Feelings should come with a warning label “Trust with Caution”.
We might think that our feelings are what needs to dictate our day, but the truth is our feelings are fickle.
They lie to us, they only see what they want to see, and they demand attention.
Our feelings are like a 2 year old having a hissy fit. Often irrational and unreasonable.
Our feelings are a results of our thoughts.
If we can learn to take our thoughts captive, we become the adult in our mind and don’t allow the 2 year to ruin our day.
Listen in and be inspired.
TRANSCRIPT
Feelings are Fickle
Welcome to the Unstick Your Mind podcast on Mimika TV. Get ready to get unstuck, align with your true purpose, and unlock your God-given potential.
Well, really what it is we’re talking about is removing the pride and the ego. We need to get our ego out of the way. Because when you look at the bigger picture, I always like to say there’s somebody praying for a solution to their problem, and you just might be it. If you could get out of your own way and stop thinking that it’s about making you look big and wonderful and fabulous, which actually comes back to a root of rejection, if I have to really get detailed on this. This is something I learned myself, is pride is often a defense mechanism because of insecurities. And insecurities are usually resulted from rejection, usually back in childhood. And this is what I work with my clients on, uncovering these roots.
Because our lives are like trees. You could have fruit, and you can have rotten fruit or you can have good fruit. You can keep cutting the fruit off and medicating and placating and hiding and denying whatever the fruits are. But unless if you ever get to the root, you’re going to keep growing a tree with the wrong fruit. So we have to get down to understanding where that root came from. A lot of that made me the people pleaser and perfectionist I became. Like all about my drug of choice was people pleasing and accolades. Like let me make sure that everybody knows, let me do this, let me achieve more, let me do more and perfectionism. And we get stuck on that loop.
But it took me this crisis of faith and life to really realize what those roots were because I just kept trying harder and being a workaholic. I kept thinking, “Well, if this isn’t working. I must try harder, right?” And that is one of the biggest lies that I think the society has perpetuated is this whole hustle mode. The harder you hustle, like life’s a hustle. And I’m like, “Not actually. It shouldn’t have to be.” If you are working that hard, something is wrong. There is imbalance there. You are not meant to work till you drop. You not mean to push yourself so hard to exhaustion. You’re not mean to sacrifice relationships and lose a marriage over the bottom line of a business. That’s not what it’s meant to be about. And to me, I really had to get introspective and start to look at really what are my motivations and digging through things.
And a good way of gauging this is are you attached to the results? And this is something that in coaching we are taught a lot is if, for instance, you’re doing a big launch and you know you’re desperate for cash and you want these people to sign up to join your program or whatever, and you are like, “I need these people to sign up because if I don’t, I’m not going to be able to pay the bills.” And I start freaking out like this and start going on a rollercoaster ride. So then when you get on sales calls, you’re like, “Ah…”
You know, the energy we put out there, it’s either repellent or magnetic, and people can sniff out desperation. And what it is really is if you are attached to the result, then what happens is if the result doesn’t turn out the way you want, then you think it’s about you. Then you make it about yourself. Like, “Oh, I’m less than, oh, I must be stupid. Oh, nobody likes me.” You know, “I’m going to eat worms,” that whole story, like, “Nobody loves me. I’m going to sit in the corner and eat worms.” And we start having a pity party and we start spiraling.
Feelings are Fickle
Then, “Oh, it’s because that person was wrong or because they didn’t understand it or they don’t get my genius or whatever.” Really, the end of the day is we have to take a hundred percent responsibility for a hundred percent of our results. And most people in society want to blame, shame, do whatever, divert, because you’re unattached. You’re unattached to what people think, you’re unattached to the results. Because I believe I’m on mission for God. I do what I feel he needs me to do, where before I was a total control freak. I say I gave up my membership to control freaks anonymous. And I’m so much happier since I did.
Now I’m like, okay, I feel God-driven, that what I’m doing is in line with who I’ve always meant to be. I just got down the rabbit hole and got a little confused because I was so worried about how I was appearing, that people knew I was smart and I was capable. And I mean, you look at my resume and I just roll my eyes now. Because I go, “Yeah, that was the former me, always trying to prove myself,” because it came from that root of rejection. But since having gone past that, realized that there are other people who need what I have to say. And if I put myself out there, I don’t really care how it turns out. I just need to know that I’m showing up to do what I’m meant to do and I’m going to leave the results to God. He will sort that out. That’s his problem.
Whether this person becomes my client or not, whether this person buys this from me or not, whether this is meant to be something for the future. Instead of me thinking a hundred steps down the line, because I was always playing chess in my mind. Like if I do this and this and I do this. And that’s great, especially coming from a business background. As a strategist, it’s kind of what people paid me for, is to think of the strategy. But sometimes we have to bring it down to what I call the micro moments. What is it that I can do right now that’ll change today? Forget about next week or next year or five years or 10 years. I mean, really, with the world we’re living in right now, how can anybody really project 10 years, with what we’ve gone through in the last two?
So I really feel, and what it does is actually such a relief. When you release the reins and you let go of the expectation, it doesn’t become about you and your performance. It becomes about you are providing a service and a role. You do what you are expected to do and you leave the rest to the next person or whatever else. We stop taking on and trying to save the world. And we realize we just stay in our little corner of the world and do faithfully what we’ve been told to do or what we feel led to do.
Swimming in your lane and staying in alignment with your God-given purpose doesn’t mean think small. Actually, in actual fact, you should think bigger. Because the more you can stretch yourself to think bigger, the more capacity you have. Because here’s the thing, is our brains, and this is what fascinates me with neuroscience is, like anything in life, our brains particularly are like an elastic band. If you get a new one, you get it out the box and it’s kind of stiff. But the more you pull on it and stretch it and stretch it, it never regains its former shape. So if you think about every time you’re stretching and growing your mind, your mindset, your habits, your ability to function and to process information, to overcome challenges and obstacles, you are never going to go back to your old self.
Feelings are Fickle
But your current self is kind of like a two-year-old toddler. This sort of primitive brain part of ours, part of that brain that always wants to override our thinking and our feelings. It’s the one that has a hissy fit. You’ll know which one. Where you want to do something and all of a sudden, and people like to call it my anxiety or my depression. And I’m not discounting those. But those are feelings and emotions that are a result of our thoughts. It really starts with our thoughts.
And we realize that we often are waiting to feel motivated or feel happy. And I don’t feel like doing this. So we are so reliant on our feelings, nothing gets done and we get stuck in the same old cycles of repetitive, I’m frustrated kind of thing, because we are listening to that two-year-old toddler’s like, “I don’t do that. That’s uncomfortable. Don’t make me do that.” Like, ugh, like a two year old. Like, “Don’t make me go to bed, Mommy. I want to eat candy, give me candy. I don’t want to sleep.” Like really, I’ve had three two-year-olds.
And I remember many time leaving the grocery store with my eldest, who’s very headstrong, in like a football hold under my arm, kicking and streaming like a fish out of water. Moms out there will know. You will have that experience. But I’d realized why was I allowing this two-year-old toddler in my mind to override my logical thinking? I know personally that I have made the decision, this is what I want to do. So why am I letting that emotional hissy fit constantly override my decision? So I had realized that your decisions are important because really our brains are wired to avoid discomfort.
So if you think about it, every decision is to make you comfortable. So every time you’re challenging yourself out of your comfort zone, of course fear is a given. You are going to feel uncomfortable. It’s going to feel strange because there’s no precedent for it in your mind. I always like to talk about the story of the four minute mile. Back in the day, no one had broken the four minute mile. Everyone thought it was impossible until it was done. And within a very short space of time, I think it was a matter of months or even a couple of years of when the first person broke the barrier, it was done several times after that, because the precedent had been set. “Well, so and so did it. I can do it.”
So we have to realize that our brain’s first instinct is to shut us down and get us into toddler mode. So if we can tell ourselves, “It’s okay, you’re safe. You’re not going to die. You don’t have a scary bear running after you. Your life is not in danger,” although it can feel like sometimes a threat of death. But a lot of the time that is just our feelings overriding our decision-making. But what happens is we get bullied by the two-year-old into not pushing forward with our decisions. Because here’s the thing. And I say with, I’ve got two young adult kids and a preteen, you’re never going to feel motivated. You can’t wait for your feelings to catch up. You need to decide first and then the feelings catch up afterwards. It’s like, “Well, I don’t feel motivated to do my homework.” I’m like, “Well, how about you just decide to sit down at your desk and work through this math problem. And then afterwards you can go, ‘Wow, now I feel motivated.'” Because it’s counterintuitive.
Feelings are Fickle
But unfortunately, society has made us think that everything has to be instant, instant gratification. If I don’t feel good, then I’m not going to do it. So I think we need to go back to the basics. Go back to doing hard stuff. So we need to be the parent in our brain and not the toddler. And that’s what I think is a lot of us revert to is just allowing the toddler to have a hissy fit every five seconds and we just give in. And everyone knows, any parent out there knows if you give in to a toddler once, they become very demanding and it’s very hard to get them in line.
So it really comes down to thinking about what you’re thinking about. Stopping and pausing and saying, “Okay, I feel like this.” And this is a technique I use in coaching is I call it backtracking. Okay, let’s stop and pause right now. Because most clients that I work with always come with some form of anxiety or overwhelm. Like, “I don’t know how to deal with this. I’m freaking out.” Let’s press the pause button. If your life was a movie, let’s press the pause button on this exact moment. So you saying that right now, you having an anxiety attack. What were you thinking a few seconds before this happened? You were thinking about this. Okay. So what was the result of that thought? What triggered that thought? And we start asking the questions, but how did that start and where did that start? And we start to go back and we start to realize, “Okay, what are those initial thoughts that got me thinking there?”
And we start to really press rewind on the movie of our life and go back to originally figuring out what started this whole process. Because once we know what the triggers are, we can then understand, okay, we are not going to do this again. Let’s obviously, I always like to think of it, the story of a woman gets to work late and she’s flustered and she’s got a speeding ticket because she’s sped to work just to get there on time and she’s super frustrated. So the rest of the day she’s super grumpy with everyone.
But if we look back, what actually happened was why she was late, she underestimated how long it would take her to get to work. And even before that, the reason why she left so late is because she overslept. And why did she over sleep is because she ignored her alarm clock. Why did she ignore her alarm clock? Because she went to bed too late. Why did she go to bed? Because she wasn’t disciplined in switching off her computer to finish the work she did. Why didn’t she finish the work yesterday is because she then procrastinated and then didn’t do the stuff. So really, tomorrow’s morning is determined on what you do today.
And you start to realize these little micro decisions we make, you have to take a hundred percent responsibility for a hundred percent of your results. It’s nobody else. It’s not the weather. It’s not the traffic cop. It’s not that the battery didn’t work. We can make any excuse possible. But at the end of the day, it comes down to our micro choices that eventually become macro decisions that eventually results.
So if you don’t like the circumstance that you’re living right now, my challenge to you is to think back of what got you there. And what do you think you need to do to undo that by making little choices? Well, excuses are a dime a dozen, right? People can make up excuses. And as I said, I don’t have patience for excuses because you can find an excuse for anything. But really what is an excuse? It’s a way of giving yourself, taking yourself off the responsibility ladder. Like, “Okay, I’m not good with this, I don’t have money right now. I can’t really invest in coaching.” I get this one a lot. And I’m like, “Well, what do you really want to do in your life? If you really want change, don’t you feel like you need to do something that’s different?” Einstein has a quote, doing the same thing over and over is called insanity, expecting a different result. So clearly ain’t working, honey. So we need to try something different.
But again, remember, your brain is wired to avoid discomfort. If you’ve never stretched yourself that way, if you’ve never taken a risk, if you’ve never done the hard thing that is required of you, of course you’re going to be in the same situation. Now, you could sit there and 10 years later you could be in the same situation. You get to decide today. Am I willing to do the hard thing for the immediate discomfort for the future gain? Or am I going to let this uncomfortable, fearful, anxious…
Feelings are Fickle
It’s like getting on a bicycle when you were a kid. Of course, you were like, “Oh my gosh, this feels weird, the whole balance thing. And how do I get my legs to work and where are the brakes. And Daddy, don’t take your hand off the back of the bicycle.” And it took a bit of practice. But do you remember what your parents said is you just got to keep doing it. It’s okay. You fall down. We get back up. We fall down, we get back up again. It’s guaranteed you’re going to fall. It’s not if but when. And eventually you got a little more confident and a little more confidence and eventually Dad took his hand off the back or Mom, whoever it was. And then eventually you find out you were riding your bike and your legs worked just fine. And yeah, you had a few bumps and bruises, but now you probably ride down the road and you don’t even think about it, like when you learnt to drive.
So it’s the same process. We have to realize our brain is always going to try stop you. You’re never going to feel ready. So you have to decide today to say, “I’m going to change and I’m going to do it starting now.”
Come and join my coaching program Unstick Your Mind today!
