Hi guys! Welcome to Episode 395 of the wildly successful lifestyle podcast! What’s going on out there? Are you finding that you’re managing your mindset?
Anyone that knows me well and you guys if you’ve listened a while, you probably know me pretty well, but anyone knows I love mindset work. I love self improvement and growth of any kind.
For a while I have thought ok I know how important it is to have a positive mindset. I know how it completely changes your life when you change your focus to the positive. It’s without a doubt for me. But I’ve had this naggiyng thought in my head but what about the people that are really down and out. The ones that say I just can’t be happy or positive because I’m depressed or I’m so angry at this or that. How do we reach and help those people? It’s a tough one because feelings are real. And then…
I was listened to a podcast that Eric sent me this week Rhonda Byrne was on The School of Greatness podcast, she’s the writer of the secret documentary and book. She sort of answered that question for me. The universe always comes through when you allow it to. Anyway, she answered my nagging thought I was having. She said it’s easy to think about mindset stuff and positivity and self improvement if you’re in a good place but if you’re really in a bad place a positive mindset doesn’t seem to work so if you’re sad and depressed or angry then how does mindset work? My ears really perked up when she asked that question because it has been on my mind.
Her answer was you can be sad, depressed and angry in a way that proliferates it or encourages the sadness, the depression and the anger or you can feel those emotions in a way that doesn’t proliferate them. Ok. Now I’m listening. A big part of it is language and how you speak to yourself. We have to be so careful the language we choose when we talk to ourselves. When we say I AM sad. I AM depressed. I AM angry. You are defining yourself as that thing. Whereas if you say I FEEL sad or I FEEL depressed or I FEEL angry now that’s separate from you as a person which means you can change it. And here’s the thing you have to let yourself feel it. Rhonda said and Brooke Castillo says this all the time that you have to feel your feelings but Rhonda went a step further in almost embracing your feelings of anger or sadness instead of pushing it away. Let yourself feel the anger and you will find it pass quickly. If you push against it or ignore it it will just keep coming back up. So feel it but also watch the language you use with yourself.
So for instance if you’re angry you can just keep going down the rabbit hole and making yourself angrier or you can say you know what I feel angry right now but I know there will be a time when I’m not. It doesn’t fix it right now but it heads you in the direction of not feeling angry anymore. That’s something.
For example,when you’re feeling sad. You can say I feel sad. But time heals so I know the sadness will wane. Like Jordan Peterson says, that’s not nothing. I say That’s hope. I’ve heard people say things like “I’ll never not be sad”. And at the time you may feel it’s true that you’ll always feel sad but what we don’t realize is that that statement almost guarantees you’ll never not be sad. And no one wants to live always sad.
Having a positive mindset doesn’t mean you’re always happy. It doesn’t mean you’re never sad or never angry. It means you do not let yourself live there. And only you have that power. You may not be able to snap out of it like I want to but you can head in the direction of knowing it’s gonna get better.
Our mind is more powerful than we’ve ever been told.
So my personality is I want to fix things now. I want things to better immediately. I’m a Snap out of it kind of girl. But obviously that isn’t gonna always work for everyone not even most of the time. Not even for me. But I know the power of the thoughts we have in our mind to make things worse than they are or to make them better than they are. Which one do you do consistently? What is your habit? Making things worse or making things better?
Do you have a habit of intentionally introducing positive thoughts or do you just let the negative thoughts run amok.
I heard David Goggins this week say the most important conversation you’ll ever have is the one you have with your self in your head And I couldn’t agree more with that statement.
So we may not be able to avoid negative feelings but we do have the power to affect how long we feel them. We have the power to flip the script so to speak. That’s not nothing.
A close friend and her husband went to the beach for their anniversary this last week. She called me as soon as they got there pretty upset because the carriage house they rented had construction right below their deck overlooking the ocean. So there was a port a potty in their line of site to the beach along with guys using jackhammers from 6:58 until 5. She was spiraling and making things worse by saying the only way for it to be ok was to go home or move houses which wasn’t really an option and we were talking it through when she said well my husband just said hey it may make us change up what we do because instead of staying in and being lazy it will force us to get out and about early to avoid the noise so we will probably end up having the best vacation ever.
This is a beautiful case of one person making things worse and the other making them better.
And guess what? They ended up literally having the best vacation they ever had because they got out early and walked the beach in the morning, they spent their days riding bikes all over. They went places they wouldn’t have gone all because someone decided to make things better.
There is always the option to make things better regardless the scenario.
When you’re feeling sad, angry, depressed or fearful it’s easy to succumb to those thoughts and let your brain have its way with you. But if you intentionally interject thoughts of hopefulness into the language you use with yourself, the impact of those feelings will decrease greatly, eventually you’ll find yourself able to manage any feeling that comes along. I’m not there yet but that’s my goal.
My challenge to you this week is to notice if your habit is to make things better than they are or to make them worse. Once you know that you know where your work is. Softening the language you use with yourself is a really powerful tool. Just keep hanging out here and we will do it together. Share this with 3 people who have ever felt a negative emotion. I love you guys. I’ll talk to you in a few days.
