The Small Decision That Pulls You Out of Autopilot | E96

Gino Cordone [00:00:12]:
Hello, and welcome to episode 96 of Working towards our purpose. Today’s episode, we are going to talk about small decisions that can pull you out of autopilot. But before we get into that, we’re going to slow down, take a second to just check in with ourselves. All right. How you feeling today? Hopefully you’re able to check in and see how you’re feeling. For me, feeling a little anxious today for some reason, not sure why, but yesterday I. I was able to go out and enjoy this beautiful weather. It’s been really warm and nice over the weekend, and I was able to relax a bit, which was nice.

Gino Cordone [00:01:05]:
It’s hard for me to relax sometimes. I always feel like I need to be productive or do something. But yesterday I got outside in the park by me and read a book, and it wasn’t like a nonfiction productive book. It was just like a fiction book, so that was cool. I got to also just sit there and look at the trees, and that’s nice. I think it’s helpful for me to get into nature to try to relax a bit. So, yeah, that’s a good thing. But, yeah.

Gino Cordone [00:01:41]:
So today I want to talk about small decisions that you can make, I guess, or things that can help pull you out of autopilot. And I guess what I mean by autopilot is we did have an episode not that long ago, maybe a couple months ago, called something about going through the motions and disassociating at work. And I think that autopilot is kind of similar to that. It’s like just going through the motions of life and not really realizing where you’re going or. And I don’t want to talk about numbing yourself and disassociating this episode, but more so how to make a change and get out of that autopilot feeling. So perhaps if you’re in a job or something where you feel like you don’t want to be and you’re just going through the actions of the day and doing what’s asked of you, but sort of feel disconnected from yourself and disconnected from what it is that you want to be doing. Maybe this episode’s for you, but. So this idea came to me from a podcast that I listen to from this artist, Petey, who is a indie rock musician.

Gino Cordone [00:02:59]:
And he’s also like, I guess, a TikTok personality. He’s kind of a comedian. Makes these short skits of him being all the characters. Maybe you’ve seen him, but he was talking to Rainn Wilson, who is Dwight, but Rainn Wilson’s his real name. And he has a podcast called Soul Boom. And he kind of just talks about spirituality and life and all that kind of stuff. I listen to it every now and then. It’s a decent podcast for me.

Gino Cordone [00:03:32]:
But anyways, he was talking to Petey and Petey was kind of telling his life story and kind of describing being like in this autopilot phase of his life where pretty much all through his 20s he just worked dead end jobs that he didn’t like and wasn’t happy with his life and was just kind of doing all these things because he had to and was just talking about like being really stuck and unhappy. And Rain was basically like, well, what changed? Because now you’re like a successful musician, tours, is on a major record label, has a pretty good life it seems. So what happened and what changed? And he kind of boiled it down to a small decision which I think was super interesting. So he was saying at the time he was living in California, I just thought this was really interesting and worth sharing. So that’s kind of why I’m reiterating it. Um, but basically he was driving like over an hour to work each day and in like LA traffic and working this job and like I think he said the mail room just like kind of a job that he didn’t care about, but it was a job that he could do because they didn’t really ask that much of him and he wasn’t really good at having jobs. So it was like a job that worked for his attention span. And he was realized that he.

Gino Cordone [00:05:04]:
Well, I guess what caused him to want to make a change was like, I think realizing that he wanted to be with this girl and he thought his life was a mess so he had to get his life together, which maybe is not the most important part, but the important part I thought was that he decided that he had to make a change. And he realized that he was ruining his days every morning by driving to work because he would put the directions on his phone and use the Waze app and try to get to work as fast as possible through this horrific traffic and over hour commute. And by the time he got to work he was already extremely stressed out and angry and feeling like he was late and this and that. And he realized that his drive to work was just one highway, like one straight drive. But the phone would always tell you to get off and avoid these five minutes of traffic here and whatever it does to try to get you there quicker. And he realized that if he just accepted that it would take him 20 minutes longer to get to work. Then he could just put his phone down and not be staring at his phone and not endangering his life by going to work every morning and being completely frantic by the time he got there. So his decision to not look at his phone and just enjoy the ride and accept that it was going to be an hour and a half long and that was the end of it completely changed his life.

Gino Cordone [00:06:30]:
And it made him feel like he had some ownership over his life, and it made him start to make more decisions about how else can I change my life? And another thing he said, and he called these micro decisions, which I think is great, because it’s nothing like crazy. You don’t need that much motivation or energy to make these decisions. It’s just like. I mean, that one, the driving is kind of almost just like, acceptance of your situation. But another thing that he also decided to do was that he said he lived by this hill, and he grew up in the Midwest Chicago area, and it was super flat, and he always wanted to live by mountains. And. And he said he lived by this really cool hill. And he’s like, you know what? Every day I’m going to wake up, and as I’m going to my car to work, I’m going to say, that’s a cool hill.

Gino Cordone [00:07:23]:
So between those two things, he kind of took some ownership back over in his life, and then he decided to start chasing music more and all that sort of stuff. But he didn’t really change much. He didn’t have to quit his job. He didn’t have to, like, make some sort of crazy decision. And maybe your life calls for that at some points. But also, I think it’s, like, super empowering to think about what small change can you make to give yourself some ownership that can kind of help pull you out of that autopilot. Because, I mean, I think we can kind of all relate to that traffic situation. Like, how many times have you gone somewhere and you’re trying to get there? For some reason, you give yourself the exact amount of time to get there.

Gino Cordone [00:08:07]:
So then you get on the road and you’re like, oh, man, there’s an accident. I got to get off here. I got to. You know, you’re making yourself, like, go crazy because you’re trying to get there on time, and for what? Like, it doesn’t. Does it matter that you’re 10 minutes late? Probably not. Or just leave 10 minutes early. Like, I don’t know. It’s just these, like, little simple decisions that can help Us like help keep yourself calm.

Gino Cordone [00:08:31]:
And I think that’s kind of like the one of the biggest things for him. As I was listening to his story. One of the biggest things for Petey was that he was helping calm himself, helping calm his nervous system so he didn’t have to act out of fight or flight motor or being your nervous system completely dysregulated. You’re helping to calm yourself down by just deciding it’s going to take 20 minutes more. And at the end of the day, that was a great decision because the 20 minutes he never missed. But feeling calm when he got to work completely like changed his perspective on his life situation. And so basically he went from this place where he thought his life was terrible and you know, he was at this dead end job or whatever, to being content with his life and then starting to make decisions to pursue his music and like pursue a career and like him kind of blowing up on TikTok and stuff. The way he described it is he didn’t plan that out.

Gino Cordone [00:09:29]:
He didn’t try to be this TikTok personality. He was just having fun with his friends and he found fun again in his life and was kind of acting like a kid and just hanging out with his friends in his backyard and made these videos because he thought it was interesting and fun. And I think that kind of came through especially when he gained his popularity during the pandemic. There’s just this honestness to it, you know, and that’s sort of what connected. And it wasn’t something that he planned out, it was just him trying to like make good decisions in his life. And, and yeah, how can we bring that back to our own life? Like, how can you think about your own situation? And maybe if you’re unhappy with something, like what is one tiny change that you can do? Because it doesn’t feel like that much, does it? Doesn’t feel that hard to do, but it is giving yourself some ownership back into your own life. So then thinking about all this, I was kind of thinking about my own life and my own examples and I was like, have I ever done this in my life? Have I ever kind of made change that way in these little micro decisions? And I think, well, if I think back to when I was first trying to get out of my corporate job, my initial thought was like, I need to be an entrepreneur, I need to have a business, I need to run my own business and that will be the solution. So I didn’t know how to do any of that.

Gino Cordone [00:10:59]:
And I think the first micro decision that I made was starting an Instagram for this business that I had. And I kind of hid behind this name, Pleasant Podcast. And I was like, okay, this is my business. I’m just going to start an Instagram and see if I can get clients. And at the time, that worked because Instagram was a very different place and I was able to reach out to some people and find clients to edit podcasts. And it didn’t seem overwhelming because it was just like, oh, it takes five seconds to make an Instagram. Just make one and then start messaging people. So that kind of seemed like a micro decision.

Gino Cordone [00:11:36]:
And then I took it to the extreme and made a website and learned how to do all this sort of different type of stuff and content marketing and like, all website design and like, all this. Did I say that already? All this sort of different type of stuff. And then I went to, like, a podcast studio, and then, like, I kind of ran with it at that point. But it started with just making an Instagram, and I think maybe that’s. Maybe that’s important to notice. Another kind of change in my life that maybe started with, again, a micro change or a micro decision is for me, going to open mic nights. I think I knew that I wanted to play my music and perform my music and do something more with my music, but playing at an open mic night seemed intimidating. And I went and sat at open mic nights for a while before my friend PJ kind of forced me to do it because he knew why I was there.

Gino Cordone [00:12:37]:
But I just attended. I just went and watched. And that was easy because it’s just like you go to a cafe, you hang out for a couple hours, you go home. So that was sort of like a micro decision. I also had friends to help me because they were performing, so I was supporting them. So that made it easier for me to go. It wasn’t like I was going by myself, but there were these kind of small decisions for myself that helped move the scope of my trajectory, kind of just moving the target in the vague direction of where I want to go and just making that one little decision. And now I’m playing my own stuff every week, and I have a collection of songs, more than 10 songs that I can play and I’ve memorized.

Gino Cordone [00:13:21]:
And that’s something that I never thought of doing or never thought that I could do. So I think these little micro decisions are so interesting, and I think at the end of the day, they’re not necessarily like, it’s not about making the right little micro decision. It’s more so actually making a decision. Because I think that a lot of us, if I’m speaking about my old self, me, I was lost in the past because of the lack of decisions that I was making. And I wasn’t making any decisions. And this is what Petey talked about too. Like he was just avoiding making a decision for so long. And you kind of just let your life happen to you.

Gino Cordone [00:14:05]:
And I think that that’s the biggest definition of what a life on autopilot is, is that you’re not making any decisions and you’re just letting life happen to you based off of where you are and you’re letting everybody else make decisions for you. And especially for me, going to college, thinking about where I was going after high school, none of those decisions were mine. I was just kind of in the place, right place, right time to go to engineering school. So that’s where I ended up. And I don’t say that in a regretful way, but I say that in more of a self awareness way that the. Yeah, I wasn’t making any decisions for myself out of fear, out of no confidence, out of feeling bad for myself, whatever it was, I just wasn’t making any decisions. So that’s what’s great about these micro decisions, because it’s like now you’re actually making a decision for yourself instead of the decision to not make a decision. And when you make your own decisions, you can get closer to that life that you desire, that you want.

Gino Cordone [00:15:15]:
And yeah, again, just the beauty of micro decisions is they’re not that they shouldn’t be hard, they’re not that hard to do. They kind of fall in with where your life’s at. But what makes it different is that you’re making the decision. So, yeah, I thought that listening to Petey talk about his life just really made me want to think about that more and to share that message and yeah, also to challenge you. Maybe if you’re listening and you’re feeling sort of on autopilot in your life, is there a micro decision that you can make right now? And yeah, that’s kind of it. So maybe this is a bit shorter of an episode, but I did want to share that message. Thanks to Petey and Rainn Wilson for that. And yeah, if you’re struggling with your inner critic, as always, I have a free seven day guide to help you soften your inner critic.

Gino Cordone [00:16:11]:
Link is in the show notes. Thank you for listening, as always, and I hope you have a great rest of your week and I’ll see you on another episode real soon. Take care.