00:00 

This is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale, and this is episode number 25, "Getting Unstuck." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. 

00:14 

This is Tanya Hale, and I'm your host for Intentional Living. Well, hey there, my good friends. Thank you so much for joining me. I just can't tell you how nice it is to have you here. I know this is a couple weeks ago for you, because I record these a few weeks out, but yesterday I just hit my thousand downloads. So I was pretty excited about that, considering I've only been doing this since March. So thank you for listening. That means more to me than you will ever know, and I'm excited to be moving this forward because I just think there's so many great things here to talk about, and I hope that you're finding this really helpful for you in creating the kind of life that you want to create. So thank you really from the depths of my heart. I thank you for helping me to create this and giving me a purpose in doing this. 

01:09 

So anyway, we're going to move on today. Today our topic is Getting Unstuck. You know those times where we just feel like we're stuck and we can't move forward? I think we all get in those, and we're going to talk about why we get in them and how to get out today. So the basic topic of this is a concept called indulgent thoughts and emotions. Isn't indulgent an amazing word? I just think that when I think of indulgent, I think of a dessert, right? I indulge in a dessert. So after a good dinner, I indulge in it. Now the thing about indulging is that it's a short term situation, right? So something that I'm doing right now, but it may not have any long-term benefits. It might be in as a special treat or a pleasure, but long-term it doesn't really provide us anything. So when we talk about indulging, indulgent thoughts and emotions, emotions and thoughts that right now may feel really good and may feel very comforting, but long-term there's no benefit to them because they get us stuck in what we call a thought loop. 

02:27 

Okay, so we're going to start off today by talking about two reasons why emotions are important. Now women are generally very open to saying, "oh emotions, emotions." Women love emotions. We want to watch movies that make us cry. We want to feel all of that. Men, as I work with some of my clients who are men, very often they're like, "yeah, well, I don't really do emotions. I don't feel emotions." Well, this is the deal about emotions. Everybody feels emotions because emotions drive all of our actions. They are the reason that we do everything that we do, because we want the feeling or the emotion that we think we're going to get when we achieve it, alright? 

03:09 

So man, if you're saying, "I just want to play video games because I want to tune out my emotions." Well, why are you playing a video game? Because you like the feeling you get when you play it. You like the feeling of conquering or you like the feeling of being able to zone out or whatever it is. Because we all work off of emotions. They drive all of our actions. Everything we do is because we want to have a certain feeling from it, alright? So even if we think that we don't have emotions, we do, right? And emotions are the way that we experience our life, by the way that we feel. Does it make me feel good? Does it make me feel peaceful? Does it make me feel relaxed? Does it make me feel frustrated? Does it make me feel angry? Does it, you know, whatever? That's how we experience life. And these emotions start with our thoughts, right? Our thoughts are how we create the emotions. So therefore our thoughts are how we create our lives. 

04:16 

And so we're going to start looking at indulgent thoughts and indulgent emotions and what we do with those. So let's look at indulgent emotions first and let's figure out why they are so counterproductive. So here are some examples of some indulgent emotions: confusion, overwhelm, pity, anxiety, self-loathing, defensiveness, worry. Okay, so what do all of these have in common? Think about that for a second. First of all, they're all going to fit in more of a negative category, but what  they do is none of these take us through an experience. They get us caught in an experience. They put us in what I already said is called a thought loop that just keeps looping around and around and around on itself and it doesn't get anywhere. It's a never-ending thought for which there is no real answer. These are the thoughts that get us stuck. 

05:25 

So when we talk about getting unstuck, we have to realize that these are the kinds of emotions that we feel that get us stuck. Alright, so obviously we've talked about how our emotions are created by thoughts. So if we're having indulgent emotions, those are coming from indulgent thoughts and these are the thoughts that get us to that stuck place. So here's a couple of examples of an indulgent thought "why does this always happen to me?" or "I should have done something to stop that from happening." 

06:01 

So let me ask you this: Where is the answer to these questions? Why does this always happen to me? Where's the answer? What could I have done to stop this? Or should I have done something to stop this? What, where's the answer for that? There isn't an answer. It's good. There's no way to resolve that. And so that keeps us in a place of limbo. There's no progression. And no progression, that is exactly where Satan wants us to be, by the way. Okay? Because there's no growth there. These indulgent thoughts and emotions, they may feel really good or justified short-term. But in the long run, they don't provide us with anything helpful, just like the dessert we talked about. There's some short-term happiness, but long-term there's no nutrition in that dessert. There's no benefit really to that dessert, right? Just as indulgent thoughts and emotions, there's no benefit long-term. It may feel good in the moment, okay? We may feel justified or even validated with these thoughts and emotions, but long-term they lead to a dead end. We just circle around and around and around and we never get out of this. 

07:18 

Okay, so how do you know if your thoughts or your emotions are indulgent? Alright, we know from our results. When we look at where it's getting us, if we feel like we're stuck, if we feel like we're in a dead end, if we feel like there's no answer, we can see the result of that thought and emotion is that we're stuck, right? So our results are what let us know if we're having indulgent thoughts and emotions, okay? So it's time to start learning how to look at our thoughts and emotions and figure out if they're indulgent or not. 

07:55 

Again, remember, indulgent thoughts stop our progress because they get us caught in a thought loop. For example, we end up hating ourselves because we hate ourselves. And then because I hate myself, I hate myself even more. So we get caught in this thought loop. Sometimes when something happens, we may want to indulge on purpose. Sometimes I just want to feel sorry for myself. Something can happen, and I may go, "you know what, I just want to sit here for 10 minutes and just cry and feel sorry for myself. And sometimes that little bit of indulging can feel good. But then give me 10 or 15 minutes, and I need to get up and I need to start fixing things. I need to start changing my thoughts because if I stay in that place of feeling sorry for myself, I'm going to get stuck there. I'm going to get caught in that thought loop, okay? Because an indulgent thought is just going to keep creating the same thing. 

08:52 

So for example, the one I just used, if my thought is "I hate myself," my feeling then becomes self-loathing. The actions that that self-loathing creates as I start shutting down in my relationships, I don't show up authentically like my real self, I hide my real self, I engage in negative self-talk. And what's the result of those actions? I hate myself even more. And so that result circles right back around to that thought. I created the result of hating myself by the thought that I hate myself. Indulgent thoughts are a really dangerous place to play if we want to be healthy because they lead to indulgent emotions which cause some very hurtful actions in our lives. Indulgent thoughts and emotions do not create the actions and the results that we really want and need in our lives if we're going to move forward and if we're going to progress. 

09:52 

Okay, so let's talk about useful thoughts. These are going to stem from the same circumstances but the thought becomes one that is empowering. A useful thought could be "I'm going to figure this out," in which case my feeling that that thought creates is that I feel determined to figure it out, right? When I feel determined the action that that feeling creates is that I go on to learn something or I try something different or I start asking questions to figure it out. And the result is that I finally do figure it out. So again that result leads us right back to that thought of "I'm going to figure this out." Okay, so see how the result circles right back around to the thought. We create our results by the way that we think. 

10:43 

So let's look at this from an indulgent thought. An indulgent thought would be "I can't figure this out." In which case I get super frustrated. That's my feeling, right? Then when I feel frustrated my action is that I give up and I stop trying. And the result becomes that I don't figure it out. Amazing, right? Isn't that cool? So here the result leads us right back to the thought of "I can't figure that out." That is an indulgent thought. You can tell it's indulgent because it's creating this same negative thought loop that we can't get out of. 

11:22 

Alright, but I want to point something out that I think is fascinating that I just figured out the other day. Sometimes the same thought in two people can create very different feelings for those people. Okay, for example, and I just I just had this aha the other day when I was working with a coach myself and the coach was walking me through a situation that I experienced some time ago and I was just trying to to to process some things. I've already worked through the through the situation and I felt good about it but there were a few things that I was a little bit confused on like how how did I come up in this place? How did I end up here? And so anyway, we're working through it with this coach and when the situation occurred my thought was "I didn't deserve to be treated that way." 

12:10 

Now this is really where things are a little bit fascinating, because for most people I think this would be an indulgent thought. It would be "I didn't deserve to be treated that way," and then I might my feeling might be anger or frustration which would then circle back on itself and I would be caught in this loop of "I didn't deserve to be treated that way. I don't know why that happened. How could they? How could they do that to me?" But for me, I thought this was fascinating, when I was working through this this thought model process with my coach for me to say in this particular situation "I didn't deserve to be treated that way" it created a feeling of empowerment for me. It was a feeling that to me said "you had no right and I'm going to do everything I need to to protect myself and to put myself in a good place," which, shocker, that's kind of more my personality. 

12:20 

So, I know, don't make fun of me, but for me it wasn't an indulgent thought but rather it created a feeling of empowerment. And so when I had this feeling of "you had no right to treat me like this and I'm going to do everything I need to do to protect myself," the feeling caused my actions to be proactive in moving to a safer place or a healthier place. And then the result of that was that I did end up in a better place than I had been before the experience. And it was a place where I would not allow myself to be treated that way. So my result of not allowing myself to be treated that way took me right back to the idea of the thought that I initially had that was "I don't deserve to be treated that way," right? 

14:00 

So when when I was working with my coach and when that got pointed out to me I was like oh my gosh that's amazing. It was so insightful to me to have her walk me through that process and to see something that I had not seen before. And this is why sometimes working with a coach can be so helpful, because even though I know this information I was not making that connection and I was not seeing it and she was able to point some things out to me that were pretty fascinating. So it's really insightful when we start seeing that and sometimes we need other people to help us see things that we are not seeing. If you find yourself really stuck you know what I've I've got a free coaching session for you. You just have to get on my website and and we can work through it and you can see how this process works. I think it's amazing. 

14:52 

So right now I want to look at one of my new favorite useful emotions: discomfort. And most of you are going to go, "what? How is that useful? How is discomfort useful?" Most of us are going to see it as a negative or maybe even an indulgent emotion, but really discomfort is quite an empowering emotion because it drives us to make necessary changes. If I feel uncomfortable, I want to change it. I want to fix it, right? So remember how we talked before about how we should all be experiencing about 50% positive and 50% negative emotions, that that's just the human experience. There's got to be a balance between our positive and negative emotions, just as there's a balance with everything in the world. There's light and dark. There's good and bad. There's right and wrong and truth and error. We've got all these things going on, right? 

15:50 

And that's how it's created. That's how God created all of this. And so our emotions are the same way. We should all be experiencing out 50% positive and about 50% negative emotions. That balances us out, right? So kind of think about it like in a circle with a line down the middle and half of our emotions are positive and half are negative. So discomfort, though it may be termed input in the negative side of the circle, when we work through the discomfort, it gets us over to the positive side of the emotional circle. 

16:29 

So this is the thing: useful emotions do not have to be positive emotions. They can even be negative emotions. What makes them useful is the end result that they create. Remember, we go back to that model. That thought that creates the emotion and what is the end result? That's how we know whether it's indulgent or whether it's useful. Okay, so if I am all in and I'm focused on growth, the emotion. Emotion is not going to be so visible. Right? So for example if you find yourself visibly anxious, like you're shaking and you're sweating or you're fearful or you're overwhelmed. You're shutting down. You're Confused. If it's visible, it's probably an indulgent emotion because we're allowing it to get a stuck and we start having those excess of emotion when it's indulgent because we're stuck in it. We can't get out of it. 

17:30 

But if I'm all in, and if my thought is focused on growth, the emotion is not going to be so visible physically. Except for the energy that's good that I'm going to invest in it to move me through it, right? It's like that initial thought that I had of "I don't deserve to be treated this way," alright, that could have been something that could have shut me down in which case that thought would have created an indulgent emotion. But because I was focused on growth, I used that as an energy to move me through that experience. So getting unstuck from these indulgent emotions means that I have to start with being aware of my indulgent thoughts that are creating them. 

18:17 

So when we find ourselves caught in an indulgent emotion, we can ask ourselves, "what am I thinking that is causing this feeling? What am I thinking that's causing this anxiety or this self-loathing or this self-pity?" When we find ourselves, we have to go back and say, "what am I thinking?" Learning to identify the thoughts behind our emotions is such a valuable tool. You just can't put a value on it because that is what is going to change the results of our lives. 

18:48 

So if you receive my weekend win emails, by the way, you can sign up for those on my website, tanyahale.com. It's just a quick email every Friday that I send out. If you get those, then you'll know that last week I talked about clean and muddy thoughts. So this is the same idea, just different terminology. Clean thoughts are another way of saying useful thoughts. And these thoughts help me to move on or to move through. Muddy thoughts are another way of saying indulgent thoughts. Muddy thoughts are arguing with reality. And I'll tell you what, it does not do us any good to continue to argue with reality because we can't change it. It gets us caught in the thought loop because it cannot be changed. 

19:39 

And yet when we indulge in these indulgent emotions and these indulgent thoughts, we can't get out because we're trying to change reality and we can't change reality. So saying, "I should have been there to stop it from happening" does absolutely no good. The reality is that I wasn't there to stop it from happening. Bemoaning the fact that I wasn't there does nothing to help anything or anyone. That's what makes it indulgent. It gets caught in a thought loop because there's nowhere for that thought to go. I should have been there to stop it from happening. Where's that thought supposed to go? There's no answer to that. There's no place for it to go. Except for back on itself because reality is that I wasn't there to stop it from happening. But thinking I can help her work through this, it accepts reality. It accepts the fact that the situation did happen and is working on moving through the tough negative emotion of pain or grief or whatever it is and learning to come to peace with it. 

20:52 

So here's an example. When my mother suddenly died, my sister, who's a nurse, was living with my parents at the time and she could have easily gotten caught up in the indulgent muddy thoughts such as "I should have been there to stop it." She was at home when my mom died. My mom was in bed and my sister was in the living room, if I remember this story correctly it's been quite some time. She could have very easily just started thinking "I should have been there to stop it," but the reality is that she wasn't in the bedroom with my mom and my mom did die and thinking that she should have been there would have only caused guilt and indulgent emotion in this case, which would have caused her to beat herself up, which would have then been catching her in a no win situation. There's no way to get out of that, no matter how much she could have said "I should have been there to stop it," it wasn't going to bring my mom back. She would have been caught in an indulgent thought loop, had she chosen to go there. 

22:02 

So that's not to say that she didn't grieve or she didn't feel pain over my mom's death. Or, you know, with her skills as a nurse, I mean, there was a lot going on there for her. But thoughts such as "I loved her so much" or "I'm so grateful she was my mom" or "I'm thankful that I'm living here with dad to help him through this," these are useful clean thoughts that help to process the grief and the pain and they help to move us through the grief and the pain. 

22:32 

So let's look at two thought models with this idea. So the circumstance. Remember we go circumstance, thoughts, feelings, actions, results, right. So a useful thought model circumstance is that "my mom died." The thought could be "I loved her so much." The feeling would be grief at losing her, especially suddenly like that. But the action would be grief with gratitude because of the love that I had for her. And the result would be that I can then heal and move on and continue to connect with the thought that I loved her so much. Right? So I continue to get in this idea that I can heal, I can move on. And yet I can still love her so much. 

23:25 

Okay, let's look at an indulgent thought model with the same circumstance. Again, the circumstance is "my mom died." The thought would be "I should have been there." The feeling then becomes guilt. So not only are we feeling grief that our mother died, but now we're compounding it with guilt, right? So this thought model says I should have been there and the feeling that comes is a feeling of guilt. The action then is that I start to blame myself and I start to shut down. And the result is that I don't heal and I don't move on, right? And I'm still there, right? I just don't move on. 

24:10 

So this is the miracle of learning how to think and learning how to have useful thoughts. When we learn to identify our thoughts and our feelings, we can start to create the lives we desire. Rather than being stuck, we can choose to live unstuck. We can create the life of growth that we want. Healthy lives are created because we're progressing and we're growing. And these are things that identify with God's plan for us. Alright, God's plan is all about progressing and growing. Satan wants us to be stuck. God wants us to move forward. The beautiful thing is that we can begin to identify our thoughts that are creating our feelings and we can move into the place or the place of progress that we desire, alright? So because we're progressing and we're growing, we're happy and we're content. 

25:16 

Now again, this does not mean that this is an easy process and it doesn't mean that even if I'm progressing and growing, that being happy and content is always going to be easy, that I'm not going to have struggles or trials. But it does mean that we have an underlying peace regardless of the negative emotions we're needing to work through. Remember we all have 50% positive and 50% negative emotions. We all have that. We have negative emotions we need to work through. Learning to have useful, clean thoughts rather than indulgent, muddy thoughts helps us to work through them and not to get stuck in these thought loops. 

26:06 

Hope that's making sense for you. I love it and I love growing up because growing up puts me in this place where all of this is starting to make sense. All the pieces of my life are starting to fit together and I feel like God has just, at this age in our lives, is pushing us right where we need to go, so I love it. 

26:25 

So here's the deal, if you would like some personal help from me learning how to get unstuck or if you just want to navigate some tough situations with a little bit more clarity, you can contact me at tonyhell.com, go to the coaching tab and you can book a free 20 minute coaching session to get you started on this. I would love to help you learn to identify your indulgent thoughts and your useful thoughts and help you start making some connections here. Alright, so get in touch with me. I would love to chat with you. 

26:57 

And just to close this up, really if you feel like this podcast is helping you out, if you feel it's adding value, please do something for me. One, subscribe. Two, leave me a review. I would love the reviews I've gotten have just brought me to tears sometimes. I just feel so happy. So leave me a review and then share it with other people. I'm so excited that I hit my thousand download mark just yesterday. And I would love to reach 2,000 in a little bit less time. It took me 65 days to get to 1,000. I think it'd be kind of fun if I could get to 2,000 in 40 days. That's kind of my new goal. So go ahead and share this  with somebody who you think would love this kind of discussion. So I guess that'll do it for us today. Thank you. Thank you for joining me. I just really appreciate the fact that you're here and the fact that you are joining me on this journey of self growth and self discovery. Have a really, really terrific day and I'll see you next time. Bye. 

27:57 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.