All-or-Nothing Thinking (and the life-changing power of "good enough")

Transforming Your Life by Overcoming All or Nothing Thinking

In this episode, John  delves into the pervasive issue of all-or-nothing thinking, a mindset that can impede progress in various aspects of life including weight loss, relationships, and career goals. John discusses the origin of this mentality, often rooted in childhood experiences and perfectionism, and offers practical strategies to identify and overcome it. He emphasizes the importance of setting realistic, incremental goals and maintaining a presence with one's objective reality to facilitate meaningful progress. John also explains how reframing moderate efforts as valuable can break the cycle of shame and extreme attempts followed by failure. For those interested, he offers coaching resources and invites viewers to join a new community focused on personal freedom and inner work.

00:00 Introduction to All or Nothing Thinking
00:47 Meet Your Coach: John Oakes
01:51 The Impact of All or Nothing Thinking
02:18 Real-Life Example and Resources
03:07 Understanding Human Behavior
04:50 The Roots of Perfectionism
07:43 Breaking the Cycle of Shame
10:20 Practical Steps to Overcome All or Nothing Thinking
12:32 The Importance of Moderate Solutions
19:06 Staying Grounded and Moving Forward
22:51 Conclusion and Community Invitation

To inquire about 1 -1 Coaching with John - email John at john@oakesweightloss.com

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Transcript

All or Nothing Thinking

[00:00:00] Welcome back to the channel. In today's video, we're going to talk about all or nothing thinking this is a very common mentality issue, a mindset issue or in the way our brains approach reality and help us navigate through life. And ultimately, no matter. What it is you're trying to get unstuck from in life, no matter what it is you're trying to improve, 

whatever is really sapping your life, whether it's something that you're doing, that's sapping things from your life or things that you feel incapable of doing that are keeping you from living life to the fullest, all or nothing thinking can infect. All of it, and by learning to spot your all or nothing thinking and by learning what to do instead, you can open up possibilities in so many aspects of your life where it previously didn't seem possible to have that sort of success.

So before I get into that, I just want to explain, since maybe you don't know me very well, my name is John Oakes. I've done a lot of coaching around weight loss, specifically helping people regain their motivation let go of emotional eating and deal with a lot of the shame that's at the [00:01:00] core of weight issues. And I like weight loss because as soon as you start to have any substantial conversation about how to lose weight, especially talking to people who have, , significant weight to lose 50, a hundred, 200 pounds,

and getting anywhere near that issue, you're going to come into contact with the root issues. that are at the core of so much of the dysfunction and unhappiness in people's lives. And that's really what I love to help people do. Weight loss is always like a bonus.

 You realize like, Oh, the weight on the scale, isn't causing all of this. , It's what's inside. What's going on in the inner world. That's causing what's going on on the scale. And this is true of so many aspects of life.

And I love that style of coaching. But I also like getting straight to the. The matter at hand. A lot of people I've coached don't have weight issues, but they're still dealing with on the inside with all the same things as someone who's, you know, 400 pounds.

So I'll continue to use weight issues , as an example, cause it's a great example, but we could include things like people pleasing, how we relate to career [00:02:00] or relationships,

finances any big project, any long term project that really means a lot to us, but somehow we get in our heads and we. Get off track and we fail letting go of all or nothing. Thinking is going to massively improve our prospects in all these areas of life.

Now I was doing a coaching call with a weight loss client this morning where this came up and that's what inspired this video. So, of course, if you want to put these principles into practice specifically regarding weight,

I have awesome resources for you, you should get in contact with me,

email me at john at Oakes, weightloss. com. Oh, a K E S weight loss, J O H N.

And if you're not so much focused on weight loss, but you still have aspirations to massively free up your life from the places where you're stuck so you can really live it to the fullest and, find out who you really are underneath all the survival mechanisms and free that, then I'm looking to put together a new group

Where we can improve in both the practical grounded, but also the holistic and the deeper senses [00:03:00] using coaching community and content like you're seeing today. So if you're interested in any of these options, please let me know.

So all or nothing thinking tends to impact both our motivation and our compulsive behaviors. So think of this as two sides of the coin. All of our human behavior really falls into two categories, the doing or the not doing specifically doing things that we want to do, not doing things that we don't want to do, right?

The problem with being human is that we find it sometimes impossible to do the things we want to do and not do the things we don't want to do.

And when we inevitably slip up, some of us, our brains tell us one slip is too many and that's it, that's the end of it. Right. That give up. Right. And this isn't a very logical take. If we sat down and really analyzed, okay Becky, she brought cupcakes to work, and I ate a cupcake and it wasn't on my plan.

So, ah, screw it. I'm, I'm off the rails [00:04:00] for the rest of the day. That's not logical in any way. One cupcake does not ruin a diet, right? You ate some excess calories that you weren't planning on,

but it's easy to adjust for that. Whether it's in your meals later that day or later that week. And if you didn't adjust for it at all, it's not a life ending event yet. We treat it as if it means that there's no hope and therefore continuing to invest energy into the things that are meaningful to us is a waste.

This is a total breakdown of logic. This is how we lose our access to reasonable expectations of good. We are derailing ourselves off the hope train off any prospect for a better life. And we do it very quickly and very readily. So why would we do that? Well, this starts in childhood usually, and this has a lot to do with perfectionism.

If you're listening this far and you're like, yeah, I kind of do some all or nothing thinking chances are you [00:05:00] also deal with perfectionism. You probably deal with different forms of people pleasing, whether you realize it or not.

But perfectionism, yes, it can come from being celebrated for being perfect as a child. The real trouble is when the other side of that celebration, the stick to the carrot came around being punished for not being perfect, right? That's really where this stuff takes root. The punishment. Another place that takes root is when a child is Doing their level best in life, and they're still being punished as if they're not trying kids with learning disabilities.

They learn in childhood, listen, I showed up, I tried, I did my best, I still got punished like I was not trying or I didn't want to do well, and it makes them lose hope. In

their ability to participate and succeed in anything that is at least on its face, seemingly difficult.

We can learn in childhood or even later in adulthood to put massive high stakes on things in order to gin up motivation. You [00:06:00] know, if you're not feeling very motivated about something, you can try to pretend that your house is on fire and that, well, I, I better go to the gym or else I'm going to die. And, you know, lava will fall from the sky.

That's maybe a way to get yourself to the gym once or twice. But after a while, that's going to take from you way more than it gives by putting high stakes on daily things we do for our wellbeing or to progress in our areas of interest.

It's a recipe for burnout

and it totally sets us up for this lifetime of all or nothing thinking you know, if I need to be at. 11 just to get to the gym. Well, then

if I did get to the gym, I literally saved my life. And if I didn't get to the gym, well, then I literally killed myself. Obviously not literally, but

if you teach your brain over time, that something has a psychological importance akin to death, then it's going to take it very seriously. So your brain is going to give back to you what you've taught it about its environment.

And going back to the [00:07:00] cupcake that you ate at work. You've taught your brain that if I deviate from my program at all, I'll never get back on track. I don't trust myself around my eating. I don't trust my ability to be motivated. If I somehow get motivated and I fall off track one tiny bit, I'm never going to get back on.

This is a story that you've taught yourself. It's a story that you've learned where you've misinterpreted your failures and become rather fatalistic about it all. And the more you're running your life on these stories, the less you're grounded in reality, which makes it that much easier for the delusions to take hold and for your entire reality to be shaped by things that simply aren't true.

And this gets us to the issue of shame. And the unwillingness to see the self, right? We teach ourselves as we accumulate these stories about how, you know, our inability to be 100 percent perfect all the time is the root cause of our [00:08:00] failure. This eventually causes us to accrue shame and makes us less interested in the ability to see ourselves.

Right. Particularly with people who deal with weight issues, this is where they start to become violently disinterested in getting on the scale where they, they start wearing, clothes with expandable waistlines. So they don't have to be confronted with the changes in their body so they can hide their awareness from

the way their health is deteriorating

Because they're afraid that if they saw where they were at, that this would somehow create harm.

So one day it starts with, Oh no, I had a cupcake. That's not on my diet. This is the end of the world. And years down the line, we can have people who are incredibly unhealthy, incredibly sick, whether it's weight or their relationships or their finances or their career or any number of things to where they feel like they're too far gone.

So if you're in the early phases or if you're in the later phases of this, [00:09:00] either way, the way you back your way out of it is by sort of reverse engineering how you got into it.

And we can think of this in two general categories. There are the things that happened as a kid that you weren't in control of, and maybe things that you didn't deserve. And then there are the ways in adulthood that we have sort of. Put the pedal down and really rev the gas to try to get more out of those survival strategies

and ultimately presence and awareness are going to change the game. They're going to help you redraw the lines and appreciate where reality is, and that's going to help you remove some of these delusions that are running your life.

So you're all or nothing thinking is real. It's a thing you are doing, but the reason you're doing, the reason you've taught yourself to do this over time was based in things that weren't really about you in childhood, that were really about other people and the mistakes they were making that was about, you know, their ignorance as to how to teach a child with a learning disability, for [00:10:00] example,

Or if you grew up in a situation where 

you didn't have good role models around eating exercise, how to have relationships, to relate healthily to your work. finances.

Let's try to move these things in reverse order

so that you can get out of the all or nothing thinking and allow your life to progress without you getting in the way.

So the first step is to learn to be present with the objective facts of your life, to sit down with yourself and write out Okay, here is the situation I'm dealing with. Here's what's going on objectively, and to notice anytime you're putting subjective judgment on the situation. Objective means if an alien from outer space who never met you was watching you from their spaceship taking notes, what would they write down?

Right? They don't have a lot of context for what's going on with you. 

And notice how different the objective accounting is from the intense self judgment that's going on [00:11:00] around that information in your lived reality. And the trick with a lot of that is realizing that it's a fear of the harm that could come to you if other people saw your situation, if you were truly seen, if your failures were seen, and that this is keeping you from seeing it.

Right? Your fear about what other people might see is keeping you from being willing to see it yourself. So once you understand the difference between those two things, you can walk right up to these things and they might be telling you, you're not allowed to look at this, this mess that's in your life and you get to walk right past that because you have the right to see your inner world.

You have the right to investigate your inner world.

And no matter what you're faced with, no matter what you're trying to accomplish in life,

this is really going to allow you to start to take practical steps toward your goals, 

 So as you embark on any project, the shame will tell you. that nothing you're doing is good enough Well, going for a walk for seven minutes, that's not a walk. It's [00:12:00] gotta be at least 25 minutes for it to count as a walk.

So your brain will start to devalue moderate attempts and tell you that the only way to solve your extreme shame is through some sort of extreme success. And so now, as you embark on any project in life, you're not choosing the moderate. Path. You're choosing a path that is incredibly difficult and most likely going to end in failure.

And that failure is going to lead to more shame. And that's going to prove this story of shame, right? It's a self fulfilling prophecy.

So this is why when you embark on any project, you need to notice that voice that's telling you to take extreme solutions because you're that ashamed.

And most likely , your life is not going to improve until you start freeing your mind up to take moderate solutions.

If you have to lose a hundred pounds, no, you don't have to lose a hundred pounds. Your job is to lose the next pound. If you're trying to make 10, 000, you're not trying to make 10, 000. You're trying to make 10.

We are learning [00:13:00] that good enough is great. Taking steps in the direction you're trying to travel is always good enough. Your brain will tell you, well, that's not enough steps. So what's the alternative burn out and get nowhere. Obviously slow and steady wins the race. We know this, we've known this for a long time,

right? So we don't want to start off asking ourselves what's the fastest way to get there, what's the best or quickest, what's the right way. We just want to find out what are my next steps, right? And also not what's the most I can possibly do. To get the most reward. What's the least I need to do to get a reward, right?

This is the minimum effective dose.

Stop trying to go to extremes don't ask how hard can I go out of the gate? Start small, work your way up until you start seeing progress.

Then you can increase. The amount of resources and energy you're putting into it only as you're continuing to get that back.

And eventually we all hit a point with everything in life where if we went 10 percent harder, we would no longer get [00:14:00] 10 percent more in return.

And at that point, we're wise to just let the process hit cruise control and allow ourselves to make steady progress at whatever rate is working.

Because you want to realize that all progress happens somewhere between challenge and stress, right? , we need challenge to help motivate us.

And then we need to not exceed a threshold where we start to overstress ourselves in the pursuit of meeting that challenge. If we stay there, we're going to continue to make progress unimpeded for as long as we want. This is the key to succeeding at anything in the longterm. Now, the place where people go wrong is that they allow stress to inform the challenge.

Meaning the challenge that they're trying to meet is not based in passion, curiosity, just an innate desire to do something. They're basing it in, Oh my God, I've got to lose weight or else I'm going to die, or no one's going to love me or, Oh, I've got to make this much money. Money or else I can never succeed at dating, [00:15:00] or

I'm not going to be able to buy the kind of clothes I need to wear in order to have the status I want. The more the project you're embarking on is about solving problems, the less likely you are to succeed. And the more likely you are to fall into all or nothing thinking

Most things in life that are worth doing, there's an innate joy or interest in doing the thing. And there's also a piece of us that would want to do that thing as a part of a survival mechanism, right? So you could want to make money. By doing what you love and then part of you could also want to make money so you could feel safe, right?

And trying to do something out of joy and passion and trying to do it out of a sense of self preservation are completely are working at cross purposes. So you can be trying to go for A thing like let's say making more money, 

but if that's being motivated, both by your innate passion and your desire to avoid harm, [00:16:00] eventually,

as you meet challenges on the road toward toward that goal, brain is going to have to choose, do I try to avoid harm or do I go for what I want? And if you're falling into all or nothing thinking, that's a really big clue that you're motivating. Yourself toward your dreams, really out of self preservation, not your passion, not your deeper sense of self.

It's really important to remember that just because you've failed at something 150 times before does not mean that you don't have hope in that area. It just means that your mindset was infected and you were basically set up to fail from the start. You failed 150 times because you didn't have what you needed to succeed.

, from attempt one through 150, you were probably trying to figure out a different strategy or a different tool,

or trying to convince yourself to just work harder or want it more. And all of those things, that's most of what people are scrolling looking for, right? They're [00:17:00] looking for systems, strategies, tactics, tools. Some kind of silver bullet that's going to magically get them what they want when invariably what always makes the difference is getting at the mentalities that caused 150 failures to begin with.

Because if you want a thing, truly want it, and you have failed to get it 150 times, that's not a problem in your exterior. That's a problem in the interior.

There is absolutely hope for the 151st time. If you are willing to take a sober assessment of your life to, 

fully accept what's going on with you,

to fully see that, okay, my finances are in the toilet. I don't have the relationship that I truly want. I don't have the career I want. My fitness is not in a great place and to notice that those facts are different than what you feel about those facts. And then to also be able to hold some space.

Okay. I've got pain around my failure. [00:18:00] Okay. Why wouldn't I, it's understandable.

And then noticing how your pain is telling you that if you're going to take steps towards solutions, you have to have some big all encompassing strategy. That's going to take you from a, all the way to Z. That's not true. Notice the pain telling you that you've got to find a solution yesterday. That's not true.

Notice your pain telling you that you have to find a solution that really hurts. Otherwise, it's not going to work, right? That suffering is part of success.

And notice the pain telling you that every step along the way has to be perfect. That you're not allowed to sit down and take a break. Or if you deviate from the path that you've, you know, you're going to fall off of a ridge. When in reality, if you take a step off the path, you're literally one step away from the path, right?

If you take one, if you go on a straight line from here to your goals and you take one little step off that line, well, guess what? Not only are you not lost to hopelessness, you're not lost at all. [00:19:00] No matter where you are, you just redraw that line between, okay, here's where I am. And there's my goal.

So if you can learn that, , you're totally safe to accept the truth of where you are right now. And that the scale can say, whatever number it says, and it's just a number, right? The bank account can say whatever number it says, and it's just a number. Your brain is going to tell you that it's all doom and gloom, but look around the sun's still shining, you're still alive and you get to decide what you want to do next.

And if you decide that you want to go towards something you truly want, rather than just try to avoid what you don't want, your efforts are going to be rewarded. Your efforts are going to go into something that can actually bear fruit.

And if you start taking steps, manageable steps toward that thing, you're going to find out that good enough is good enough. Good enough is great. Moving in whatever fashion toward your goals Has to be enough because that's all we can ever do. And if you learn to temper your approach to not let [00:20:00] the shame tell you to jump into that cycle of extreme attempts and failure and more shame to apply a minimum effective dose and to notice when trying harder, isn't going to get you any more fruit

and to have the patience, to let things play out, to understand that patience at that point is the ultimate shortcut.

And to notice where. You know, your mind is still telling you to jump in your own way to overcomplicate things and to forgive yourself for doing that because yeah, look at all the pain I'm carrying around over all these past failures. Look at all my compulsiveness. Look at all the ways. I'm totally preventing myself from pursuing the things I want.

Of course, I'm going to get in my own way some days and that's okay.

And remember that when all or nothing thinking shows up, it might show up as a thought, but it might also show up as a feeling, just like a pain, a pain that says, you're not allowed to make mistakes. You're not allowed to deviate from the path. You're allowed to get a B. In this class, in this effort and that that means doom and gloom and for you to [00:21:00] hold that pain to feel it to be there for that feeling

and if you can see that feeling for what it is right and to see the aspect of your psyche that's basically wounded

and hasn't had a fair shake at things and it hasn't been guided, and given good examples. The way other people have will allow you to have compassion for that piece of you that's hurting and that it's kind of flailing around looking for solutions and not really helping. And from that point of view, you'll be able to continue to make the most mature decisions that will actually help you bear fruit in the long run because life isn't about where you are today.

It's about trajectory. It's not even about your goals, so to speak. It's about the decisions you're making day in and day out. You have no control over the decisions you made yesterday or the decisions you're going to make tomorrow. You only have a say in how you're treating yourself today, how you're making decisions today.

And if you continue to put your wellbeing first and make decisions that move you toward a greater wellbeing. Today, that's [00:22:00] all you have to worry about and that's always going to extinguish that voice saying, ah, let's just light this whole thing on fire. You know, that voice is always telling you to dissociate, to check out, but you can stay grounded.

You can stay in the present moment and you can stay effectively with yourself. You know, when that voice says, Hey, burn it all down. And you don't guess what the psychological entity driving that voice that's causing all this chaos to begin with, it sees you staying in the room, that's going to help bring the temperature down on that thing, if that thing is upset or lonely or unseen or unloved, and that's, what's really prompting all this.

All or nothing thinking,

then when you stick with it and, you hold it and continue to take good care of yourself, it will calm down and it will get that much easier to continue down the path without getting in your own way.

If you found this video helpful, I hope you'll let me know in the comments leave a like

subscribe if you haven't already.

Like I said, in the beginning, 

I have a lot of [00:23:00] established coaching resources for people who specifically need to shift a lot of weight

and need help with all the practical and mentality aspects of that. 

And I'm actively looking to put together a community of people who

want to talk more broadly about. Personal freedom, inner work, healing, all that good stuff and how that can apply to anything in life. And if you're interested in that, please contact me. You can email me, John Oakes, coaching at gmail. com, or you can email me, John at Oakes, weight loss. com. Either way. That's J O H N and OAKE S thanks for watching. Talk to you soon.