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Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Bite-Size Brilliance podcast. I'm your host, Dr. April Darley, and you have probably been asked this question at some point in your life or a career. _Do you wanna be a big fish in a little pond or a little fish in a big pond? _Now, whoever was asking you this question, they probably wanted to get your read on where you wanted to be in terms of visibility or performance.
When you ask questions like this big fish or little fish, it creates this dynamic in your brain that locks you into very limited forms of thinking. For example, you have something called a cognitive distortion, and this translates to a trick of the brain, and this particular one with big fish or little fish is one called polarized thinking. It tricks you into believing that there are only two choices, this or that. And if you have any kind of [00:01:00] perfectionistic tendencies, then it puts this extra pressure on you that if there's only this or that available, then one of them is going to be right and the other one will be wrong.
This can create a lot of tension or anxiety in your brain system, body, what have you. So it is a very limited form of thinking big fish or little fish, but what it also does is set up an unnecessary dynamic for you. So let me explain.
Humans enjoy a good hierarchy. It's how we naturally prioritize or rank things. And often I will ask my clients when they're trying to achieve some sort of goal or create a new identity or habit system for themselves, I will ask them to find someone out there who inspires you, maybe that can be a mentor, someone you know personally, or maybe it's [00:02:00] an influencer, but there is going to be someone out there who does something very similar to what you want to do successfully.
Now when you bring this person in as your mentor, your inspiration or your muse, you're probably going to be attracted to them because of their success or how they've done it or something subconsciously in your value system. Maybe you can sense that, one or more of your values is a match for one or more of their values.
Either way, this person is someone you want to be like, and if you are here and they are here, it creates a little bit of a gap and your brain views that gap in quite often a negative way because it's a vertical hierarchy. Now when you are trying to achieve something, you are naturally going to work on your mindset, your habits, and your identity.
There is something that needs to [00:03:00] change if you wanna be here and you are here. You've got to bridge that gap. There are many ways to do this, but one of the most damaging things you can do is buy into the fictional belief of the gap, and whoever's higher than you along that vertical gap is better than you.
This is where we start to get into a little bit of trouble when it comes to our three brain system. So if you're new here, welcome. But I teach my clients and listeners how to operate within an archetypal system based on three brains. You have a logical brain, an emotional brain, and a survival brain.
Your logical brain is what we like to think of as our brain, but it only makes around 3% of your decisions out of about 30,000 or more every day. Your emotional brain, which is your subconscious and your survival brain, or your unconscious makeup up about 97% of everything [00:04:00] else. So they run these automated programs based on your beliefs, your thoughts and emotions in the background constantly.
The choices that you make most often are out of your conscious control, and they've just been automated somewhere down the line. This causes you to react in patterns or think in these thought, emotion loops, which may be helpful or harmful to you. Now when it comes to something like Big Fish or Little Fish, you want to think about where these brains are viewing that statement.
_Do you wanna be a big fish in a small pond or a little fish in a big pond?_ If you split these brains apart, the survival brain is really concerned about resources and status, safety and protection. It's going to view that as _what are the best chances of survival here? Where is the competition going to be less, and where can my _[00:05:00] _status be higher?_
It could be the little pond, could be the big pond, but it's gonna weigh the odds on that. It views higher status as very favorable in terms of your survival, because this brain sort of thinks like a tribal caveman or prehistoric in some way where resources are delegated to tribal members, and when you have more status, you are more apt to be accepted by the tribe and not voted off the island, so to speak.
Now your emotional brain is concerned with identity, belonging, feeling loved and accepted, and it's also concerned with reputation. If the survival brain views that something could increase or affect your status, it's going to filter that up into the subconscious or emotional brain. And that emotional brain is also on board with higher [00:06:00] status can mean higher acceptance rates or a higher likelihood of belonging and being loved.
So it's also going to want you to do something that will increase your reputation, belonging, and status, but you will need to change your identity to reach that higher status and to get that reputation that you want. And the logical brain is the one that we like to assign the organizational flow of how we'll get there.
But when it comes to big fish, little fish, instead of that vertical hierarchy, I would encourage you to flatten the plane because when you create any kind of dynamic where someone is above you, whether you put them on a metaphorical pedestal, or you think that they're fabulous and you are not, you do create that harmful gap.
Where if we just made things lateral or parallel, there's [00:07:00] more room for everyone. So I want you to imagine this scenario instead of any kind of vertical gap where there, up here you are down here. Let's keep that fish example. But we are going to imagine a flat field where there are a lot of different size ponds, and these ponds are self-contained, but they're close enough to where you could jump from one pond to the other.
When you start to view differences between people that you admire as just lateral jumps, you take away that vertical hierarchy aspect that makes you feel unworthy, not good enough, less than, or incapable, because that's not true. the beautiful thing about our brains is if one person in the entire world has done it, then that is evidence that it can be done.
If someone could do it, then you can do it. [00:08:00] And we get out of that polarized thinking or limited belief hierarchical mindset, and we open the field to tons of possibilities. If we do think about these things as ponds, that you can jump one to the other. You don't have to stay either a big fish or a little fish because here's the reality.
Polarized thinking or cognitive distortions and limited thinking completely blinds you to possibilities or the gray area. In reality, fish of all sizes exist. You will have a spectrum of tiny fish. You'll have medium sized fish in a spectrum, and then you'll have a wide range of big fish. I guarantee you that any mentor you choose probably also has a mentor that they consider a bigger fish because the pond size is limitless.
If we think about ponds being of all different [00:09:00] sizes, and it's easy for you to jump from one to the other, then it's just a matter of leapfrogging from one pond to the other when you're ready to jump. So if you want to stay a little fish in a little pond, that's a valid choice, but at some point you might get a little itchy for growth.
This is natural. This is supposed to happen because this is evolution, and I'm not talking about evolution from a Darwin perspective, but I'm talking about your spiritual growth, your mind, your body's growth, your habits. You can play bigger and it doesn't have to be massively bigger. It can just be a tiny bit bigger.
If you look around your pond one day and go, you know what? I have explored every area of this pond. I really would like something different in my life, then it's time for you to jump. To jump into maybe the next pond over, [00:10:00] because then that brings a sense of excitement and possibility, and you have some room to grow, but you don't have to be the smallest fish there, and you're probably not going to be the biggest fish there either.
At least not for a while. And you're just going to repeat that same process. When you get a little bored or when you want to change something in your life. It's time for you to jump a pond. When you decide that you wanna play a little bit bigger in your life, create new habits, new beliefs, a new way of living, you're ready to jump a pond again.
When you make all these lateral jumps, you may discover that the life you want is not massively ahead of you. It's only a couple of lateral jumps over, maybe three ponds over to the right. It makes it so much more doable and achievable to the brain. And when you do this incremental increase, the brain doesn't panic.
It doesn't fight you on [00:11:00] trying to make changes. But if you try to jump massively, and if you try to quantum leap this gap, you may discover that you can't hold it because you haven't increased your capacity for more in either a nervous system perspective or an energetic perspective, or maybe even in your mindset. These incremental jumps, these ponds that you switch into where you get a chance to acclimate, grow, learn a new system, create new habits, and you're gonna create a new identity from that. This is what allows you to scale sustainably . So that when you reach the pond of whatever size you are trying to jump to, you'll feel fulfilled, happy, stabilized there, and you can hold that level of growth and that identity for as long as you want.
And if you ever decide you want an even bigger pond, guess what? [00:12:00] That's available to you. All you need to do is jump. It's not just about thinking about the jumps, it is about the action steps on how you get there. And that can be the tricky part because there's so many moving parts and pieces. A portion of it is your mindset.
This is true. There's your nervous system to consider from a body-based or somatic perspective, also true. Then you'll need to change your habits, your systems, your identity. All these things will need to be upgraded and it's best if you upgrade them incrementally.
Because then you can hold the success. Humans don't tend to react well to massive change happening all at once. We want it or we think we want it, especially our logical brain wants it. But what happens in reality and think about lottery winners, they have done so many studies on lottery winners that will show you that most of them lose all [00:13:00] of their money within five years, and some of them, a goodly portion are even worse off financially than when they started and won the lottery in the first place. That is a great example of a rapid expansion because so much change happened at once that all your parts and pieces couldn't catch up in a way that was sustainable for you to hold that level of greatness and success. It is much easier for you to do incremental upgrades to close the gap bit by bit by bit. Than to have it arrive all at once. And I know there's a piece of us that is really going to be bummed at that, and we're gonna fight that and maybe even try to resist it because we want what we want.
The very act of wanting gives us a dopamine boost. I get it. But the truth is, slow and steady wins the race. This is what's going to help you stabilize every part of your mind, body, [00:14:00] spirit, so that you can really enjoy and hold that level of greatness that you visualize in your mind. If you need some help doing this, either the visualizing part, working on your habits, your systems, having an identity upgrade moment, or even just spotting the patterns that are keeping you in the small pond when you know you are ready to jump to something bigger. this is where I come in my friends. It is my specialty to find these patterns quickly for you. To show you where they started to help you either refine them, eliminate them, rewrite or upgrade them so that these patterns of thinking aren't hiding in blind spots and sabotaging your behavior. That they're not sabotaging your very success. I can teach you how to find them. Rewrite them or eliminate them very [00:15:00] quickly using my *Rapid Regulation Method *and *Three Brain System. *So if you would like to learn more about how I can do that for you, then go to aprildarley.com and book a free consultation today. You'll find out how you can jump to a new pond very quickly with so much ease that it doesn't cause that anxiety or that friction. You don't have to jump with resistance. You can jump with confidence and I will show you how. Until next week, my friends, have a great day. Bye-bye.
