00:00 

You are listening to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number four, "How to Change." 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. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:20 

Well, hello there, everybody, glad to have you here. Thank you for coming back. Hey, we are going to talk today about how to change. This is the struggle that we all deal with, isn't it? We all have issues in our lives, we have things that we know are our weaknesses, things we want to fix and yet when we try and change them it is such a struggle. It feels like we just fight and fight and fight to change things in our life and we're going to talk today about why that is. 

00:49 

Now in my training in the life coach school I have learned something that Brooke Castillo calls the self coaching model and I love this because it takes us back to the reasons why change can be difficult and how we can make it easier for us. Does it still require work? Of course. Does it still require a lot of effort? Yes, it is a skill that we have to learn. But learning the real reasons of why change is hard and how we can change is one of the most brilliant and liberating ideas that we can have because it really helps us to understand how to move forward and how to progress and how to change our behaviors that seem to hold us back so much. 

01:29 

So we're going to start off by talking about the model itself. Now the model starts off, it has five different levels. It has first of all we start off with circumstances and then we have thoughts. Thoughts create feelings. Feelings create actions and actions then create our entire life . And we're going to break this down into pieces and show you how this works. So let's start off by starting at the top of the model. 

01:57 

We'll start with circumstances are things that we can't control. It may be people, it may be situations, or it may even be the past. Things that we cannot control. We don't have any ability to determine what's going on. If someone tells us we're stupid, we can't control the fact that they told us that. In fact, by the time they tell us that, it's already in the past, and we know that we can't change the past as well, right? We can't control other people's behaviors. We can't control other people's thoughts. We can't control whether it's rainy outside. A circumstance is something that is out of our control, but we have to start realizing that everything else, the other four parts of the model, are all things that we can control. I can control my thoughts, I can control my feelings, my actions, and then the results of my life. 

02:47 

What I'm seeing in my life, I know that I've heard many times over the years, that the life that I have right now is a result of everything that I have already done, and that is 100% true. We can see that what is going on in my life has been determined by my actions and my actions have been determined by my feelings and my feelings have been determined by my thoughts. So we need to start being very clear on what we can control andwhat we cannot control. And the more clear we are on the fact that I can control me and really kind of nothing else, the more liberated we become and the more free we become to be able to create our own lives and to do what we want. 

03:38 

Let's move on from circumstances then to our thoughts. Now thoughts, it's kind of amazing that we really don't think that much about our thoughts. A lot of us just have random thoughts and we never question them. We take them at face value and we think that what we're thinking is true. If we think, "well, he's mean," we oftentimes don't even question that. We don't think, "well, is that true? Is he really mean or is that just my perception or is it something else?" And so we haven't all learned to be very inquisitive about our feelings. So we take them at face value and oftentimes we're not even aware that we're having them. 

04:21 

Now, that's not surprising considering most research says we have between 40 and 60,000 thoughts a day. So it's very easy to not be aware of all of our thoughts. And a lot of our thoughts are patterned thoughts that we have had over and over and over, some of them going back to our childhood. It always amazes me how sometimes I will say something and then I go, "oh my gosh, that was just what my mother used to say when I was a child." Things from our past and our childhood stick with us and they are thoughts that we have. Some of those things that my mom used to say are good, some are bad, and some are neutral. It doesn't really matter, but I have to start learning to be more aware of my thoughts and look at them, and we're going to talk about how to do that today. 

05:12 

So if we have that many thoughts today, and if our thoughts really create our feelings, which then create our actions, which then create our results, we have to start asking ourselves, how do we learn to be more aware and control our thoughts? We have to, because our whole life begins with our thoughts. And if we want to progress, and if we want to move forward, it's vital that we learn to start controlling our thoughts if we want to change. 

05:48 

So everything that we do is because of our feelings. I want to feel happy so I do something or I create something. I want to feel connected, so I react in a certain way. And when we start realizing that our feelings really direct our actions and that we can then start to impact our feelings by what we choose to think, then we really start to understand the importance of the thoughts that we choose to have. Or sometimes we don't really choose to have them, they just come, but we need to start learning to be more aware of our thoughts and intentionally choosing them more and deciding which thoughts are going to work for us and which thoughts are not. So if our thoughts are in the driver's seat for the results for my entire life, we now start to understand why it's so important that we are aware of what we're thinking and why. 

06:47 

So our first step here with this has to be awareness. We have to start becoming more aware of what we are thinking. We have to start observing our own thinking. And most of us have never really done this before in this context. We probably think about our thoughts as being right or wrong as far as, does this lead me to obey a commandment or not obey a commandment, or we may think of them as positive or negative, am I optimistic or pessimistic? But a lot of us have not hit the point where we start to think of our thoughts as the catalyst for all of our feelings. A lot of times we, I think most of us think of our feelings as just existing. They just create themselves. They just come about because I'm a human being. And so this is just a new thought, that we create our feelings with our thoughts. And this will cause us to start seeing our thoughts completely different if we can start connecting those two things. 

07:44 

And then the realization that our actions and the results of our life all come from those same thoughts is really pretty exciting because we start to realize how much more control we actually have over our lives. This control all starts with our thoughts. How's that for an amazing realization? Realizing that I can control my life by learning to be aware of and control my thoughts. 

08:10 

So we might take a look at the state of our lives and get overwhelmed with the state of our thoughts. We may just go, "oh my gosh, my life is a mess and that's all my fault. That all comes from my thoughts." Well, yeah, technically it does, and that can cause us to become overwhelmed. And that's totally normal if we haven't approached our thoughts this way, if we haven't realized the control and the power that our thoughts have over our lives. And this is the thing. It's not a horrible thing if our thoughts are doing this. Our thoughts have often run unchecked for years and possibly even we're recycling thoughts over and over from our childhood even. 

08:38 

This is something that we weren't taught in school about our feelings and that our thoughts can create our feelings and that we have control over our actions. We oftentimes were taught that we can control our actions but the connection to our feelings and to our thoughts was never a piece of that puzzle. I know that that I was taught anyway and so sometimes we may have thoughts coming from our childhood of insecurity or powerlessness depending on the the type of situation that we were raised in. We may have thoughts of fear or anxiety or we may have thoughts of feeling very empowered and feeling strong and like I can accomplish things. So much of the the behaviors of our brain were created when we were children and  we spend the rest of our life trying to figure that out, don't we? And I always try and tell my kids that yeah, it's my job to just give you all kinds of issues for your whole life so that you never run out of things to work on. I don't think they appreciate that sentiment very well, but that's that's just how it works. We get all of these things ingrained into us when we're children good and bad and then we spend our lives trying to sort them out and trying to figure out. 

10:07 

So once we start becoming more aware of our thoughts and figuring out exactly what I'm thinking this is the time that we need to slow down a little bit and we need to get curious. It may become really easy to start feeling overwhelmed if our lives are kind of crazy and we realize that that's all starting with our thoughts, or be overwhelmed by this by the specific thoughts we're having. But we have to start working on these thoughts and we have to start identifying them and becoming curious about them. 

10:38 

Just a quick experience I had.Wwhen my kids were little I had one child who really struggled with incontinency and this child was a little bit older and I used to get so frustrated because there would be poop all over the place. I just couldn't handle it. Couldn't handle it. I would get so frustrated and I would yell at him and I would just fume about the fact that I was cleaning up poop once again. And we finally took him into the doctor and the doctor took an x-ray and his poor little insides were so chock full of poop. Every little, as far up as poop could go, it was there. And no wonder these problems were going on because it was so full and he couldn't control it. And so once I realized that, my thought completely changed from just thinking that he was trying to be an ornery little stinker and just trying to make me mad to compassion for him. And that thought completely changed my feelings toward him which completely then changed my actions. And then I was more compassionate in my actions and my behaviors toward him. So just our thoughts can totally create the experiences that we're having. 

11:57 

So coaching is one of the greatest things about coaching is that it helps us to find the cause of our actions and helps us to start figuring out why we do what we do. It helps us to move back and to identify our thoughts. Once we start getting this idea down, changing our thoughts is much easier and it then makes changing our behavior so much easier. So let's go through an example of this. So I was working actually with a high school girl several weeks ago and she was struggling, I'll call her Chelsea, she was struggling so much with getting work done that the end of this quarter was horrific for her. Lots of drama, lots of high stress, mother was was upset, daughter was upset, it was just creating such an issue for her. And so we sat down we worked through the model. And what we did is we started off by talking about the result, to the very end thing, and we talked about "well, what is the result in your life that you're seeing?" And she says "well a lot of high anxiety, a lot of stress, a lot of anger." 

12:59 

So we worked that back and so we said "well, first of all what's the circumstance," and the circumstance was that teachers give work. One reason that she was so far behind is that she wasn't doing the work in a timely manner so by the end of the semester she had tons of late work, she had big projects due, she had all these things going on. So we said "well, okay, the circumstance is that teachers give work." That's that's out of your control, that's something that teachers do. 

13:26 

So let's jump down to the bottom of the model. So we've got we've got circumstances, thoughts, feelings, actions and results. So we moved down to the bottom of the model, the results, and she said that she was feeling high anxiety and stress. And so we moved up a step to the actions and I asked her "well, what actions are you engaging in that are creating that result of high anxiety and stress?" And she said "well, basically I just procrastinate till the last minute to get everything done." Well, okay so what feeling are you having when you decide to procrastinate that causes that procrastination? What feeling is driving that? And as she worked through it, she finally came up with the idea that it's apathy. I just really don't care what's going on? And so then we moved it up to the thought and this one took her a little bit longer to pinpoint, but when we said "well, what thought are you having that's creating that feeling?" And she eventually came to the idea that she says "I just think that homework is stupid. I think there's no purpose in it, and I think it's a waste of my time." Quite fascinating, right? So when she starts looking at that, that her whole thought about homework being a waste of time, that ends up creating these periods of high anxiety and stress and anger and frustration in her life. 

14:48 

So then we took an opportunity to go back and look at the model a different way. So again the circumstance is the same: the teachers give work. We went to the results line again and it talked about "well, what result would you like to have at the end of the quarter or the end of the semester?" And she responded that she would like to be in control that she would like to be In charge of herself instead of having her mom have to get on her because she wanted to be independent. She's a senior. And she says I want to be able to move out on my own someday and do my own thing. And so we took that thought, that desire to be in charge of herself, to be independent ,and we work that back. Well, if that's what you want, what is the action that needs to take place in order for that result to occur? And she says " well, I need to stop procrastinating. I need to start doing my work when it's due and not waiting till the last minute." Okay. 

15:42 

So then let's look at what feeling do you have to have for you to be able to create that action of not procrastinating, and she identified motivated. I need to feel motivated. Okay. Well, so what are we doing here? You're with me. We take a step back then to the thought line. So what thought do you need to be having in order to feel motivated? She very quickly identified that "I need to think that I'm independent and that I'm in control without my mom." Quite fascinating. Because she was able to figure that out. And I asked her, I said, "is that something that you believe that that you can be? Independent and in control? And she's like "yes, I can believe that I'm like a big K." Bingo. Then this is where we're at. This is the thought that we need to start switching out. So every time that you have an assignment and you start thinking "well, this is stupid. This is a waste of my time," we need to stop. And we need to go "okay, no, I really want to be independent and I want to be in control of my life without without my mom. I want to be able to move out on my own," and start changing that whole process by starting our thoughts. 

16:52 

Now both of those thoughts were things that she believed. Isn't that fascinating that we can believe two opposite things? She was believing that homework was a waste of time and that it was stupid, that there was no purpose, but then she was also believing that she wanted to be independent and in control. Now those aren't necessarily opposites, but those two thoughts that were very different ended up creating a very different feeling in her, one a feeling of apathy and one a feeling of feeling motivated, completely opposite feelings just by changing the thought. 

17:25 

Now we need to be careful here to not start deriding ourselves for not changing our thoughts or for actually having the thoughts in the first place. It would be very easy for Chelsea to start thinking, "okay well that was just so stupid that I was thinking that homework was a waste of time." That doesn't do us any good. Let's just move on and start changing our thoughts and moving where we want to go, because if we're fighting against ourselves we're gonna, it's a losing battle. It's us against us, right? And that doesn't work. 

17:51 

Let's talk about one more thing here that's going on. Our brains love habits. We've created these neural pathways in our brains that our thoughts love to travel. The reason our brains love habits so much is because our brains are created to conserve energy and to help get things done. If I have a habit, I can do it without expending any energy of thought or decision-making to make that happen. I think of times that I've gotten dressed in the morning and I don't even remember putting on my shoes and tying them, right? I didn't have to stop and think, "okay, the right lace goes over the left one and I tuck it under and I pull it tight and I hold it with my finger." If I had to do that with everything that I was doing all day long, from picking up my fork and the process that that takes to putting some food on my fork, we would be exhausted by nine or 10 o'clock in the morning if we had to think that deeply about everything that we did. 

18:47 

So our brain loves habits because it can create this whole life for us without us having to think about what we're doing. And this is really, really great in a lot of ways, but it can be very difficult when we're trying to change our behavior. So as I said, our brains have created these neural pathways and basically what that means is it's creating a habit. And so our thoughts love to travel these same paths over and over. So think about a path in the forest. You've got weeds and undergrowth and all this stuff going on and yet you've got this dirt path that nothing is growing on. And that's kind of what our brains have created is this pathway of behavior. And so our brains like that path because it's quick, it's easy, it can travel it without really having to think that much. But if we want to change our behavior, we have to start thinking a new thought and thinking a new thought requires cutting a new path in the forest. And so doing that is hard. it's a challenge. There's lots of undergrowth, there's branches across, there's roots coming up, and we have to walk that path over and over and over. And that's hard because it's not, it's in comparatively, it's not easy like the other one. And so that's why the change can be so difficult, because we're constantly fighting against this new undergrowth and creating this new path. 

20:12 

But over time, as we are consistent with that, that new path starts to break down all the the undergrowth that's going on. We start to break off the branches and we start to create a new path. And the old path, if it's not being used, the grass and the weeds start to creep in along the side. And over time, the new path is way easier and the old path starts to grow over from no use. And so this is how we change behaviors, but it can be really, really hard to start changing those thoughts. And this takes some time and it takes some work for sure to change these. But as with anything, consistent practice is the key. Constantly going back to the thought we want to have so that we can create the feelings and the actions and ultimately the results that we want in our life. 

21:02 

And it's a process, but once we discover the thought we want to be having, we need to engage it every chance we get, and eventually we will override the previous thought. This takes practice to develop this skill. And this is the thing: we don't have to fix everything from our past, we just need to isolate the thought. We need to be compassionate with ourselves for having it and then we need to learn to override it by consistently applying the new thought. 

21:30 

So in summary, let's look at this. So we have circumstances that happen in our lives and how we choose to think about those circumstances is our challenge because we're going to have immediate gut reactions to a lot of things and things that we're not even aware of. But if we can learn to slow down..and we may not slow down the thought process. I may not realize that I've had a thought that I don't like until I get to the feelings page, feelings part where I'm having feelings that I don't like or I'm performing actions that I'm like, "whoa, that is not the kind of behavior that I like." And so at that point, we just need to stop. We need to say, "okay, if this is the action that I'm doing and I don't like this, what feeling was I having?" And then from the feeling, take a step back even to so what thought was I having that was creating that feeling and we can start learning to slow down and start learning to process a little bit more. Because if we want to change the way we feel or act, we have to start tracing our actions back to our feelings and our feelings back to our thoughts. 

22:37 

And from there, we can start making adjustments and we can align our thinking with our feelings and our actions to create the results we learn in our lives. And as we really learn to understand ourselves through understanding, our thoughts, we can be more compassionate and loving to ourselves, and we can be more able to change our thoughts, and then our feelings, and then our actions, and then finally we can start seeing the results in our lives that we want to see and start living the kind of life that we really, really want. 

23:08 

So this is an important podcast because this one talks about the basis of so many of the things that we're going to talk about here, the fact that we can control our lives. We can't control other people's lives and we can't control the circumstances, but we can control our thoughts, our feelings, our actions, and the results of our lives. Again, it's a process and it's something that takes time and takes effort and a lot of energy to learn that skill of slowing down and backing up, and we will talk more about how to do that and how we can process that more. 

23:43 

So, there we go. That's what I've got for you today, is the self coaching model. So I hope that that has been helpful for you, to give you some food for thought of how we can change and how to start doing that. So I coach on this and if you would like some personal personal help from me with anything going on in your life, you can go to tanyahale.com. Sign up for a free 20 minute coaching session and we can we can have a chat about it. And if you really are enjoying what you're hearing, please share this podcast with others who you feel would love it as well. Thanks so much for joining me today and I wish you all the best and I will talk to you next time. Bye. 

24:24 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my "weekend win" Friday email: a short and a 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 to learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya!