Hi guys! Welcome to Episode 437 of The Wildly successful Lifestyle podcast! I’m glad you’re here! Nice of you to choose this podcast to listen to today. You have a lot of choices and Im honored that you’re here.
I have been fortunate in my life, or I view it as fortunate that I never had the need to go to one of the 12 step programs like AA where you are working hard to keep yourself clean from some substance. Those are helpful to many people, but if I were to design a program like that it would be for every person on the planet and when you came to the meeting at the beginning we would start out by saying this: Hi, My name is Heidi Dawson and I am not my thoughts, I am not my behaviors and I tell my brain what to do, it does not tell me. That is how I would start it because eventually after repeating that enough times, you would get it. And I want to get it and it be so automatic that any thought that comes in that isn’t helpful or empowering, I correct it.
In Fridays podcast I talked about how sometimes our strong uncomfortable emotions are useful and help us. Like my feeling anxiety about a design element I was considering caused me to take the extra step to drive and impose on someones personal home to be able to see the product in person, which confirmed for me that I needed to pivot and pivot we are doing. I’m thankful I listened to my inner guidance that that needed more attention because I would not have been happy about the final product and it was too big of a deal, so I listened and pivoted. So sometimes our brain gives us uncomfortable emotions and they are useful. And those we want to listen to and do something with, But what happens when our brain causes us to have big emotions and they aren’t useful? Like when it tells us we looked fat in the dress we wore yesterday, there’s nothing I can do about that, that’s not useful at all. My niece and I were joking around and I said something that was kind of true about her and also kind of funny. We laughed and when she got done laughing, she said that was a little more hurtful than it was funny. Which made us laugh all over again. But you see our brain gives us hurtful thoughts all the time that are not useful and we never correct it.
I was listening to Mo Gawdat speaking on the Tony Robbins podcast recently. He’s is an engineer and math genius who was a tech executive before he became an author and speaker. In the episode he was talking about the brain and how we are able to train our brain to encourage and create our happiness or we can also train the brain to be terrified and anxious because the world is so incredibly bad and it’s only getting worse. It brings tears to my eyes thinking about how much of our misery is self induced and unnecessary. And also how little about that we are told.
Mo went on to say the brain behaves just like the muscles that we train at the gym. How we train our body dictates how our body is going to look. How we train our brain dictates how our life is going to look. That’s a big deal right?
So when I go to the gym I don’t just train my upper body, I train my whole body. That makes sense. My husband, Eric told me about a guy that used to work out at this gym when he was younger and he only trained his upper body and so his legs and calves were super kind of scrawny and not muscular but his upper body was super muscular, probably not ideal…but you see how you train your body is how it’s going to look. And in order to change the way it looks, you have to be consistent. Same thing goes for your brain. We have to be consistent in training it too. But how do we train our brain? It sounds difficult, but it really isn’t. In fact we are training it every day without even knowing it. I mean if you wake up every morning and immediately get on the news or social media, you’re training your brain that the world is gonna end really soon and you should be scared and probably prepared. Verses waking up meditating, grateful journaling, maybe listening to a positive message of some sort. Both of those routines are training your brain. The life outlook is very different for each of those routines. One will have you looking for what there is to be grateful for, while the other will have you looking for signs of the apocalypse. Our world view is created by what we allow into our brain in every single case. Growing up we don’t control it as much but as an adult, that’s part of our work, controlling what we allow in in order to live a carefully curated, peaceful, happy life.
The brain left to it’s own devices has a negativity bias. It is trained from a very young age for the negative by our parents, by our school system. If you don’t get good grades you won’t do well in life, if you don’t please us you get punished….the list goes on and on but we can train it differently. We can train it to the positive.
We can train our brain to be happy by noticing and flipping the thoughts we have that make us unhappy. Notice I didn’t say by eliminating those thoughts, because you aren’t going to eliminate them. Ever. You are just going to get really good at shaking your head at them like a naughty child that you love very much but is always doing what naughty kids do. You can’t eliminate those thoughts but you can correct them.
Every single one of us has the ability to find joy and it isn’t going to be found outside of us. Our brain holds that power. We just have to guide it in the direction towards the positive.
In the podcast with Mo, he went on to say when he went through the worst thing he’s ever been through, which was the death of his son…His brain did what our brains often do…it was giving him thoughts that were hurtful and causing much more pain…to the point where he finally literally told his brain…I get it…“Don’t destroy my life. Don’t just give me dreadful, misery inducing thoughts, either give me something I can do to make this better or give me a thought I can think about with joy.” His brain was literally destroying him by telling him all the things he should have done to save his son, but you see none of that could be done at this point. He can’t do anything about that now. So he made the decision to say to his brain…..LOOK. This isn’t working. From now on……
If it’s not useful don’t hurt me. It was a powerful episode of the Tony Robbins Podcast. I encourage you to listen to it. I of course ordered his books and will be reading them next. Because I know the power I used to allow my brain to have and I also know how it feels to take back that power and realize that I decide what things mean. I get to decide which thoughts are useful and which are only hurtful. If we really think about it, we know the difference.
That thought that I’m not good enough, no-one loves me or the world would be better without me, and I’m letting everyone down. These are all hurtful. There’s no usefulness in those thoughts and they aren’t even true anyway. Now, sometimes we do have uncomfortable thoughts that are useful like I should be eating a salad or going to the gym or taking better care of myself, or giving that design element another look, those thoughts may be useful because they’re probably true oh and they might get you to change something. You have your own version of repetitive thoughts and beliefs. A belief is just a thought you keep thinking. Get really good at listening to and noticing your thoughts. Every one of them. If you listen to someone talk and you realize nothing they are saying is true, you would stop listening but we tell ourselves things that are not true all the time and we just keep on believing them because we never correct the lies we tell ourselves.
You talk to yourself all the time anyway so start correcting those thoughts that aren’t useful, just like you would correct that naughty little kid that you adore….you have to correct yourself too. I literally will catch myself with a thought like ugh you look terrible and I will laugh and correct myself and say no I don’t…I look great I just need to brush my hair, get over it….I say something silly to myself about it because it’s silly to think that about myself. I am very careful anymore with how I talk to myself about myself. It matters.
We are not our thoughts, we are not our feelings and we are not our behavior. We have to somehow figure out a way to separate ourselves from our brain so that we understand that it is separate from who we are innately. It’s really a gigantic processor of all the garbage we’ve allowed in for the entire life we’ve lived….. we have a lot of correcting to do, trust me, once I started noticing and correcting I have been appalled at the way I think about myself. I have also corrected the way I think about others too. Still not perfect on either of them but Im getting better every day and I have meditation and watching what I allow in to thank for it. The bible says guard your heart…but Guarding your mind may be the first step.
My challenge to you this week is to realize that you are not your thoughts. Really get that. You don’t have to keep thinking those horrid thoughts that are not useful at all. If it’s a painful thought but it’s useful and gets you to take action, that’s great. But if it’s painful thought and it’s not true and it’s not useful, you have to start correcting yourself. You can do what I do, I will literally have a hurtful thought, notice it and then correct it quickly by saying that’s ridiculous and not true. You wouldn’t tolerate someone else lying to you regularly, you would correct them, don’t tolerate yourself doing it either. If it’s not useful don’t hurt yourself anymore. Share this with 3 people who could use a reminder that life is supposed to feel good and that starts and ends in our head. I love you guys, I’ll talk to you in a few days!
