I love the idea of setting aside time to think about what you did "right" last year before moving into making goals and mapping y=out your life for this year. So how did you do with last week’s challenge?
What qualities or character traits have you strengthened? How did you share acts of kindness and support others? What special memories did you create? And finally what did you achieve and accomplish both personally and professionally? I asked one of my clients to do this assignment this week because there is always so much good stuff to uncover about ourselves. Especially when our brains are designed to focus on the negative.
So, now that you have done that and we’re in a new year, and a new decade, and so many of us are trying to evolve, let’s talk a little about believing in new things on purpose and how we can do this.
Maybe our ways of thinking and acting have led us to places we don’t want to be, and we’re hoping for a shift in perspective—a mindset shift.
So let’s start with the basics: All creation starts with sentences in your brain. Everything flows from there.
Step one is to cultivate an awareness of our current thoughts. What sentences in our minds are we holding onto, believing in, and repeating to ourselves?
Make sure to pay special attention to thoughts or sentences that cause negative emotions, such as:
· That’ll never work.
· I don’t like that.
· It’s all his fault.
We believe these thoughts because we’ve repeated them to ourselves for years. Not because they are true, but because we have chosen to believe they’re true. We’ve fallen into a pattern of replaying beliefs that have been programmed and practiced, but now it’s time to be more deliberate.
To create something new in our lives, we must believe new thoughts. You don’t have to really believe them now, but it’s important to take baby steps toward them.
Take five minutes to write out several sentences about yourself and your life that make you feel negative emotions. The stories you’ve told yourself for years.
· I’m always going to be behind the curve.
· My stomach is gross.
· I’ll never be as successful as my brother.
Now, take those same sentences and convert them into positive statements you don’t currently really believe, but that you’d like to be true. Pro tip: if you can’t get to positive, try neutral statements that can help you along.
· Who gets to decide what “the curve” is and who’s behind or in front of it?
· I’m behind the curve now, but I’m about to kick into high gear!
· My digestive system does a lot of work for me every single day.
· My stomach is soft, warm, and snuggly.
· The perception of success is sometimes an illusion.
· My path is different from my brother’s, and comparison is useless.
Practice on your own to see what old habits and thought patterns you can break for 2020!
This week on a mini session, Claire (we'll call her for confidentiality reasons), was concerned about her stress levels. She's been thinking "I have too much to do" which generates a lot of anxiety. This thought is sneaky and she realized she tells herself this about 100x's a day according to her estimate and has done so for years and years she has identified her life as stressful even though she says her life is pretty good.
What are you telling yourself daily that's causing unnecessary stress?
Did you know that you can think totally differently about the stress you experience? Or that without a lot of lifestyle changes you can feel less stressed overnight? I'll help you figure out how when you jump on a FREE mini session today.
