Time to Think with Laura Noel

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one Leffler This is George G. And the time is right. welcome today’s guest strong, powerful Lauren. Welcome, Laura, are you ready to do this? I am ready. Let’s go for it. Let’s go. Or as a certified coach, she’s helping leaders, teams and entrepreneurs say no to things that drain their most precious precious resources. And yes to things that invigorate prof profits, inspire action and increase impact. excited to have you on or tell us a little about your personal life’s more about your work and why you do what you do. All right, well, I currently live in Nashua, New Hampshire with my husband and our dog, Luna. And we’re soon going to get a another rescue this weekend. So I’m really excited about that. served in the military for almost 28 years, I was in the Air Force. And I love what I did. before I retired, I was a commandant of a leadership school. So I was always involved in teaching leadership and leading others. And so it really lent itself to what I do now, which is coaching individuals and teams and helping them get out of the mental processes that are keeping them bogged down and stuck, and keeping them from really enjoying the work that they’re doing. And pursuing their passions, finding their fulfillment and all of that.

Laura Noel 1:33
I started doing what I do now, in 2017, that’s when I retired from the Air Force around that times when I met my mentor. And I had been, you know, pursuing all of these degrees and certifications throughout my military career thinking, wow, you know, someday something will stick I’ll find my purpose. But really, everything came together around that 2017 Mark, just before that, when I was one of my certifications was yoga, teaching certification, I don’t teach yoga anymore. But what really inspired me was the mindset piece of it. And I started teaching on the base, some of my colleagues would just come to our school house after work. And I noticed people just were shifting and how they felt it was in their bodies, but more importantly, in their mind and in the clarity of their thinking. And once I started getting that feedback, I was like, Ah, I got to bottle this up somehow, and teach it and bring it to more people. Because literally, learning what I’m coaching now helped me do a complete 180 From where I was in my work to where I am now. And so that’s me in a nutshell. Nice. That’s awesome. Thank you for your service. Thank you. Does Luna know about this new dog? She does not she is unaware.

george grombacher 2:57
How’s that gonna go? Barbara?

Laura Noel 2:59
I think she loves all dogs. So and she is a rescue as well. So she’s gonna be just fine.

george grombacher 3:05
Okay, yeah, there’s nothing to worry about at all. I don’t know why, but I just know. All right, perfect. So we’re here at the intersection of the Air Force leadership and yoga. And yeah, that’s very, very, is that strange? Or is that make all the sense in the world?

Laura Noel 3:25
To me, it makes all the sense in the world. It, it really. It opened me up to other possibilities. I mean, I I love, I loved my career. And I’m so grateful to have had that opportunity. And I feel like within my career, a lot of people don’t truly understand the military if they haven’t served in it. But I had a lot of latitude to use my creativity and build my organization and, and my team in a way that helped us become a high performing team. So I felt like I had that that space and creativity. But when I took the yoga teacher certification, and when I started getting coaching certified in some of the mindset techniques that I teach, it just really opened me up, I thought that I was a really creative being actually I have to say a large part of my career in the military was in the band as a vocalist, so that you think that’s, you know, yoga and military might sound strange, but a lot of people don’t know that there’s music in the military. And that’s, you know, seems odd to some, because it’s a very creative field. And the military is a bit more structured. I mean, it was similar to any corporation without any that’s hierarchical. But I wasn’t tapping into my creativity, though. I thought myself to be a creative person. But once I started learning about how the mind works, I started realizing how I was holding myself back in a lot of ways and how I

stuck in a lot of patterns that really were halting any forward progress. It looked from the outside looking in that, you know, I was progressing in my career, I was doing marathons and triathlons, I was leading different organizations, I was, you know, getting advanced degrees and whatnot. But when I look back, those were all incremental gains. It, there wasn’t a lot of growth attached to a lot of those goals. And I find it interesting because you recently had a guest, and I wrote his name down Tom Ferry. Oh, my gosh, he was so entertaining. But toward the end of your conversation, he was talking about sales teams, and how if you meet your goals the first time, you know, basically, you’re you’re a star, right? You’re, you’ve made it. And then if you do it a second time, you’ve duplicated that effort. So now you’ve proven that you could duplicate it. But then if you’re doing it the third time or the 10th time, you know, you’re stuck. You know, there’s no growth in that. And that’s not a goal. And so once I started really getting embedded in the idea of what are goals, what could I possibly achieve, and I started getting out of the day in and day out and such regimented thinking. And I think that we’re we can all get stuck in that a whole new world opened up for me. And it became my passion to teach other people to tap into their own gifts to set goals in a completely different way than what we’re taught in school, and to find fulfilment, and tap into their passions. Whether they’re an entrepreneur, or whether they’re working in an organization, it doesn’t matter, you can still have and lead a fulfilling life, and you don’t have to be stuck in the grind, or this, you know, litany of things that you think you should do or what other people you think other people think you should do. That’s not fulfillment? No, it’s not. Well, that’s really powerful. That ton of really good stuff there. What, what was sort of the key that started to to unlock all of this, yeah, allowing myself to dream, and giving myself permission to do that, and giving myself permission to allow myself to not be so logical, to be illogical. And, I mean, really, it’s a few things, giving myself the space and the time to do that. Because I find that my belief was at the time too, that we’re conditioned to believe that doing more is means accomplishing more, being more busy, equates to being more successful. And I would argue, even in my own personal life, I was busy, I was pulled in a multitude of different directions, I looked successful. But on the inside, I was miserable and not fulfilled. I was moving laterally. But I was busy. It looked like I was doing a lot of things. But it really wasn’t until I started carving out space to put myself first to think and dream, give myself permission to do that. Be silly with it. That’s when things started to open up for me.

george grombacher 8:21
Nice. And when you gave yourself the the room and the space and the permission to be able to do that. Is that how you sort of settled on? This is the work I’m interested in doing? This is the impact I’m interested in having. Are you in tell me if I’m off base?

Laura Noel 8:41
No, I you know, I think there are a couple key things at play. And it’s one of the things that I help people with, I trusted that little voice inside my head. That intuition, you know that that voice that tells you bring the umbrella and then it’s a beautiful sunny day, you don’t bring it and you get poured on. So when I saw I was following my intuition and following my curiosity, that’s what led me to yoga teacher certification. But I was also because I was carving out the space for myself. I was able to quiet the noise and listen to myself when I was curious about something. Or when I when something touched my heart when I said gosh, I would love to bottle this up in a curriculum. That became a decision. I listened to that voice most people go but how am I going to do that? Right and so when I was at a seminar, my mentor was speaking at the seminar and he was talking about the conscious and subconscious mind and I’m like, Oh, I love this. This is perfect. This is exactly what I what I’m experiencing. I love this. And I might seem like I’m an extrovert I am not. So for me to stay stand up in front of like a roomful of 500 people and just say, how do you know when you found your purpose? That was not like me. But it started this conversation between he and I. And that ended up being the the vehicle or the mechanism, the curriculum that I used to help myself and other clients. So carving the space, giving myself permission to dream. And carving that space enabled me to tap into my intuition, not only listen to it, but act on it. So when he was speaking, because I’d made that decision, I’d love to have this curriculum, boom, I moved into action. I didn’t just, you know, wait for something to fall in my lap, I knew this was the path. So when you do that, and you get into the habit of it, you’ll learn to trust your intuition, you’ll learn to trust that sixth sense, and an act on it.

george grombacher 10:58
There are a million different ways that we can hear what you just said, and then say, Ah, but not for me. I don’t have time, or I don’t I don’t have the luxury, right. But it’s right in front of us. But we can make all these different excuses for for why it’s not something we’re going to do.

Laura Noel 11:18
Yeah, and that’s our mental programming. There are, you know, Bob Proctor, I know his one of his mentors always say said to him, Bob, you’re the only problem you’ll ever have. And you’re the only solution. I mean, it’s the truth. I mean, we all have 24 hours in a day, and you can’t manage time, you can only manage your activities. So it’s a matter of what’s a priority for you. Because I can guarantee you, if you put your thinking first, the things that you’re doing in your work, will become a lot easier for you. Because you’re thinking you’re not being driven to act by circumstances and people and things outside of you.

george grombacher 12:03
isn’t everybody doing that?

Laura Noel 12:05
No. Doing that they’re being governed by things outside of

george grombacher 12:10
them? No, I mean, that people don’t put their thinking first,

Laura Noel 12:14
mental activity does not constitute thinking. And so what I find, and what I did myself is, I would look at results, or I would look at the opinions of other people or something negative that somebody said or on the news. And I would allow that to influence my thinking. And that would influence my decision making. And even when I, you know, left the service and became an entrepreneur, it was easy to look out there and see what all these other successful people were doing. And then I want to do that I want to try that. And a lot of those things didn’t pan out for me. It’s because I wasn’t thinking I wasn’t I was, I was looking outside of myself for the answers. But the answers are inside of me. And once I started trusting myself, and not leveraging all of the opportunities and all of the possibilities, which you can’t, I started leveraging the opportunities that made sense to me, and resonated with me. And that’s I go God bringing yoga into it, I had that drishti I was laser focused on that goal and that plan.

george grombacher 13:27
So start putting your thinking first creating space for that. How do you see, I’m assuming I can’t go from from zero to 60, for lack of a better term, I can’t just start doing it immediately. So how do I how do I build up to that? Or how do I do it? And then how do I build up to it?

Laura Noel 13:49
Yeah, I would start just by taking time for yourself first thing in the morning, you have to claim it, your freedom, your mental freedom, your fulfillment has to be more important than your excuses. Yep, you have to want it. And there has to be a reason why as well. You know, so not just for the sake of doing it, but you really have to create a vision for yourself. Be a little illogical, how is living this new way going to benefit not only yourself, but the people around you, the people you love most your community, the world, really your organization, whatever that is for you, whatever is important to you. But if you’re not used to carving time out for yourself, your mental programming is going to throw up, you know, excuses. Oh, I don’t have time or I feel extra sleepy. Today I’m going to hit the snooze. You’re not even going to realize it’s happening. We all have a mental operating system within our subconscious mind that governs our habitual behavior. But just by being aware that it’s there, whenever you move to make any kind of change that seems significant to your mind. we’re uncomfortable, your mind is designed to keep you comfortable. And so it’s going to, you know, pose obstacles and, and excuses that are going to stop you in your tracks. So just be aware of that. And you be the boss of you, by consciously making the decision, no 15 minutes, we’re sitting here now, I’m going to ask, How can I serve today I’m going to get in alignment. And imagine this ideal future that I want for myself, I want ease and flow in my job, I want to have, you know, great relationships where we’re working toward a common goal, or that difficult person at work. We have ease and flow in our conversations and understanding, I want you to think about that to live there in your imagination for a couple of minutes, and then pose the question, How can I be that person today? How can I move? How can I What can I do today, that will move me in that direction. And you do that every day? 15 minutes, that’s where you start.

george grombacher 16:03
So you think about and sort of set an intention of this is this is I want to go about my work today, and go about it with flow and absolute ease. And just sort of put that in the universe into my subconscious and then start just just kind of ponder and write how, how can I do that?

Laura Noel 16:27
Yeah. So you know, like you said, you have this idea of your ideal, how you want things to unfold for you. And you pose a question, and then you just are quiet. And so writing causes thinking, so maybe you feel inspired to write, maybe you sit there for a few minutes and quiet and some random flashes of inspiration or ideas that don’t 100% make sense, right? Now write them down and take action. Because when you’re thinking about your ideal scenario, you’re basically in harmony with it in that moment, when you can transport yourself and feel what that would feel like through your five senses. What would it be like to have this kind of ease and flow when you’re thinking from that space, and you can feel it in every fiber of your being. And ideas come to you those ideas are in harmony with not with where you are now, those ideas are in harmony with the ideal what you want in the future. So you’ll never get where you want by making decisions. Based on current reality. You get where you want to go by making decisions and taking inspired action based on your ideal. It’s not easy. It’s it’s a completely different way of of planning and goal setting. But it’s very effective. And you’ll get there much quicker when you do it that way.

george grombacher 17:55
I love it. Yeah. And Why would anything else be true? Why would I think that I was going to get something brand new that I’ve never had before doing the things I’ve always done? That’s makes makes perfect sense. Yeah, yeah. A lot of people are ready for difference making tip, what do you have for them? All right.

Laura Noel 18:13
So first and foremost, take 15 minutes, create space for yourself, claim it first thing in the morning, before you check your email, I know that’s a tough one. You know, check your phone, you want to set your mental space up before you know anything else has a chance to influence your thinking. Give yourself permission to dream, take the next week or two with these little 15 minutes and ask yourself if I could have anything I want. What would that be? And think in terms of how would I be of service? How would that feel? What would that you know, a lot of people have created space, even in their jobs that they never thought possible, just by getting a clear picture in their mind, and then asking for it. So get clear on what you want. And give yourself permission to write it out every day. And then after about the course of a week. You know, figure out one or two things that you want most of all, and that’s your goal. That’s the thing that you’re working toward. And then start to as you have flashes of inspiration or ideas, even if it doesn’t make sense, write them down and start to take action on them toward that end. That’s how you learn to strengthen your intuitive guidance system.

george grombacher 19:34
Well, I think that is great stuff that definitely gets come up. All right, thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you? How can they engage with you? All right, if

Laura Noel 19:43
you just go to my website stretch into success.com You can find me there. We can have a conversation. You can schedule a little 15 minutes with me and I can see if I can get you pointed in the right direction. And I would love to connect with you.

george grombacher 19:57
Perfect. Well if you enjoyed this as much as did show lower your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas go to stretch into success.com and take lower up on our offer to have that 15 minute conversation. Find out if things we just talked about and get you to where you want to go. Thanks. Good luck. Thank you. And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.

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