3 Essential Insights About Your Thoughts

Welcome to This Daring Adventure podcast where we work on bridging the gap between where we are and where we want to be in order to live a bigger and bolder life. In this podcast, we will provide inspiration, tips, and skills need to make your life the adventure you want it to be. Here's your host, mindset mentor, and life coach, Trista Guertin.

Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of This Daring Adventure. Thank you so much for joining me today.

I was thinking about topics for this episode, and I was thinking about the free private coaching sessions that I do, and people come. They receive a free hour of coaching on any issue that they wish, and it's a really fabulous opportunity for you to tackle one issue in depth, get some help, get some support, get some clarity about what's going on for you, and to fully understand what the coaching process entails.

And so then I was thinking, you know, people will get this coaching and they will, they will feel better about whatever issue that it is that they present with, but I also want people to take away some knowledge of how their brain works and. How they can help themselves, even if I never coach them again or if they never work with another coach. And you should totally work with a coach, even if it's not me.

But if you don't, I was thinking, what are three takeaways that I want everybody to know about themselves and their brains and the way their mind works, that can have an impact on literally the way they live their lives for the rest of their lives. so I was looking at thought awareness, and I came up with these three points.

The first thing you need to know about your thoughts and what your brain is offering you is that you don't have to believe everything. You think your brain will offer you up to 60,000 thoughts per day. Most of it will be the same thoughts that you had the day before and the day before that, and the day before that.

Our brain loves repetition, and so it's very easy for us to keep thinking a lot of the same thoughts. It also will be negative and it will focus on problems our brain loves to focus on the negative and look for problems.

It's designed this way because it thinks it's keeping us safe, so it will generate a lot of fear. It will look for all the things that could go wrong. It will tell you all the things you should worry about, and this is on purpose. And brain was designed to keep us safe, to keep us alive and protect us, and it believes that by offering us fear, by looking for potential problems by. Knowing all of the things that could go wrong. It is, it is doing its job.

Now, this was true thousands of years ago when we were living in a cave, when we were living very primitive lives and focused on day-to-day survival. But today, it's no longer the case and.

Our brain has not evolved to keep up with our current circumstances, and so it will continue to offer us these thoughts on a loop, focusing on the problems, and telling you everything you should be afraid of and worry about for the rest of your life. So understanding this, that your brain will offer you a lot of thoughts and you don't have to believe them because they're probably not true.

A lot of it will be negative. It's not serving you. You can just let it go. You can challenge it, you can analyze it. You can just say, yes, thank you, I hear you, and next, and focus on what you want to focus on. Focus on what you want to create.

The second thing I think that is important for us to be aware of about our thinking and our brains is that we have to stop beating ourselves up. If there's one habit that you can break for yourself, it's to stop beating yourself up. Stop criticizing yourself. Stop calling yourself names, stop saying anything negative about yourself, and in fact, you want to take that one step further, you want to say positive things.

You want that positive reinforcement the same way that you would do with a child or a puppy, or a friend or your partner. You want to give yourself that same love and compassion and encouragement. Nothing good is going to come from beating yourself up, from criticizing yourself, from making yourself feel terrible. It's not going to motivate you.

It's not gonna help you do better in the long run. It's just going to tear you down, and in order to stop it, you have to be strict with yourself again. If you were talking to a child or a puppy and trying to deter it from taking certain action, you want to use that same tone of voice, right? That same sort of stern, like, stop it. No, this is not acceptable. Don't do that. No, I'm not doing that anymore. It's no longer acceptable. You wanna use that same tone, you wanna break yourself of that habit, don't accept it anymore. That alone can change your life. And then the third point about your thinking and, and your brain is that you really want to be curious and you want to make it normal. And by making it normal, I mean, if you react a certain way, if your thoughts go back to a certain circumstance, perhaps you're reacting to the way your mother talks to you or a phone call in the middle of the night, Or an email from your boss. Try and understand why this is normal for you, why this might be happening. If this is a pattern that you adopted when you were a child, then it makes sense. Your brain is going to that place again. If you received bad news at 3:00 AM via phone call, it makes sense that the next time you receive a phone call at 3:00 AM that you would go there and worry and get stressed thinking that its bad news, right? If you're reacting in a certain way. With your mother, if she used to speak to you in a certain tone of voice or used to yell at you, it makes sense that you would still have a certain reaction 10, 15, 20, 30 years later, as you did when you were a child or an adolescent. Your brain remembers these patterns. It remembers.

So it makes sense, so don't tell yourself that it's silly. Don't beat yourself up thinking that you shouldn't be reacting this way. Be curious about why you might be thinking this and why you might be acting this way, why you might be feeling this way, and just know that it's normal.

Usually there is a reason why you are reacting in the way that you are and having that awareness, that curiosity, and then making it normal and understandable can then help you to start thinking about how you wanna change it, how you wanna refocus your brain, what you want to tell it. Yes. Getting a phone call at 3:00 AM can be scary. Yes, it was scary at that time, but this situation, this time is not the same. It's not the same circumstance. It's okay. I'm safe. Nothing has gone wrong.

You can reinforce some of those messaging messages. You can reinforce some of those messages in your brain and help to calm yourself, help you to, to bring your, your nervous system back to a calmer place. Bring your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that you use to be rational and to think about what you're thinking about back online, and get you to a place where you can think clearly and become calmer.

So those are the three things I think that are so powerful for people to understand about how our brains work and the thoughts that we think and why we're thinking them. And. What we can do to make some small changes that can have a huge impact in the way we live our day-to-day lives.

Knowing that you don't have to believe everything you think, knowing that you can stop beating yourself up, telling yourself, working on this habit, eliminating it can give you so much freedom. And will have you focus on what you're doing and how you're feeling in such a way that you will do better, you will feel better, and therefore your results will be better. And then getting curious. About why you might be thinking and feeling and reacting in a certain way and normalizing it knowing that nothing has gone wrong.

There is a reason why you are thinking and feeling and reacting in certain ways with certain circumstances that it is okay that it makes sense. You make sense. And then you can start to change those thoughts and focus on how you do wanna think and feel.

I hope that helps.

Those are just a few little tidbits that come out of the coaching sessions with my clients.

I do invite you, if you're interested to sign up for a private coaching session with me, the link will be in the show notes. It's a great opportunity. Invest the one hour come. Let's talk about any issue that you wish you will leave feeling a little calmer, a little clearer.

Thanks for listening everybody. I'll talk to you next week. Bye-bye.

Thank you for listening to This Daring Adventure podcast with your host, Trista Guertin.

We hope you enjoyed the tips and conversations on how to get excited about life again.

As always, you can head to tristaguertin.com for additional resources and to book a one-on-one coaching session.

You can also follow Trista on Instagram at tristavguertin.

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