Listen up! For anyone who does not know thought-work or is skeptical that it works, I am here to tell you from real life experience what it has done for me over the past three years.
Thought-work is a term we use at The Life Coach School for tools we use for managing our minds. There are many elements of a managed mind, but here are some of the themes:
- Taking responsibility for your life- your thoughts, feelings, choices, results
- Owning your own emotions (emotional adulthood)
- Setting appropriate boundaries
- Understanding that emotions are 50% positive/50% negative
- Willingness to feel any emotion and process through them
- Being able to love unconditionally
- Living deliberately- deciding how you want to experience life and making it happen
EVERYONE can continue to work on these skills and get better until the day we die. I think that is one of the reasons I have embraced it so much! I love learning. Thank goodness we have ways to keep that up through the end of life. I don’t ever want to stop.
Anyway, let me get to the things that have changed me the most:
- I’ve taken full ownership of my feelings. Once in a while, I still need to pause and remind myself that this other person/thing/event is not the cause of my feelings, but for the most part, I don’t even think of it that way as the default anymore. My new default is to ask myself what am I thinking that is causing this feeling and then how do I want to respond?
- I no longer get jealous or envious in a negative way. I’ve replaced any comparison-like thoughts with curiosity and re-deciding choices in my own life. It is a human instinct to compare, and it’s not a bad thing unless we are using it against ourselves or others. I used to find myself always comparing my life as a mother with a full time job to women who worked less-than-full-time and was utterly jealous of their time outside of work. Seriously! It used to CONSUME me. I would search for stats on how many American households had two parents who worked full time because I was so damn miserable. But all it did was drive me insane. It wasn’t until I fully embraced thought-work that I was able to completely shift that mindset.
- I changed the way I talk to myself with a truly empowering mindset. I eliminated ever saying things like “I can’t have that” or “I don’t know”. I replaced it with “I am choosing” and “I’m figuring it out.”
- I am MUCH MORE PATIENT! This was a tough one for me. Being a full time working mother means juggling a LOT of things, so scheduling, timing, and making sure nothing falls through the cracks is my jam. So when a little kid decides she wants to throw a fit about her clothing or when we have to turn off the Kindle, my patience used to go out the window, because it would “mess up” my timing. But I shifted that too! Not that I don’t ever have annoyed thoughts, but now I pause and think “I don’t have to be annoyed with this if I don’t want to.” I remind myself that childhood lasts a fleeting moment and that someday I will want to hear that little voice again. I tell myself that kids don’t have all the emotional tools yet and that she needs love and guidance the most, not a yelling or frustrated mother. Nowadays we handle it much better and we take breaks if we are getting upset and almost always make up with hugs and kisses within a short time.
I probably have many more examples but will leave you with these for now, to show you the power of mindset work and how coaching has forever changed the way I see and interact with the world.
If you would like to learn about coaching, please send me a quick email and I will send you more information. It is TRANSFORMATIONAL. I concentrate on weight loss clients, but the tools go much deeper than that. Learning to love yourself and the world is the greatest gift YOU could give yourself!
