Episode 49: Lies I Used to Tell Myself

Hello, podcast universe! Welcome to Episode 49 of the 100% Awesome Podcast. I'm April Price and I want to send my biggest smile to each of you out there in the podcast universe.

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I recently heard an interview that Ross Edgley, one of my heroes, gave and he referenced this study that somebody recently did with cyclists. And they had these cyclists cycle to exhaustion—to go as far as they could go until they couldn't go any farther. And one group in the study was shown these subliminal visual cues of happy faces and the other group was shown these subliminal visual cues of sad faces. And like the visuals were given so fast that the cyclists didn't even notice them. But the group that got shown the subliminal happy faces were able to cycle significantly longer than the other group.

So I'm out here smiling at you. Keep going. You're doing amazing. Smile at yourself and tell yourself that you're 100 percent awesome and just keep going!

Well you guys, last weekend was my birthday and it was amazing. We had cake. We had chocolate cake and we had a dance party complete with light up balloons and glow sticks. And we got out the dance machine with all the flashing lights. And I'm sure all the neighbors wanted to come but of course because of the quarantine it was just us, but it really was so amazing. All my kids were there. It was so fun.

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And as part of my birthday celebrations, one of my daughters, as a birthday present, made this sweet little video and I had clips of my life. There were clips from my early life, even when I was a baby and I was just learning to walk. And then there were some clips from like my growing up years and then there were video clips of me with my children— when my children were babies and they were just learning to walk. And I was teaching them how to ride bikes. And I have to say that I just bawled through the whole thing.

It was so tender to me because it was such like a beautiful statement about life about the life we are living and the chance that we've all had to come here and live and grow and learn. And I was once again reminded about what a gift all of it is. What a gift it is to be human. To learn to walk as it were. To learn to love. To have the incredible opportunity to teach others to do the same.

And from where I am now, this year, I have so much more compassion for me as a human being all those other years. Like for the learning process that I experienced. And as I watched that little film, I was struck at how much I really have learned and I was touched that through most of that learning process, I was so incredibly hard on myself (and admittedly I have moments where I still am—just ask my husband) but I was given a little glimpse last Saturday into how we could view ourselves if we choose to. As flawed, yes, but also as utterly amazing as well. And just all of us learning how to walk. Every step along the way.

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And so as I've thought about this and I've thought about like if I could go back what I would tell myself, what would I tell myself at all those other times in my life, the things that I wish I had known then. The things that I have learned in the last year or two or three that have made such a big difference for me and have changed my life and the way I see my life and myself in so many ways.
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And so today on the podcast, I want to share some of these ideas with you, some of the things that I have learned, some of the thoughts that have made such a difference for me in recent years. And talk about some of the ideas that I used to think that I no longer think.

So it's funny because I was just listening to a coach talk about how all of our problems, no matter what our problem is, can be kind of categorized into one of three categories. Right? She said like we either have money problems or we have relationship problems or we have like physical problems, like our weight or our health or something like that. And so it's either money or relationships or physical.

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And literally there was a time in my life or I had problems in every single category. I had money problems. I had relationship problems. And I had physical problems. Like check, check, check. Right? All I had were problems.

And that is because when we boil all these down—money problems, relationship problems, physical problems—all of these problems were created by only one problem: thought problems.

So I want you to kind of think about this in terms of like referred pain. So referred pain is where you have pain in one area of the body but it manifests itself in another part of the body. So over my lifetime I have had some pretty significant health challenges. And often when I'm in the middle of one of these and having lots of pain, the pain can be so intense that I can no longer figure out exactly where the pain is coming from.

00:05:31:27 - 00:06:01:23
So in fact in this little video that my daughter made in one of the scenes was this moment in the hospital after Savannah was born. And I remembered in that moment watching it how uncomfortable and how much pain I was in in that moment. So I had gotten a spinal headache from the epidural but at the time I didn't know that's what was causing the pain. All I knew was that my neck and my shoulders hurt so bad. I kept telling my husband like, "My shoulders are killing me," right? And the pain was so intense that I was actually nauseated.

I kept thinking like maybe I had dislocated my shoulder or my collarbone or something in childbirth. So I was talking to my sister-in-law about it and talking to her about this pain and her mom was a nurse and kind of overheard us and she said, "Does your head hurt?" And I was like, "Yeah my head hurts," right?

So when she asked me that question I was like, "Oh my gosh! It's my head!" Like the whole time I thought there was something wrong with my shoulders, like maybe I dislocated something or broken something, and it turns out the whole time I had this really bad headache. Right? And until she said, "Does your head hurt?" I had no idea that it was my head that was the problem.

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And in the same way we often think that our problems are our money or our relationships or our physical health, but this is actually just referred pain. The real problem is our thoughts that is creating the pain.

And what's amazing to realize is that, fundamentally, the only difference between me today and me a few years ago is the thoughts that I'm thinking. So most of the things that I choose on purpose to think on a daily basis today, I never used to think. And in fact I used to believe almost everything that my brain offered me on default. I just believed what my brain was telling me and I believed it was true. I used to believe everything it told me about me and about my potential and about my worth and about my abilities.

And so today I want to tell you some of the lies that I used to tell myself in the hopes that you will be able to recognize similar lies that your brain is telling you, right? Because our brains, let me tell you, are not really super creative when it comes to negative thoughts, right? They all kind of sound the same. They're like, "You're a mess. Everyone hates you and you're going to die."

So the lies my brain tells me are not much different from the lies your brain tells you. I have just learned not to believe them. And I want to expose some of these old lies that I used to tell myself that I used to believe so that you can see them at work in your own life and decide to stop believing them too.

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Okay, so the first lie I wanted to talk about, the first lie I used to tell myself, is that you are failing. And P.S. failing is bad. Right? So I used to think this on a daily basis, on an hourly basis, on a constant basis. I am failing. I am failing. Now this thought that you're failing is a lie. But we have a really hard time seeing that it's a lie because we have so much evidence in our brains that it's true.

So remember that the brain's number one job is to notice problems, to notice dangers. And our brain has already identified us and our failures as its number one problem. And so our failures are very well documented in our brain. Right? It is well aware of all the ways we're failing.

So over the last like 48 podcasts I've talked about this a lot. I've talked about how a few years ago when I looked at my life all I could see were my many, many failures. But what I didn't think then, so many years ago, and what I do think now is that just because my brain thinks I have failed doesn't mean that I have.

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I know that my brain is wrong about this. I haven't failed. And the reason that I know this is because I've learned to think about failure completely differently. And I do this in two ways. So first, I remember that the word failure implies an end. It implies like a verdict. Like the time has elapsed, the game clock has run out, and you were found lacking. Failing implies a finish line of some kind. It implies a stopping place where we can tally up and evaluate the score. And our brains are always putting an arbitrary finish line where there is no finish line.

As Simon Sinek pointed out our brains are always wanting to create a finite measurement of an infinite game. And when my brain adds up the score it always acts as a biased referee. It always rigs the game against me. It always makes sure that I always lose and it always emphasizes my failures.

But I know and I think purpose that there is no finish line. (P.S. There is no score either except the one that my brain has arbitrarily created.) So I never accept my brain's opinion that I have failed because there's no finish line and there's no scoreboard.

And secondly even if it's true that I have failed and we could prove that somehow, right, that at some point we're going to reach a point where no more progress can be made and I've somehow failed and missed reaching my expected outcome, Ilonger see that as bad or as negative.

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So let me give you a little example of this. So one of the ways that I always told myself that I was failing was in my mothering. I told myself that I had failed and that my kids deserved better, that I really haven't been the kind of mother that I wanted to be in so many ways and I had failed.

But I never tell myself that lie anymore because even though my brain has tons of evidence of all the mistakes I've made and that surely I have failed, I know that that isn't true for a few reasons.

First, motherhood is an infinite game. I never, ever, ever stop being a mother. I can't fail at something that will continue forever. There isn't going to be a place where the final verdict is in. I just get to keep growing. I just get to keep learning. I just get to keep becoming more and more the mother I want to be. There isn't a finish line. My capacity as a mother will increase forever.

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Okay but then sometimes my brain will say, "Well, maybe so," right? "But you can never get back their childhoods." Right? "There was a finish line there. There was a finish line. There was a firm 18 years and you failed at giving them a perfect childhood." And that's the moment where I recognize that even if it's true that I have failed, even if that is true, it isn't bad. It isn't negative. If I have failed, I have failed in the exact ways I needed to in order to learn and in order for them to learn. I do not see my mistakes as negative. Instead I see them as necessary for me and for them.

The thought I think is that I am here to learn and I am here to learn by doing it wrong. The lie is that we should always do it right. "I am here to learn by doing it wrong" allows me to access compassion for myself and keeps me from giving up. It actually makes me a better mother and it makes me better at whatever I'm trying to do and "failing" at.

Because the thought that "I'm failing" makes us feel ashamed and then we hide. We don't show up in our lives. The thought that "I'm failing and I'm supposed to in this exact way" makes us feel compassion and allows us to try again. And that doesn't mean that my children had a perfect childhood with a perfect mother. But they were never supposed to. They were supposed to get a 50/50 childhood with a human mother who isn't at the finish line yet.

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And I just want to add that this lie that we're failing has a little sidekick that kind of goes around with it a lot and that is that you have to hate yourself to get better. It pairs nicely with "you're failing" because once we notice all the problems that we have and the ways that we're failing, we think then we have to hate ourselves and all these things about ourselves, beat ourselves up or be mean to ourselves in order to change. But it never works.

And even though it never works we keep trying it. We keep trying to hate ourselves different. We try to hate ourselves healthy. We try to hate ourselves thin. We try to hate ourselves out of debt. We try to hate ourselves into loving other people, right? It's all a lie because hate and shame and blame and disgust are feelings that never produce positive powerful action. They just can't. If we want to succeed we have to keep trying and trying will need to be powered by positive hopeful confident emotions.

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Okay, the next lie that I used to tell myself was "You can't change." And again just like the first thought about failing at everything my brain had filing cabinets full of evidence proving to me "you can't change." Like how many goals had I set in my lifetime? How many times have I repented? How many resolutions and promises have I made? How many plans and programs and new starts have I created for myself only to over and over and over again let myself down and disappoint myself?

Even a few years ago, I believe that change was hard. And deep down I believed that maybe it wasn't even hard, maybe it was impossible, at least for me, right? At least for someone as flawed and undisciplined and inconsistent as me. Like maybe other people could change but I had tried and I just couldn't.

But here's the thing. I was always trying to change in the wrong way. I was always trying to change my actions. I was always trying to act differently in order to be different. I was trying to work my way from who I was to who I wanted to be, right? So I'd try a different diet. I'd try a different budget. I'd try a new habit journal. I'd start a new exercise routine or an or new scripture reading program.

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I'd like recommit to not yelling, right, or I'd give myself time outs. I'd try and meditate. I tried all these things. I once tried this Ben Franklin plan of like acquiring all the virtues by recording little dots in a journal at the end of the day.

And what I didn't know then, what I do know now, is that changing our actions only works as long as our willpower holds out. When I changed my actions without changing my thoughts, I was always working against myself. And it was only going to last so long. What I didn't know then, was that I wasn't broken or incapable of change. I was simply going about it in the wrong way.

I didn't know that my work to change only needed to be in changing my thoughts. Change is possible if you can change your mind about yourself first. Change is not only possible, it's actually easy, if you find the right thoughts to think and practice until you believe them.

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Okay, the third lie I used to tell myself is "You can't you can't accomplish what you want and it's way too late to try."

So we all have dreams. We all have nudges from the universe—things that we've always wanted to do or create in our lives. But achieving those things required so much from us and our brain was always telling us that we that we couldn't for so many reasons. And we just started to like ignore those dreams. We started to just settle for the life we were living and just kind of accepted the fact that we were never going to achieve those things. We tell ourselves we can't do the things we've always wanted to do and one of the biggest reasons for that is that it's just too late.

We can't have the marriage we wanted when we got married. It's just too late. Too much has happened. We can't accomplish the goal that we've had for decades. It's just too late. We can't lose way and get in shape and change our bodies. It's like too late. We can't start our business, we can't get out of debt. We can't have the life we want. It's just too late for us. That's the lie our brain is always telling us

And I never tell myself this anymore. I tell myself the truth. The truth is I can do anything. I'm willing to try. I tell myself there are no time limits. There is just the life I have and the time is going to pass either way. Either I can have the life I want or I can choose not to. But the time is going to pass either way.

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So we have some friends who came to live in the United States from Mexico and before they came here it took them seven years to apply and to receive their documents in order to be able to come legally. And when I asked my friend about it she told me that she knew so many people, who when they realized that the process took years and years and years, they just didn't think it was worth it, right? They were just like, "It's too long. It's too hard."

But she said, "We knew that the time would pass anyway. The time was going to pass anyway. seven years was going to come and go. So we just applied and in seven years we got our documents and moved to the United States."

So this is the thought that our brain offers us: that it's just too late, that it'll take too much time. And it really doesn't even make sense, right, because time is going to come and go either way. I talk to lots of people all the time who tell me like, "Weight loss is slow. I've waited too long. Building muscle takes years." As if that makes it not worth it, right, if it can't happen quickly. But the time is going to pass either way.

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And what's even more powerful to think about is that when we decide to pursue our goals and our dreams, it's not really even about achieving that thing that thing that we think we want. It's about who we're becoming along the way.

So when I decided to lose weight, it seemed like everyone on Instagram was doing it about a million times better and a million times faster than me, right? My brain kept telling me, "It's too late for you," or "You have too many health problems. You're not strong enough. You can't do this. You don't even have a history of being healthy."

But even more important than what was happening in my body—the weight loss and the muscle recomposition—even more important than all of that, was who I was becoming by showing up for myself day in and day out. Showing up and tracking my food. Showing up at the gym. Showing up when it seemed like there was like no point and no results and no progress. That was what I was really doing.

And no matter what your goal is, that is why you are really doing as well. You are becoming a person who can do anything they want.

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Okay, another lie that my brain used to tell me is the lie "I'm not worth it." That I have too many problems and that I'm not even worth fixing. I might as well give up.

I never think this anymore. I always think that I'm worth the effort. I think I'm worth investing in and I invest in myself over and over and over again. And that makes a difference in all the results in my life.

So this week is I've kind of looked back over the past year and over the past few years, I think this is one of the thoughts that has the biggest impact on my life today and how I see myself. And so for me it started small. Right? I paid my first nutrition coach $50 dollars a month. And that seemed like so much money to spend on myself.

But the only reason that it seemed like so much money was because I had such little belief in myself that I didn't know if I could get a return on my investment. I was scared because at the time I still had the thought and the belief that "I can't change." I was afraid that I was just throwing my money away and this would just be like another action plan that I couldn't follow through on.

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But not only did my coach help me question my thoughts about my physical capacity and ability to change my life, making that investment in myself started to change me as well. Like up until this point I had always thought that like, "I should just be able to do this on my own. I should just know how to eat healthy and how to exercise and I shouldn't need help with this."

But paying someone to help me signaled to my brain that I was someone worth making an investment in. I was worth a try. Improving my life was worth some of our dollars. And then like that just continued. I continued to be able to believe in myself by making investments in myself.

And about a year after that, one of my coaches, Jody Moore, offered this weeklong opportunity. It was like a coaching intensive when we could go for a week and really learn the principles of coaching that she was teaching and get some deep coaching for ourselves. When she was telling us about this coaching experience, I kind of had this price in my mind of what I thought it would cost to go and what I would be willing to pay to be able to go and to learn and to have this in-depth coaching experience.

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Well, the price ended up being almost three times the amount that I thought it was going to be. And like when I added it up it was like more than my daughter's college tuition for that year. But I wanted to go. So I paid my money and as soon as I did I thought, "Holy cow, what have I done?" Because my old thoughts that "I'm the one who can't change," and "I'm not worth it. Who do you think you are?" all came up for me again.

That week ended up changing my life in countless ways, and those changes all started and were made possible, first and foremost, because I believed in myself enough to think I was worth the investment. Because I believed in myself enough to put money down and say, "I believe in you."

It was like my signal to the universe, my signal to my own brain, that I was worth the investment. And I never hesitate to invest in myself anymore because I know the truth. I am worth any investment. I am worth never giving up on myself

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Okay, finally the last lie that I used to tell myself is that "I didn't have a choice. This is just the way things are." So for me the lie that I used to tell myself was like, "My life is just turned out like this and I didn't get any say in it. I had no control over it."

I lived where I lived and I lived how I lived and I lived who I lived with. And I did all the things that I did because I had to. And it was just like kind of on default. I felt like I didn't really get much choice. My life and all of its problems were like somehow just like thrust on me and I just had to deal with it. And this made me feel so powerless.

Like my husband was going to make choices and they were going to impact me. My children were going to make their choices and those were going to impact me. The government was gonna make laws and bills and make decisions and those were all going to impact me. The school was going to make decisions that was all going to impact me. And I was like this person without any control over my own life.

I never think this anymore. I never think this. Instead the thought I always think is "I create all of my results." Every result that exists in my life right now is because of a current thought that exists in my mind right now. Every single one. My current life is a direct representation of my current thoughts.

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And I don't use that against myself, right, because I love knowing that I created all of it. Because that means at any time that I want to create something different, if I want a different result in any area of my life, I only have to look at my thought and decide to think something else.

This is like the most empowering thing I can ever tell you. You only have the life you have currently because of the thought you have currently. It's not an accident. It's not magic. It's not fate. It's not random. It's creation. It's the way creation works. And if you want something different you only have to change your thoughts.

Okay, so those are the lies I used to tell myself. You are failing and failing is bad. You can't ever change. You can't achieve your dreams and it's way too late to have the life you want. You're not worth it. And you don't have a choice. This is just the way things are. If any of these thoughts feel familiar and they're the things that you have believed I want you to know that none of them are true.

00:26:27:00 - 00:27:00:11
So I want you to think for a minute about your own life. I want you to think about yourself in a year—you a year from now. What would your life be like in a year if you no longer believe these lies that your brain tells you? What could you change and do and create and experience, if you no longer believe that you were failing, or that you can't change, or that it's too late, or that you can't, or that you're not worth it, or that you don't have a choice? What would be different if you didn't believe these things?

Whatever you want a year from now is available to you. The time is going to go by either way. You get to decide what that will look like in a year by the thought you choose to think.

When I look back at myself five years ago. These are the things that I would tell April five years ago. I would tell her, "You are not the problem. You are not broken. You are not a hopeless mess. All the pain that you're experiencing right now is just referred pain. You think it's you. You think you are the problem. You think your life is the problem. But the only problem is the way you are thinking. The way things are is not the way things have to stay and the only thing you have to change to make that happen is your thoughts."

00:27:51:29 - 00:28:25:28
And this is what I want each of you to know. You are not the problem. You are not broken. You are not a hopeless mess. All the pain you are experiencing right now is just referred pain. You think it's you. You think you are the problem. You think your life is the problem but the only problem is the way you are thinking. The way things are is not the way things have to stay, and the only thing you have to change to make that happen is your thoughts.

Your brain will tell you that that's impossible. But I know for sure that it's not. Every area of my life is better after years of trying to change with no success. And the only thing I changed was the way I thought about myself and my life. And then all the feelings and all the actions flowed from those thoughts. The only thing I had to change were my thoughts and I can help you change yours.

Sign up for free coaching session and try it out. See what it would be like to work with me as your coach. We'll talk about where you are right now and where you want to be and I'll show you how the only difference between here and there is your thoughts and I'll help you get there if you want.

00:29:13:04 - 00:29:37:28
Stop waiting to feel better. Stop thinking that you are the unfixable, unchangeable, unworthy problem. I promise you, it isn't you. It's just your thoughts. And those are 100% optional and they are only lies that you no longer have to tell yourself. And that my friends is 100% awesome! I love you for listening and I'll see you next week!