196: Massive Action vs Passive Action

Welcome to The Wealthy Mom MD Podcast, a podcast for women physicians who want to learn how to live a wealthy life. In this podcast you will learn how to make money work for you, how you can have more of it, and learn the tools to empower you to live a life on purpose. Get ready to up-level your money and your life. I’m your host, Dr. Bonnie Koo.

Welcome to episode 196. So, if you’re listening to this when the episode comes out, we are actually currently open for enrollment for Money For Women Physicians. This is a 12 week course that I’m going to guide you step-by-step to basically carry out the vision that you created during the Design Your Wealthy Life workshop. 

If you weren’t able to attend, no worries, just go ahead and listen to the previous episode where I talk about how you can do this. But if you did attend the workshop, then my course, Money For Women Physicians, is going to help you take those steps to start making it a reality with your money. And we are open for enrollment through January 15th and we’re going to get started the week after. And so this is your opportunity to really hit the year running and take massive action on your money goals. 

Speaking of massive action, that’s what today’s episode is all about, passive action and massive action and how I want you to think about it. Now, I said on the previous podcast that hopes and dreams without action remain hopes and dreams, okay? And so I want to talk a bit more about the different types of action. 

You may have heard this concept before, but I think it’s really important because too many of us get stuck in passive action. And there are some really good reasons why. There’s nothing wrong with you if this is you, but because I know you’re a type A perfectionistic woman, passive action is really safe. We’re also very good at it, right? Because passive action is mainly consumption; learning about things, reading books, taking my course. Yes, that’s passive action. 

And it’s not that these things aren’t necessary or useful, but they’re only useful if you actually do something with what you’re learning. And the main reason why it’s so easy to just get stuck in it is because we’re afraid we’re going to take wrong actions, which might be detrimental in terms of reaching our goals, but ultimately it comes down to avoiding failure. 

So this is also an episode about failure because we don’t want to fail because failure is bad. And I just want you to remember that all failure is, is that you didn’t get the result that you wanted. That’s a very neutral way of looking at failure. 

The reason why failure feels so bad is that we usually make it mean something about ourselves and we beat ourselves up. Now, this doesn’t mean failure is not going to feel bad. It’s not going to feel great, that’s for sure. But it’s what you make it mean that makes all the difference. 

And so that’s why it’s so easy to stay in passive action, because we have thoughts like I need to know everything before I do something so that I don’t make a mistake or do something wrong. But the thing is, you’re never going to know enough. The best analogy I can think of for this is can you imagine if we became attendings but we never saw a patient because we had to make sure we knew everything? 

This is literally the same thing. We learned or we became physicians by learning things. We had to learn a lot, obviously. Lots of passive action, but then we also had to do something with the knowledge. We had to see patients. We had to practice taking histories and physicals, knowing which questions to ask, knowing what information we needed to make a clinical decision and then carry it out. 

Obviously we were under supervision during our training, of course, but that’s how we learned. And I’m just guessing you were pretty bad at it in the beginning, at least I was. I definitely didn’t know what questions to ask. I had an index card in my pocket to make sure I didn’t miss anything and it was very discombobulated. 

And now I’m at a point where I don’t have to even think about what to ask based on what the person is seeing me for. And whatever that I see as a dermatologist, most of it is visual, I know exactly what questions to ask. I don’t have to even think about it. But that’s because not only did I learn, I also practiced it many, many times and made mistakes along the way. 

And so it’s not good news to know that making mistakes or having fails is part of the process, we want to avoid that as much as possible. I totally get it. But one thing I tell my clients that they hate hearing is that you have to make some money mistakes. Well, I don’t know if I should quantify it as some, but money mistakes, money failures are part of growing your wealth. 

I mean, do you think – Think of whatever person or persons come to mind when you think of someone who’s super rich. Do you think they’ve never made a money mistake? Of course they have. 

Another reason why we avoid doing things, again, everything I said really comes down to our perfectionistic nature, not wanting to fail because of what we make it mean. And what we ultimately mean is some kind of negative emotion, usually a group of negative emotions and we don’t want to feel those emotions. 

But if you knew how to feel your emotions and have compassion for yourself, meaning you knew you could handle any emotion, no matter how good or how bad, because some of us are actually not good at feeling really good emotions or really good feeling emotions, then failure wouldn’t be so scary. You know what I mean? 

And so you have to combine passive action with massive action. And all massive action means is you actually doing something besides just consuming. So it’s something you do. So for example, if you’re in my program and one of the things that I – I was going to say make you do, but I don’t make you do anything. But why would you take my course if you didn’t want to do anything, right? 

So one of the things you have to get clear on is where your money is going, right? You have to actually sit down, look at your money, look at your accounts, look at how you’re spending money, et cetera. So maybe an action is something like what are our bank accounts, picking a budgeting software program and then buying it, if it’s something you have to pay for, connecting all the accounts. 

Those are examples of concrete actions that are going to move you further along the path to getting your money in order and ultimately setting it up to grow it and help you reach your life goals. So, I mean, that makes sense. I think it’s pretty obvious what massive action is versus passive action. And there needs to be a balance. And I don’t know if it’s 50/50, it’s probably – Actually, I don’t know. I’m not going to even pretend to try to figure that out. 

But if you’re noticing that you’re not really taking massive action or you’re not taking action or nothing’s changing, that’s a signal, an obvious signal but most of us just sometimes aren’t aware of it, that you’re spending too much time in passive action and it’s an opportunity to examine why. 

Now, I want to go back to passive action a bit more. One of the things that one of my coach mentors taught me is that when you stay in passive action because you’re afraid to fail, you’re actually failing ahead of time. And when I heard this, it kind of blew my mind because a lot of us are thinking the opposite, that as long as I don’t take action, I can’t fail. 

But not taking action when you have a hope and dream that you want to make true, not taking action is actually failure as well. So that actually kind of blew my mind. Thinking of it that way sort of helped me reframe that if I’m going to fail either way, I might as well fail by taking action. Because when I do fail, and notice I say when, not if, I’m taking action. And not all those actions are going to be failures, right? 

But if I don’t take action, then I am 100% failing. What’s that quote? You miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take. And so if you want to stay in massive action, then you have to radically change your relationship to failure and your relationship to yourself. And really, that comes down to trusting yourself and having your own back. 

You’ve heard all these phrases and they seem kind of trite, et cetera, but it’s because it’s true. If you know and have the capacity to have compassion for yourself, and if you know that you can handle any negative emotion, then it’s just so much easier to take action. 

This is one of the reasons why I’m such a big fan of courses, and not because I have one. I’m also a consumer of many courses and masterminds, et cetera. It’s because it’s so much easier to take action when there’s other people around you, quite frankly. 

When you have a community, sometimes people have accountability partners, whatever you want to call them, and having someone who can guide you and having someone who can really help you out when you’re stuck. You obviously have to “raise your hand” and ask for help, but that’s honestly one of the reasons why I take courses and put myself in groups of like-minded people, because I am way more likely to take action. 

And I do take more action when I have something discreet to focus on and when other people around me are doing it. And frankly, when I’m spending money, right? Because when you pay, you pay attention. 

And a lot of the stuff that I’ve learned as someone who’s taken many, many courses is that I’ve really had to work on that muscle of not feeling like total crap when I fail. I still feel like crap when I fail, by the way. The difference now is that there’s less and less time between feeling crappy about failure and taking action again. 

There was a time when if I had a perceived failure in my business that it would really put me in a position or a place where I wouldn’t do anything for, I don’t know, let’s say a month or two, I can’t remember exactly. And now, that time period is so much shorter. It depends, right? It’s not like it’s like three hours and it’s done, but it’s a lot shorter. 

And that, again, is another thing you have to learn about failure is that, okay, you failed, process it, maybe you have to vent to your friend, maybe you have to journal, maybe you have to just decide I’m going to feel crappy the rest of the day and then it’s time to move on. So that’s another skill to learn, in terms of changing your relationship to failure, is that you want to really shorten that time between failure and your next action. Otherwise, things can take forever. It’s pretty obvious, right? 

Okay. So that’s really all I wanted to say about staying in action versus passive action, because what I’m talking about today, this is what’s required in order to really reach any of your goals, to make your hopes and dreams come true so that they don’t stay hopes and dreams. 

Again, if you didn’t listen to the previous podcast, make sure you do. I want you to think about the questions I asked in that podcast. You might even want to make a list of what’s passive action and what’s massive action, or really think about when you’re doing a week to week or whatever, monthly progress tracker, whatever you want to call it. It’s an opportunity to ask yourself, was I mostly in passive action or was I mostly in massive action or did I have a good balance of both, right? 

And if you really want help with this in planning your life vision, because sometimes you need some guidance for that, and you want to make sure you take more massive action than passive action and as well as learn everything, then you definitely need to check out Money For Women Physicians and get inside there because we’re going to be getting started in another week or two. 

So you want to go to wealthymommd.com/money, learn all about it. And hopefully I will see you in the next class. Bye.  

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