entering our lives to avoid uncomfortable feelings.
The challenge isn't usually receiving itself. It's the emotions that receiving might trigger inside of us. 

2. Seven core emotions frequently drive our resistance to receiving.
Selfishness, being a burden, judgment, rejection, shame, superiority, and disappointment often sit beneath our unwillingness to receive support, abundance, love, and opportunity. 

3. Over-givers often delay permission to receive.
Many people spend their lives giving, serving, helping, and supporting others while continuously postponing their own turn to receive. 

4. Avoiding emotions keeps them alive.
What we resist persists. The path to freedom isn't avoiding uncomfortable emotions but learning how to move into, through, and beyond them. 

5. The path to becoming a better receiver is making the uncomfortable comfortable.
Growth happens when we willingly feel the emotions we've spent our lives trying to avoid. The more comfortable we become with those feelings, the easier it becomes to receive life fully. 

Notable Quotes

•  "The greatest lie ever told is that it's better to give than receive." 
•  "The reason we block goodness from flowing into our life is to avoid a feeling." 
•  "The wealthiest, happiest, most successful people I know are easy receivers." 
•  "Whatever you resist persists. Whatever you feel heals." 
•  "The way to heal is into the discomfort and through it." 

Call to Action

If this episode resonated with you, spend a few moments reflecting on which of the seven emotions shows up most often in your life. Is it the fear of being selfish? The fear of judgment? The fear of rejection, shame, disappointment, or being a burden?

Awareness is the first step.

Once you understand what you're trying to avoid, you can begin the process of moving through it instead of organizing your life around it.

If you're ready to do this work at a deeper level, join Mike for the upcoming Built to Give, Rebuilt to Receive Workshop on August 28–29 just outside of St. Louis, Missouri, where you'll learn how to identify and release the blocks that keep you from fully receiving life. Click here for details and to register.

Questions? Reach out directly:

mike@innerwealthglobal.com

No assistant. No gatekeeper. Just a real conversation about becoming as skilled at receiving as you already are at giving.

Mike's Media:

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Music Credit: "What's Left of Me" by Wes Hoffman & Friends

Transcript

Welcome And The Receiving Theme

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Welcome to the Inner World Podcast where we learn and choose to live inspired each and every day.

The Myth That Trains Overgivers

SPEAKER_00 0:35

All right, we're gonna stick on the same theme that we have over the last few episodes, and that is receiving, the relationship between giving and receiving. And it's been such a such a journey in my life to learn how to become a receiver and to learn how to balance the giving and receiving. The greatest lie ever told and ever passed down from generation to generation that it's better to give than receive. And it's just not true. Someone who really who absorbs that, who adopts it, and who lives from that philosophy will be an overgiver their entire life and never truly receive what they deserve the most. They'll just continue to look for ways to to uh give and give and never really allow themselves and give themselves permission to step into a place of receivership, easy receivership, and allow life to start pouring back into them. It's like we just keep delaying the permission and the permission slip and not cashing it. And we just keep giving and giving and giving what because we're built to give. We're not built to receive. If we if we build ourselves and we build our life around that, that lie that it's better to give than receive, then we'll build ourselves and our identity around it, and we'll never really truly flip the switch in order to start to allow life to pour back into us. We'll just keep delaying and delaying, waiting for a time that never comes. And what we need to do if we really want to experience a higher level and a higher quality of life is we need to dispel the uh lie, the illusion, the myth that it's better to give than receive, and start to rebuild ourselves around receiving.

Book And Workshop Announcement

SPEAKER_00 2:24

And that's why it's called the book that I'm working on is called uh Built to Give, Rebuilt to Receive and the workshop uh that I haven't announced on a podcast yet. I kept saying I'll do more uh workshops in the future. Well, now I this week I just launched uh the next workshop. It's August 28th, 29th, right outside of St. Louis, Missouri. And it's called Built to Give, Rebuilt to Receive. And uh while I work on the book, I'm I'm also launching the workshop. And by the time we do the workshop, the book should be pretty well mature by then. And I should be uh I should be pretty uh far along in the process. And not saying I'll have any copies at the workshop or it'll be actually actually published, but I should have a really good understanding about what the final product is going to look like. And I should be well into the editing stages by then.

Making Giving And Receiving Equal

SPEAKER_00 3:20

But anyway, the the point being is I have been a massive overgiver in my life. And my life in my coaching business, in my my marriage, in my uh in every aspect. When I worked in corporate, it was all about giving and receiving very little, if anything, in return sometimes for the amount of effort and for the amount of goodness that I was pouring into other people. And and I I never truly received the level of value that I brought to the table in terms of what I was able to give or what I was willing to give. And now it's flipping the script on that and not saying that receiving is better than giving, but just leveling up and making them equal because that's the truth. It's not better to give than receive, they're equal. It's an exchange. And if there's no one willing to receive, then the givers are not going to be able to give because the receivers aren't going to receive. But it's about taking someone who's an over-giver and under-receiver and making them equal so that they get to experience being on the receiving end of life. And there's one section in the book that's called easy receiver. And the most successful, the wealthiest, the happiest people that I know are very easy receivers. They don't spend time blocking goodness from coming into their lives. And if you offer them goodness, they're going to receive it and they're going to accept it and they're going to say thank you without hesitation. Whereas an overgiver, under receiver, it'll make them uncomfortable. It oftentimes makes makes overgiver, under-receivers uncomfortable to be on the receiving end of life because they're so wired and they're so born to be on the giving side. And it's leveling up that that giving and the receiving are equal and rebuilding an identity and real rebuilding, really rebuilding the nervous system around the ease of receptivity for all the value that we've already given and that we continue to give in life. All right. So the um, yeah, if you'd love to be part of the workshop, we're gonna be publishing that on Facebook. I've been promoting it. I've got a couple of people registered. Uh, it's and I expect more. I just launched it yesterday. So I expect more to be uh uh registered over the coming weeks. And we got two months before before launch. So I plan to do a whole lot of promotion around the workshop, but I'm excited for this one. It's it's unlike any workshop that I've ever created and launched before. And my live experiences are impactful. You never leave the same person that you walked in.

Five Places We Block Goodness

SPEAKER_00 5:59

So on last week's episode, I talked about the five categories of uh of where we block receiving in our life. And I'm gonna look at my notes. So um for those who are on video, I'm I'm gonna, I'm not gonna look like my eyes aren't gonna be locked on you. And that's where they're going, they're going to my note. Um, we resist responsibility for ourselves. And what that means is we put every we make ourselves responsible for everybody else's wants and needs above and beyond our own. Uh, we block our own desires. Sometimes we we we minimize or we try to ignore what we want and need, or pretend like we don't want or need anything, and we don't allow ourselves to be on the want and the need side of life, and we don't prioritize ourselves and things that are going to make our life better. Uh how about support and care? Uh asking for help, receiving support, receiving, receiving uh love, receiving uh assistance from other people and allowing not only asking for help, but allowing other people to help and participate. And sometimes, you know, it makes us feel uncomfortable when we're not a great receiver, it makes us feel uncomfortable. And we're gonna talk about that more in this episode, but it makes us feel uncomfortable when people actually help us, right? Um, the fourth is ease and abundance. So so many people that, especially a couple people in the inner wealth mastermind right now, their life has gotten really, really easy and their their nervous system almost is struggling to settle into the ease that they have in life, right? Their their nervous system isn't willing to right yet, it's not willing to accept, embrace, and receive ease. All right. And sometimes when when we don't accept and embrace and receive ease, we keep ourselves doing, we keep ourselves doing things that aren't required or they're just distractions, just to, just to to avoid feeling something. And that's what we're gonna talk about in this episode, the feelings associated with this, all right. And somebody, sometimes with abundance, it's it's just thinking that life has to be hard, or you always have to be struggling, or there, if there's, you know, if there's too much margin in your life, then you start to push it away and self-sabotage it. And finally, your fullest expression. And this is where I've done lots of episodes on authenticity. It's speaking your truth, it's taking up more space, it's being yourself, being the fullest expression of yourself. And not when we when you hold blocks to to this, to the your fullest expression, what it means is you hold parts of yourself back and you don't truly let those parts shine in in life. All right. Those are the five categories of of areas and ways that we block goodness from flowing into our life. I covered those last week. This week, I want to I want to move this thing just a little bit forward. And this is the this is a really cool part. This part that I'm gonna share with you just came about this week from between last episode and this episode. And I hired a book coach for my first book. I this will be my third published uh book that that I've written. Uh, I've worked on so many other ones that I ejected from, but uh the first book that I ever wrote was The Imposter in Charge. And I hired a book coach, and she was amazing and magnificent. And the one thing that I really took away from that whole experience of working with her is that uh when you're working on your book, your book is working on you. And I'll never forget her saying that. And it's so true. In the first book, as I was writing, I was understanding more and more, and I was grasping larger concepts that that I didn't grasp before, or I didn't even uh understand, or I wasn't aware of before I started writing the book. And in inner world, outer world, this happened. It chapters came from nowhere as I was writing the book because I started connecting dots in my life and in my work with other people. And whole chapters were created because the book was working on me. And this is happening again with give to uh built to give and and rebuilt to receive. It's happening again. And this week is an example of that. So this is a very simple concept to understand, but a very difficult one to navigate. All right, this isn't the easiest thing to navigate, especially when you are built to give and we're looking to be rebuilt to receive and be on the receiving end of life. This is a simple concept to comprehend, a difficult one to traverse when you're so built uh one way. All

Why We Block Receiving At All

SPEAKER_00 10:49

right. And the reason we would block any goodness flowing in our life, our life in one of those five categories, it's very simple. It's to avoid a feeling. We we don't want to feel a certain thing, or when we when we do, when we are on the receiving end in some way, or when we even think about being on the receiving end in some way, then we it gives us an emotion, a feeling inside of our body. And that's why we modify our behavior, or we don't ask for help, or we don't, uh, we don't allow people to help us, or we don't share our wins, or we don't increase the amount of ease that we have or or abundance, because it gives us feelings that we're trying to avoid. And this week I want to talk about there's probably a billion emotions, but this week we're gonna talk about seven specific emotions that when we block goodness coming in in our lives, we're most likely looking to avoid these emotions and feelings. And I'm gonna share these and I want you to connect with them. Sick, because I just shared this on the Interwealth Mastermind call today, and it really clicked with people, just like the cat, the five categories did last week. Uh, and this week I shared the seven emotions, the seven internal states of feeling that you're trying to avoid, and it really connected, really clicked. And people, people were scribbling notes, and it was really awesome, all right, to see and experience that things that I'm learning on this journey of working on my book, as it's working on me, I have more to share. And when I share it, it's starting to start the light bulbs are starting to go off, and people are starting to really comprehend why they struggle to receive so much, right? So we're gonna go through, I'm gonna go through these seven, I'm gonna explain them briefly. Some of some of these are just really easy to understand, and you're gonna, you're gonna intuitively know what I'm talking about because you've if you if you are a struggle isous receiver, then you've struggled with uh with receiving because of these one

Seven Feelings We Try To Avoid

SPEAKER_00 12:59

of one or more of these seven emotions, all right? The first emotion that we try to avoid, the the first feeling, I'm kind of using emotion and and and feeling interchangeably, and emotion is just energy and motion. It's the energy that's happening in your body, and the feeling is the mechanism for analyzing and understanding that emotion, all right? Um, but the first feeling that we try to avoid is selfishness. And this is why we would block asking for more, wanting more, expressing our needs, uh asking, you know, uh helping, asking people to help us with a problem, allowing people to help us with a problem because we feel like we're we're selfish in some way. And we, I don't know about you, but my entire childhood, I heard don't be selfish, don't be selfish, don't be selfish, don't be selfish. It's like everywhere I went and everybody I spoke to, it was about life was about not being selfish. So when you are built in a way, and and between the ages of zero and seven, you're a subconscious sponge. No matter what you're taught, you're gonna believe. And if you're taught to not be selfish, then you're gonna spend your entire life trying to not be seen as selfish, be judged as selfish, or feel selfish. And this is one of the reasons that we would block receiving, is so that we don't feel selfish. The second is being a burden. And I know you know what I mean by that. All right. This is the life is a team sport. And when we don't allow other people to help us with things that we need help on, or obstacles or challenges that we're experiencing, or workload that we have, and we don't ask for help. We don't make ourselves available to receive help, to receive support, to receive care, to allow people to pour into us, to utilize other people's time and for our benefit. When we don't, when we don't ask or allow ourselves to receive help and support, then it's because likely because we're trying to avoid the feeling of being a burden to other people. Judgment. Judgment's a big one, right? You you're trying to avoid the feeling of being judged. It's almost like you're trying to control the thoughts in other people's minds and trying to be seen a certain way so that you're not judged. You don't feel, you don't feel judged by others. It doesn't matter if they're judging you or not. It's really that you're trying to avoid the feeling of being judged. All right. And the uh one of the one of the greatest books, one of the greatest titles, let me say, not the greatest book, but one of the greatest titles I've ever come across is the courage to be disliked. And really it comes down to the courage to be judged and for it to not move energy and move move emotion, move your internal emotional state. And this is how we can really step into our full authority and authenticity and our power is by letting go of avoiding the feeling of being judged, right? The the next is the feeling of rejection. It doesn't matter if you're rejected or not, it's the feeling of rejection that you're trying to avoid. And another book, uh, it there's a book called Rejection Proof. And it for 40 days, this guy went out in the world. He was so prone to trying to avoid rejection that he for 40 days he went out and he tried to be rejected every single day until he became immune from rejection. And really, it wasn't a rejection, it was the feeling that it would trigger inside of him, right? And and that trying to avoid feeling rejected, it will keep you from offering or asking or inviting or allowing. And I I when I early on in my coaching business, when I would launch a workshop, I would never invite anybody to it. I would never offer it to anybody because I was afraid of rejection. I was afraid of feeling rejected. And now, just today, I invited, I sent message messages and text messages and private messages to 10, 15 people saying, hey, this workshop, whether you, whether you you you opt in or not, I feel like a duty and a responsibility to you to invite you to this thing because I know it'll it'll move the needle. I know it'll help you. Now, whether they sign up and register and come to the workshop or not, it doesn't matter. But what I do know is over the last eight years, I've worked through a lot of the fear of rejection. And we're going to talk about how to do that. Shame, the feeling of shame. We we often try to avoid the feeling of be uh of shame. And what is shame? Shame is feeling broken. Shame is feeling like there's something wrong with us. And when we don't allow ourselves to be on the receiving end of life because of shame, what we're saying is we're not going to do something or ask for something because ultimately that that invitation, that ask, that invite, that allow, that receptivity might lead to us feeling a sense of being flawed, broken, right? You you early on in my life, I didn't have a date, a girlfriend, until I was a first date, or a girlfriend until I was 18 years old. And that was trying to avoid shame. It wasn't just about rejection, it was rejection too. But I felt broken. And if they would have rejected me, I would have felt more broken. So I just don't even ask because I already felt broken, I already felt flawed, I already felt defective, and I didn't want to feel it anymore. I didn't want to feel any more of it. So we avoid feeling shame. Shame is that there's something fundamentally flawed with you, and some outside experience could further amplify or trigger that shame. Number six is superiority. And this is where, you know, in The Big Elite by Dr. Gay Hendricks, he talks about the crime of outshining. And what that means is you dim your light so other people don't feel bad. And with when we're trying to avoid this feeling of superiority, what we're trying to, what we're really trying to do is we're trying to avoid the feeling it causes us to succeed more than somebody else, or to have more than somebody else, or to experience more than somebody else. So we kind of play small and dim our light and take up less space in the world because we don't want to feel that that feeling of superiority, like or or of some kind of benefit from life that other people don't have, which makes us feel superior in some way. And finally, the feeling of disappointment. And this one has sucked my soul dry from time to time, right? So if you're avoiding the feeling of disappointment, then you you anticipate loss because anticipating gain would mean that it could eventually lead to disappointment. So you come to anticipate loss or failure. That way you can pad your emotions and you can protect your emotions. When the first Choose Your Destiny workshop I ever had, at the end of the workshop, I asked anybody who wanted to join the Interwealth mastermind, stand up. And six people stood up and I went, whoa, holy shit! And that's because I was, I was anticipating loss or anticipating no one standing up. And it literally shocked and surprised me. And all that was was the pad on my emotions uh to avoid disappointment. Right. And I've I've lived a life to try to avoid disappointment. And that's why I'm so familiar and intimate with that. So, what do we have? We got selfishness, being a burden, judgment, feeling judged, uh, rejection, shame, superiority, and disappointment. So we've got the five categories: responsibility for yourself, your own desires, support and care, ease and abundance, you're in your fullest expression. And the reasons we block the goodness from coming in in life and receiving, being on the receiving end of the goodness of life is because we're ultimately trying to avoid the feeling of selfishness being a burden, judgment, rejection, shame, superiority, or disappointment. I hope this makes sense. This is uh this has been a great week and it's it's unlocked a lot of clarity and a lot of insight in me. It's given me a lot more ammunition in the book, built, uh, built to give, rebuilt to receive. And it's going to bring a lot of fuel to the workshop. All right. August 28th and 29th, just outside of St. Louis, Missouri. I'll put the link in the show notes. More on this topic over the coming weeks and over the coming months. I've been Me and my team have been searching for what is the next iteration of what we're going to teach in the inner wealth mastermind and inner wealth in in in the entire business inner wealth. I think we landed on it because this is something that's plagued me my whole life, being on the giving side of life, the overgiving, but not being on the receiving end. And this is, I think it's time. I think it's time to start not just teaching people the creation process, but kind of a shining a light on where they're not receiving in their life. And whether it be the person in the mastermind who's struggling the most, or the private client who is succeeding and wealthy, there's still instances in their life where they struggle to receive. And when they recognize that block and when they work through the block, then they will eventually rewire themselves to receive in that dimension.

Making Discomfort The Path Forward

SPEAKER_00 22:54

Now, I kind of teased that I'm going to talk about how to begin to stop avoiding these uh these emotions, right? These seven emotions and and any other emotion that can come up. And it's not going to feel really comfortable. And there's even a chapter in the book called Making the Uncomfortable Comfortable. And what it talks about is the way the way to heal, the way to uh transcend the these emotions, the avoidance of these emotions is into the discomfort and through it. And if you if you listen to the episode that I did when we uh when we were at the Interwealth Mastermind Retreat in Nashville just a few weeks ago, that was what the Speedo experiment was all about. I was shit, I've always felt shame of my body, like there was something wrong with it. I've always hidden my body away. And I taught for for a period of time in front of my clients and in front of our students with no clothes on except a rainbow speedo. And that was so, so radically and ridiculously uncomfortable. And that is how we move through and we transcend the avoidance of these emotions and these feelings that we're trying to feel into and through the emotion. Avoiding the emotion makes it stay. Whatever you resist persists, whatever you feel heals. And it's about feeling the emotion and knowing what to do with it. The drill method. Drop into your body, recognize what you're feeling, inquire and investigate, listen to what it's telling you and what it has, what lessons it's offering you, and then ultimately let it go. And this is how we move into, through, and transcend the emotions that we're trying to avoid. And then when we when we no longer uh try to avoid those emotions, then we'll we'll be on the receiving end of life. Hope this is making sense. There's a there's a there's so much uh wind under my wings, so much inspiration in my heart and my body, and I am excited for this next chapter. And I hope you're as excited as I am, right? I've toyed around and contemplated and and and played with the idea of shutting down the inner wealth podcast and reopening a new podcast called Built to Give, Rebuilt to Receive, because I don't know if there's anything out there where somebody's teaching about the greatest lie ever told is it's better to give than receive. Because I think it's got so many people on the overgiving side of life. And that's why there's there's so so many, so few that have a lot, and so many that have just enough or less than enough, because we're taught and trained, programmed conditioned to be on the giving side of life, not the receiving. It's time to change all of that. All right. I'm glad you're along for the ride.

How To Join And Final Takeaways

SPEAKER_00 25:54

If you're interested, like I said, I'm gonna put the the link for the uh for the workshop in in the the show notes, whether it be YouTube in the show notes or on the podcast episode uh in the show notes, uh, click the link. My email address is mike at interwealthglobal.com. If you have any questions, if you want to chat about it, uh shoot me an email. I am it won't be an assistant that's reading your email, it's me directly. And uh I do have an assistant, her name's Kara Dossi. She's awesome, but it will be me who responds directly. And I'll answer, be happy to jump on a call or answer any questions. I just want the right people in the room at the workshop to do the work that helps us expand in every dimension. But first, we have to stop overgiving and start leveling up in our ability to receive. See you next week. If you enjoyed what you heard and you want to learn more, go to www.innerwealthglobal.com for more tools and reports.