Hi guys! Welcome to Episode 280 of the Wildly Successful Lifestyle Podcast! If you’re new “Welcome”. If you’re not new, welcome back as always it’s awesome to be with you. Oh and we’re going to church today so get ready…..OK.
One of my favorite mentors Tony Robbins always says the quality of your life is the quality of your relationships. And I agree whole heartedly but I would like to create my own version of that.
I believe the quality of your thoughts, creates the quality of your life.
And as a life coach, I have one job, and that job is to show you your mind, to show you how your thoughts are affecting you.
A lot of times in my episodes I show you my mind, and I do that because I want you to know that you’re not crazy. You’re not losing your mind, you’re human. And humans can do hard things. And humans also have this thing in their head called a brain that pumps out sentences all day long and we get to decide if they are true or not. We get to decide if we are going to grab onto that thought and let ourselves fall into overwhelm or if we are going to say “I don’t have to believe that, that’s just a thought.” If you leave today’s episode with nothing else that’s the sentence I want you to take with you…..”I don’t have to believe that, that’s just a thought”.
And boy can our minds create drama for us. But you’re listening to the Wildly Successful Lifestyle podcast so we are going to take control and stop letting our minds wreak havoc on us. There are lots of reasons we can come up with for why we are beating ourselves up but Im focusing on two today, The reason I chose these two is because I’ve struggled with both of them a lot and number two I see coaching clients struggle with these two almost every day.
Ok so the first thing people do to beat themselves up is for things that happened in the past. This is a big one. I used to do this a lot.
Maybe we made a big mistake or a few big mistakes and now we are having to deal with the consequences. Ok well…. Welcome to the world of being human.
Your past doesn’t have to predict your future unless you live there, unless you dwell on it because it’s happened. It’s done. The only place the past lives is in your mind. And I know some of you will say well it lives in other peoples minds as well…..but I gotta tell you…Not really….not as much as you would think. They’re more worried about their past than yours And anyway, that’s their issue, not yours, lets not even go there. Your job is you. And You’ve got a life to create. I don’t care what your past consists of. Let it go. And I always add this but if you have unhealed trauma that you haven’t gotten therapy for that’s different but if you are still dragging yourself through the mud because you slept with a married man 20 years ago, or you went bankrupt or you went through a tough divorce years ago you cannot continue to drag that stuff forward. Beating yourself up like that is the easy thing to do, it doesn’t take self discipline because it’s just so easy to think that way because that’s what your human brain does, if you haven’t noticed. It’s your job to notice these thoughts and use discipline by saying “That’s just a thought and I don’t have to believe it” Discipline allows you to say “I know who I am today and I am not my past mistakes”. That takes courage and you have that courage inside you, will you let yourself find it? And look it can be anything. Don’t use your past to destroy your future, because now that you have heard this you know you don’t have to, so it will be a choice.
I was very young and going through a divorce with my first husband and I became involved with a man who said he was also going through a divorce. That ended up not being true and once I found out he was still married, it took a while for me to end it because I loved him. That doesn’t feel good to admit, but that’s in my past and honestly I look back at it and I feel only love for that girl who was doing the best she could to survive at the time, Of course my brain would throw out all of the expected thoughts like you’re a bad person, you deserve for bad things to happen, all the things but I recognize those as lazy undisciplined thoughts that simply aren’t true. I was not going to use that to beat myself up or as an excuse to distrust every man I met after that, that would have been me allowing my past to wreak havoc on my future. I choose to take that experience and use it as a way to show myself love. Self loathing is easy and real but it doesn’t serve you and it’s lazy thinking, to get out of that you have to be strong and you have to be disciplined when it comes to your thoughts. My question for you…. Is there something in your past that you are using to wreak havoc on your present or your future? Think about that, really be honest with yourself because it could be showing up in ways you don’t even realize. Recognize those self loathing thoughts and always remember that wonderful statement “I know who I am today and I am not my past mistakes”
The second reason we tend to beat the crap out of ourselves is because we think we should be somewhere we’re not. We think we should be further along. We should be more successful or thinner or prettier or whatever, insert your thing.
We want to beat ourselves up because we aren’t where we thought we would be or should be. We say I should be making more money by now, or I should have saved more for retirement or I didn’t lose weight this week so I quit because it’s not working, or I wish I looked younger or my hair was longer or shorter. You are where you are, and where you are is your new starting point. And if that’s all you got, ok, let’s start again. You see, We use all these things like a weapon just hammering away at our self esteem and we think that just because we think it that it must be true. And I want to first give you a visual, I want you to think of your self esteem like a large piece of stone a big piece and your negative thoughts like a hammer and every time you have a negative thought you’re just taking a swing at that rock but at the same time, I want you to think of your intentional positive thoughts like a chisel and every time you think an intentional good thought about yourself you’re actually shaping that rock into something cool, something intentional, something valuable. That’s the difference between a negative thought about yourself and a positive intentional thought about yourself. You can use your thoughts to shape your life or you can use them to hammer at it in a destructive way, how would your rock look after even one day or week? Because that’s what you’re doing.
And my question is and will always be what if you are exactly where you’re supposed to be and what if nothing has gone wrong everything you’ve experienced is the reason you are the person you are today. The person that’s able to do hard things, the person who is able to handle that stress, the person who keeps going even when things are hard. Because like I always say, “life is hard and then it’s easy and then it’s hard and then it’s easy again. Maybe you’re in the hard part right now, don’t make it harder by beating yourself up.
100% of us have thoughts swirling around in our head. 80% of which are negative. So yes, it takes discipline to not beat the crap out of ourself. And it takes discipline to retell your story in a way that empowers you. You’re not lying about it, you’re simply allowing for life to happen for you, not to you. Because it is. Everything you’ve been through has built who you are and you can use it like a hammer to beat yourself up or you can use it like a chisel to reshape your story to empower you. That is your choice and that is your work, each one of us has that work to do. You’re not alone in this.
My challenge to you today is pick a story you tell about a past mistake and challenge yourself to tell it in a way that empowers you. Don’t use your past to destroy your future and secondly remind yourself you are exactly where you’re supposed to be and if that’s not exactly where you want to be well this is your new starting point.
This is one that I actually think can change anyones life the second they apply it so don’t hesitate to share it with everyone you care about, we all have work to do. Let’s go.
I love you guys, I’ll talk to you in a few days.
