The Nuts and Bolts of Changing Your Life

We see and hear from people who have made significant changes in their lives, but they often gloss over the actual steps they took during their transformations. While everyone takes different paths throughout their lives, it can be helpful to hear how people actually changed their habits and behaviors to reach their goals.

🔆 Andee Scarantino (a.k.a. Andee), who is a transformational coach and host of Get the F*** Off podcast, is one of the people who share the steps she took to make the changes she wanted to over the past few years. She sat down with LinkedIn News Editor Andrew Seaman to discuss what she did to discover her goals and reach them during the pandemic.

You can hear their conversation on the latest episode of Get Hired with Andrew Seaman on Apple Podcasts or wherever you like to listen.

Transcript: The Nuts and Bolts of Changing Your Life

Andrew: From LinkedIn News, this is Get Hired, a podcast for the ups and downs of our professional lives. I'm Andrew Seaman, LinkedIn's managing editor for jobs and career development. Each week on Get Hired, we talk about leveling up. Sometimes we talk about finding work. Other times we talk about excelling where you are right now and through it all, we focus on how to stay true to yourself in the process. We hear all the time about people who have made significant life-changing transformations during the pandemic. Often that transformation is glossed over as just one part of the story. We see a before and an after, but not the middle. But today we're going to get into that middle part. What are the steps to making a big change in the way you live your life? Sounds uncomfortable, right? Luckily help is here in the form of my very good friend, Andrea Scarantino, AKA Andee. Andee and I met in college and instantly fell in love with each other. So it's been incredible to see how much she's changed her own life over the past few years. And now she works to help other people do the same. Her website and podcast are both called “Get the F** Off.” I'm told we can't say the full name on our podcast. It's family friendly. Sorry, Andee. You can probably fill in the blanks though. Anyway, Andee helps other people quit bad habits and change their relationships with themselves. The secret sauce? Well, I'll let Andee take it from here.

Andee: I made a pretty significant transformation in my life over the last few years. And what I learned from that transformation was that identity played a crucial role in almost all of it. So shifting the part of you that believes you are something, it was integral in my transformation. I always like to say who you believe you are is who shows up in the world. And in terms of when I was struggling with things like my body, I was not in alignment with my career. And so there was a lot of struggling and a lot of that really did come down to who I believed I was and what attachments I had to different things that I did.

Andrew: Yeah. And the reason I wanted to have you on is because I obviously adore you. I've loved you since we met in college. But I think we have a lot of people who talk about transformation and who talk about making changes that can lead to substantial growth or something like that in their lives. But a lot of times they haven't necessarily experienced that themselves. They may have had some sort of transformational moment, but I think you genuinely have when it comes to actually sort of sitting down and saying, okay, this is what I want out of life. Can you tell us what sparked in you the decision to really make a change?

Andee: Well, I started my journey after an incident that I had back in 2018. So I started making changes in areas of my body and my mindset. And I stopped smoking after 18 years. And I started running marathons. I really became serious about taking care of my health and wellbeing, but I was very stuck and misaligned in the professional area. And that was the thing that I was like, I just can't shift this. I just can't shift this thing. And I did reach out to you because I knew the work that you were doing. And I said, “there isn't a job out there that I think is suited,” because I knew what I wanted to do and I knew what I was passionate about, but what was really happening was that I was telling a story about who I was, based on what was. I have a good amount of education. I have a master's degree in sociology and bachelor's degree in communications. I had been doing a rote, repetitive thing for so long that my brain had stopped learning and exploring. It just didn't take the time to become curious. And when the pandemic happened, I became very focused on learning. And I just started spending time aligning myself with things that I was interested in. So it was just about taking that time to slow down. And the second piece was examining the beliefs that I had about myself. Because if you have a belief that you are inadequate or you're not worthy, or you don't belong in certain rooms, you're not even going to go into those rooms. The beliefs that you have really dictate the direction of your life. So it's about how you are perceiving that and what story are you telling about who you are and where you belong?

Andrew: I think that is such an interesting concept to think you just have to slow down. And for you, what was that moment where you had to slow down to figure out, “okay, what am I doing? What do I want to do?” Did you have a slow down moment?

Andee: I did. What ended up happening was a good friend of mine, Andy Petranek, he's one of my mentors, he started a meditation group on Facebook. And we were all just sitting at home anyway. So every day we all sat and meditated and we were there for about a half hour every day, but there was about 10 solid minutes of meditation every day. And it was interesting because it taught me all about this different level of pausing that I had not previously experienced. And I didn't understand the difference between ... Because I was raised here in the west, so it's produce, produce, produce, produce, produce. Just keep going. And I never understood this idea of putting space between your thoughts so that you could receive different pieces of information. All change is uncomfortable. So being able to sit with discomfort is another thing that was interesting for me because when I was changing things like ... Like I don't drink anymore. I used to be a very heavy drinker. Stopping that was uncomfortable and starting my own business was the same discomfort. It was the same exact discomfort. It didn't feel any different to start my own business than it did to stop drinking, than it did to stop smoking, than it did to stop eating tasty cakes. It's the same discomfort all around. Your body gives you a feeling of anxiety because it's used to predictability and yeah, being able to sit with that discomfort and just be able to sit there. And I think that was really the catalyst for a lot of the career shifting that I did.

Andrew: How did you take those first initial steps? Because change, like you said, is uncomfortable. It's scary. And especially when you're dealing with something where it turns into your job. There's a paycheck attached. There's your home attached to that. How did you deal with that?

Andee: Okay, so that's a heavy one. There were a lot of steps. So the first thing that I did was I reached out to a friend of mine, Ash Ambirge. And I said "I'm interested in doing this thing and, and do you have any advice?" Because it's very important to me to reach out to people that have done it. And I just became very curious. I got rid of the "I know everything," and I adopted the growth mindset, which is just discomfort, learning, understanding, taking micro steps. Like there was a time when I just listened to an Audible that Tony Robbins put out and I listened to that and I took one day during the pandemic, I was unemployed, I took six hours and I listened to that. I realized I want to do this, but I don't know necessarily people that are already doing this. So I need to have more of that in my life. And I asked people that were already in business for help with the practical pieces, because there's the intuitive piece, which is what you want to do. And then there's the actual thump, thump. And as a distance runner, I embody this idea that you become a better runner by running. So you thump, thump. You thump, thump every day. And if you thump, thump every day, you will be a better runner. So I just made a promise to myself that I would take every single day and I would actively do one thing towards this. It might have been just writing a paragraph of copy on my website. It was just one thing every day. And I just focused on what I wanted. And then as opportunities came, I would feel anxiety about taking those opportunities. I would feel anxiety about talking to new people because I was still telling the old story. So I was like, “no let's, instead of catastrophizing what the worst thing that could happen with this would be, let's think about what the best thing that could happen with this would be.” And the third piece, and maybe the most important piece was examining my own story about who I believed I was.

Andrew: We're going to take a short break. When we get back, Andee digs more into how you can change your beliefs.

Andrew: We're back with mindset and transformational coach, and my friend, Andrea Scarantino, AKA Andee. Now, there's been a ton of research around habit development, and the idea of language comes up often. Basically changing the way you talk about something is so important. Think about running. If you go from, “I am going to run” to “I am a runner,” that's a profound shift. And that's exactly the mindset that Andee adopted.

Andee: If you don't identify with what you're doing, then you are not going to do it. So the shift had to be, “I am no longer an unemployed bartender that is laid off because of a pandemic.” The shift was, “I am somebody that is actively going to work to serve people in helping them make integral shifts.” And you won't feel like it at first. There's that concept of imposter syndrome that's real. And as I talked about the discomfort with breaking habits and the discomfort that comes with those sorts of things, the same thing happens when you're trying to get away from an old identity, you feel that same discomfort, that same anxious feeling inside of you. So you have to manually override it and you manually override again and again and again and again until your brain understands, “Oh, you are this. This is safe. This isn't dangerous. You can do this. You do belong here. This is for you.” Because we get into old story. And then we stop.

Andrew: And I think there's so many more possibilities and ideas if you let that go and you start thinking of “what else is, can I be, and what do I actually want to be?” And like you said, doing that thump, thump every day and actually saying “I am X, Y, or Z,” and then doing those things, I think that's how you sort of move on in a healthy way at least.

Andee: Absolutely. I do want to say that present moment awareness is also so important. I talk a lot about this, just about how every day is the only day. Today is not contingent on yesterday. So if you just showed up in your body, in your life right now, you wouldn't have any of that old story. It wouldn't be there. You would just be a being, in your body, in your life. And you would say, oh, I can go ahead and start to do these things. But like people think about the sunk costs of the past, especially with things like education, it's like, it'll apply somewhere. Somewhere that mathematics degree is going to come in. Like you're going to figure it out. But if you stay in present moment, like present moment, today is day one, and then every day you wake up and say, “today is day one.” That's a big one for me. We never really actually get to the future. It's just an illusion. So if you start today with just today, not hanging onto your past story and not hanging onto the inadequacy of where you are not yet, then you'll be motivated to make shifts in the present about what you want. And you won't be so overwhelmed with the idea of what you're not measuring up to yet because it doesn't matter.

Andrew: Yeah. And actually, and I should say that people listening, both of our undergrad degrees are in communications. And even if our routes have taken different turns, look at us, we're still sitting in front of a microphone and all that fun stuff. So it worked out.

Andee: Absolutely. When you think about us studying communications, I didn't think I would be in a studio at LinkedIn recording a podcast, but yet. I use every bit of everything I learned when I was studying communications in undergraduate. It's not directly, nobody else employs me, but I apply it to every single thing that I do.

Andrew: Oddly enough, neither of us were involved in the radio station, but that's ...

Andee: And here we are.

Andrew: Yes. And I think one of my last questions for you is if someone wakes up tomorrow or after listening to this podcast and says, “I want to make a concrete change, I want to do something different with my life.” What is one thing that they could do today to take that first step in their journey?

Andee: Well, the first thing that I would say is just get in touch with your "Why." Why do you want this change? And then that inherent motivation is always going to be there because if your "Why" is larger than life, and if it's aligned with what you're meant to be doing or what you feel is your purpose, then every other step is going to reveal itself. And honestly just follow the highest level of excitement that you can get to today. And what micro micro action can you take? Because everything I've done has been in micro actions. And what you think is a micro action might actually be a major action. Like when I changed the way that I ate and started learning about nutrition, changing my diet was not a micro action. Cutting out creamer in my coffee was a micro action. And a micro action, people will sometimes scoff at how small of a change it is. But one small change in five years. Like if you're making very micro shifts every single day, you will have a completely different life in five years. It will be completely different. Just keeping that "Why" in your mind, because motivation will wane, so that larger than life "Why" and then micro actions every day.

Andrew: Thank you so much for coming on the show Andee.

Andee: Thank you, Andrew. It was such a pleasure to be here.

Andrew: That was mindset and transformational coach Andrea Scarantino. Remember, it's up to you to put the advice you heard today into practice. Still, you always have a community backing you up and cheering you on. Connect with me and the Get Hired community on LinkedIn to continue the conversation. You can also join my weekly Get Hired live show every Friday on the LinkedIn news page. And if you liked this episode, leave us a rating on Apple Podcasts. It helps people like you find the show. And of course we'll continue this conversation next week right here, wherever you like to listen. Get Hired is a production of LinkedIn News. The show is produced by Michele O'Brien. Joe DiGiogi mixed our show. Florencia Iriondo is Head of Original Audio and Video. Dave Pond is Head of News Production. Dan Roth is the editor in chief of LinkedIn and I'm Andrew Seamen. Until next time, stay well and best of luck.