CwL Ep122 – Dealing with negative thoughts

Hey, it’s Lisa Corduff. Welcome to the podcast where you can expect inspiring, raw, energising, and transformative conversations with people on the path of personal evolution. I’m here to really live my life, and if you are too, these conversations are just for you. I’m really glad you are here. Enjoy.

Hey, welcome to another episode of the podcast. I was doing something recently and it made me think of a, a bigger issue that I have been exploring with myself, and that is, I was looking through, we use Toggle as a bit of a time keeper in our business, and the amazing Amy on my team fills out her toggle sheet where she’s just keeping inventory of, of the different tasks that she does and the time that she spends doing them. It’s good for me to be able to see where her time is being spent, how we can utilise it better, all those sorts of things. And I’ve recently started getting a little bit more disciplined with myself and with my thoughts because I found that I was just in some patterns of thought that would just take me to places and I’d end up somewhere and just think, what <laugh>, how did I get here? What’s happening? And I’ve been teaching for a very long time about, you know, our brain loves creating these well worn pathways, these easy neural pathways. One thing leads to the next, leads to the next. It’s like this beautiful little machine and we all have them. And depending on the pathways that you’ve built will depend on where you end up when a certain situation happens. You get triggered in a certain way, you experience a specific thing, whatever it is.

And it’s absolutely possible to create new ones. But it’s kind of like we are living in the dark when we feel really out of control of them. And I’d started to feel a bit out of control of certain thoughts, like, Oh, why is this in my head? Like, why are, why is this kind of consuming me? And so I actually started to really pay attention and keep my own little inventory When this happens, what are my thoughts? Where do I go to? And it is fascinating. What’s even more fascinating is just literally 24, 48 hours of practising this brought in a level of discipline that I used to have <laugh> with, where my attention was. And like just literally that awareness that I had a choice was enough to, to shift me. But in the meantime, I, I actually started to keep notes. I kept notes like, what other thought patterns here?

And I see this so much with women in my programs and they come in and they just, they, you know, they’ve got a question to ask and you can see this is such a well worn pathway. We have absolutely convinced ourselves of certain things. And if you’ve done ready for change over the years, you’d know, like these stories often sit subconscious that they’re not, they’re not fully conscious. We just go to certain places and it can feel really out of our control until we bring our awareness to it, until we actually consciously ask ourselves What’s happening here? Let’s shine a light on this because we can trap ourselves and we cannot see that there is another way.

When I started to look at the time that I was spending thinking about certain things, ruminating, future casting, you know, worrying about things that had already happened, it was shocking, absolutely shocking. I am someone who teaches, you know, in the change room, one of the core principles that we talk about is being present, Just being right here, right now, just practising that because don’t think many of us are particularly good at it because we’ve got these amazing brains, these amazing brains that take us on journeys absolutely outside ourselves and outside of the present moment. And it can get kind of crazy in there, can’t it?

And I am noticing more and more and more the women’s questions inside the change Room, which is the new program that I launched a few months ago. It is becoming more and more apparent that with this awareness we can shift ourselves way faster than we previously thought. And all the time that these amazing, extraordinary women spend hating on themselves, feeling disappointed in themselves, feeling resentful towards others, just all around cruddy thoughts. When that attention is shifted into what choices do I have right now? What’s possible for me right now, it’s like, it’s the simplest but most profound shift that we can offer ourselves.

And it doesn’t have to lead to like world changing completely, life redefining huge big moves. It’s the small tweaks. It’s the freedom that we start to feel inside ourselves because we realise we don’t have to keep choosing the self-hatred or the self-criticism. We can actually shift into something completely different and it changes how we feel, fundamentally changes how we feel when we know we can do that. It’s just crazy though that the first place we go to is, I suck <laugh> and I’m never going to be good enough. I mean, I, I would say most of the, the questions are laced with a level of unworthiness and we spend a lot of time thinking about that, but not in really explicit ways like we’re working around going I, I see myself as unworthy of, of happiness or peace or good relationships or whatever it is.

That’s not how it is experienced usually it’s in, it’s in tiny little things that just become second nature. Like putting other people first all the time, running ourselves into the ground, trying to maintain standards that we’ve set for ourself that are ridiculous and aren’t even real. You know, maybe it comes from comparing yourself to other people because you just don’t feel settled within yourself cuz you’re busy all the time being hard on yourself. Yeah, I have women in the change room right now who are dealing with exceptional life circumstances and they’re wondering why they can’t do this and that and the other. They feel hopeless in certain areas of their life. We look at six different life areas in there and some are more challenging than others for people, some, it’s easy to get a quick win. Others are absolutely more challenging. And so that’s why we always just take it super slow, bring a new level of awareness and some simple tweaks and it’s amazing what can happen when you do that. But it’s also amazing to me, it’s just been this reminder that wow, women spend a lot of their time being really, really hard on themselves when they should be celebrating the poop out of themselves.

You know, like really showing themselves a big dose of appreciation because that leads to, I guess, a feeling of contentment, which is a delicious place to be. This is enough, I am enough, I am doing enough. It’s like, feels like a mountain to climb to get to that place for so many women because these standards that they’ve set for themselves that they’re trying to live up to, that were given to them by a society, really created by men in a system capitalism that rewards productivity and performance over everything else. Growth, endless growth. It’s like it’s counter to everything for us to be like, Nah, I’m cool. I’m actually really doing the best I can and I’m, and I’m okay with that. I’m okay with the fact that I’m not keeping a perfectly tidy home because you know, I’ve got kids with special needs or my parents aren’t well and are needing me a little bit more. Or just the general day to day <laugh>. But so many people just find in itself really challenging.

I’m actually doing great, I’m doing better than I thought I would. But there was a moment in the change room recently where one of our members was really having a real like this and this and this, and this is where I’m failing, This is what feels shit and blah, blah, blah. Like just all of it, all of it. She let it all out and because each fortnight, I, I answer questions, I answered their questions. And then she came back probably a day later and just said, actually just realised that probably the simplest thing that I could do here is ask for help before I get burnt out. It’s a choice she could make if she was taking personal responsibility for herself. She knew that it wasn’t actually about taking more on, it was about letting things go and calling in help before she got burned out. Now that right there is a revolution <laugh> in that woman’s life. And any woman who recognises you don’t need to get to the point of burnout and be completely and utterly broken by the time you ask for help. You get to ask for help anytime.

Instead of being hard on yourself, instead of spending all that time talking to yourself about how you’re not doing a great job and how you’re drowning and how you feel so overwhelmed and how this person isn’t doing this and blah blah, how about you just turn that around for a moment and look at all the things that you are doing about just shaving off some of that time and seeing it like a, like this spreadsheet, this toggle spreadsheet that we use that we’re all time is allocated. I just wonder if you were really, really honest with yourself, how much of your day is spent talking crud to yourself? And that with a slight shift in that, with a sw, with an awareness, firstly that you’re doing it and that it’s a habit and it’s easy and your brain’s going to love it. It’s probably your default shifting that requires some work, but it’s totally possible.

Showing yourself appreciation is just that one of the simplest things that you can do to shift because you might not get it from the people around you if you’re seeking validation or celebration from people around you. You might not get that in a way that’s meaningful to you, but you can certainly do it for yourself. And I think we need to make a practise of that. I’m sure, I’m sure there’s a podcast here in the many, many that I’ve created where I shared about pausing for applause concept I learned years ago from someone who was in my mastermind. Do you take time to pause for applause?

Not other people’s, but just like literally you give yourself a clap. We just don’t do this often enough, and I think we should, and I am committed to upping the amount of time I spend doing that because when I do, everything feels different. I had absolutely in the depths of the, whatever the hell, the start of 2022 was not a cracking time for Lisa. I, I had started to really just spend time thinking about things that weren’t like once I’d done it, once I’d processed, I’d then created these loops in my head and in order to get out of it, I needed to bring my attention and my awareness to the fact I was doing it, what they actually were and just that act gave me a whole new perspective. It gave me my power back.

And it’s a super helpful thing. And it’s also okay to be stuck on repeat. I allowed myself to be like, I got no energy for all the tools right now. I need to be messy. Oh, I’m going to get so sick of myself. And I did <laugh>, I did get sick of myself. And I think we can all get to that point too, but unless you kind of know that there’s options there, and I am loving seeing these women in the change room, like recognise that they’ve been caught on certain loops and that there’s simple tweaks that they can make that offer them brand new perspectives, which changes what they do and how they feel. And most importantly, it changes who they’re being. We’re pretty remarkable with everything that we do. I hope you found this helpful. Please do let me know. I absolutely love hearing from you. See you next week.

Hey, if you missed out on joining the Change Room recently, Never Fear, we have created a wait list and you can jump on that right away and be the first to hear about the next time that we open the doors. If you join the wait list, I will keep you well stopped with ways in which you can make sure that you are creating some small tweaks to your life while you are waiting for this experience to open up again. It’s possible to feel different, better, different in your life. Join the wait list for the change room and I’ll be in touch. Hey, if you are enjoying the conversation, then it would mean the world to me if you head over to iTunes and give us a rating and review. It really makes a difference and it’s my intention to get as many of us involved in real conversations that really change the game as possible. Thanks so much for your help and I’ll see you in the next episode.