Episode 74: Breaking Free from the Tyranny of Your Own Thoughts

Welcome to the 100% Awesome Podcast with April Price. You might not know it but every result in your life is 100% because of the thoughts you think, and that my friends is 100% awesome.

Hello podcast universe! Welcome to episode 74 of the 100% Awesome Podcast. I'm April Price, and I am so grateful that you are out there listening, and downloading, and subscribing to the podcast, and sharing it with your friends. And I'm especially grateful to know that it is helping you. This morning my brain was offering its usual helpful morning commentary and it said, "Why are we even doing this? We should just quit." And it means quit life of course, not just the podcast. It means just give up the fight, and settle in. Or mediocrity, and failure, and just be done with it. My brain is an amazing place to be first thing in the morning, and it likes to tell me that none of it matters, and that I'm not making a difference. But my brain is wrong, and so is yours. And that is kind of what I want to offer you on the podcast today. I want to give you a bit of a pep talk. I know things are hard, and I want to tell you that you are amazing, and you are doing great, and everything you do makes a difference. I have been thinking about you, and the things your brain is telling you, and I want to offer a counter argument to the one that it is feeding you. I want to give you the truth about you, and hopefully create a little podcast episode that you can go back to again, and again, when you forget this truth about you, or your brain wants to convince you otherwise.

Okay, so to start our brain has negative thoughts about us, and our life. We would all like that to stop. We sometimes think that because our brain never stops feeding us these negative thoughts that they must be true. And so, we try to do things to change ourselves, and be better in some way in the hopes that that will quiet our brain. But if you have been alive for long, and if you have been in the game of self-improvement for any length of time you have probably found that as hard as you try, and as much as you change, your brain still hasn't changed its mind about you, and all the things that are wrong about you. And my clients have noticed the same thing. Many of them have said to me, "I can totally see my power to think new thoughts, but my brain still produces negative ones. It still offers me thoughts that I'm not good enough or that I'm doing it wrong, or that they don't know how, or that I'm going to fail. How do I get my brain to stop this?"

And the answer is you don't. You don't. I'm sorry your brain is doing its job, it's going to offer you thoughts, and most likely those are not going to be positive ones. This is not the nature of the brain. I've been doing this work for almost three years now, and it tells me every morning as soon as my brain comes awake, and online enough to process thought, it tells me you're doing it wrong. You're failing today. I have never once woken up and had my brain offer me, "You're amazing, and you are helping so many people." Never once has it offered me that thought. But here's the thing, I never expected to. I know that my brain is just doing its job, but I also know that if I want to feel differently, and do different things in the world, I need to do mine as the director of my brain.

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As the thinker of my thoughts. I get to decide what I keep thinking, and I get to decide what thoughts I dwell on, and spend my time and energy thinking. The point of thought work is not to eliminate the thoughts that are making you uncomfortable or think less of yourself. The point of thought work is to liberate yourself from those thoughts from the tyranny of those thoughts, from the tyranny they have over you, and the way you are living your life. So many of us are imprisoned by the thoughts our brain offers us. Imprisoned in a way by these feelings of shame, and unworthiness, and fear that these thoughts generate, and we aren't growing in the ways we really want to. We aren't doing the things we really want to because we are being held captive by the thoughts our brain is offering us. You can do anything. You can have anything, you can be anything, if you stop upholding the tyranny of your own brain. So, how do we liberate ourselves from the thoughts that hold us back? How do we supervise, and manage our human brains?

So, today I want to give you a tool to help you. And then, I want to offer you a bunch of alternative thoughts, and ways to think about yourself instead. So, at first this tool is going to seem very very simple, and maybe your brain will tell you that it won't work, but I want you to try it anyway. So, when your brain offers you a negative thought, I want you to just do one thing. I want you to just add the phrase, "I am thinking," to the front of whatever sentence your brain has given you. So, if your brain says, "You are a terrible mother," I want you to simply say, "I am thinking that I am a terrible mother." Because as soon as we become the watcher of our thoughts, we automatically see how they might be optional. They kind of lose their trueness, and they lose much of the charge, and condemnation that comes along with the thought. We're able to take it from, I am this thing, no questions asked to, I am thinking I am this thing. But then it isn't tied to our identity.

So, I want you to try this with me for a minute, right? Okay so, let's imagine your brain says, "There is no way I can do all of this." What happens when you stop and say, "I am thinking there is no way I can do all of this." Do you see how it loses its unquestionable, unequivocal truthiness. Okay, let's try another one. Notice how you feel when you think, "They don't like me." And then notice what happens inside of you when you say, "I am thinking they don't like me." It opens a whole bunch of possibilities that we could be wrong. And when we do this exercise it even allows us to see that we are different, and we feel different around other people when we believe they don't like us, as opposed to just noticing that we are thinking they don't like us.

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And if it's a thought that just won't leave you alone sometimes I'll say, "I notice I keep thinking this thought, right?" Like the last few days my brain keeps telling me none of this matters. And when I say, "I notice I keep thinking that none of this matters." It takes it from this is just the way things are to, that's interesting, I wonder why I keep thinking that. So that's the tool I want to offer you today, move into the watcher, into the thinker position. What you are doing is moving yourself from taking on the identity of whatever your brain has offered you, to become the person taking responsibility for thinking the thought which automatically gives you the power to stop thinking the thought, or to think something different instead. Do you see how powerful that is? When we think the thought is who we are, or our identity, right? Like as a bad mother, or an awkward socializer, or a procrastinator, or a weak person, or whatever our brain has said, when we think that thought is our identity, we feel powerless to change it. It feels like to change the thoughts we're gonna be like lying about ourselves, or something, just making stuff up. But when we take responsibility as the thinker of the thought, I am thinking I don't keep my commitments, I am thinking I should be better, I am thinking I am not enough, or whatever it is, then we see that if we are the thinker of it, we can also not think it. Or if we are the thinker of it then we could also choose to think something else instead. We can suddenly see our choice in it, and that choice is what we couldn't really see when we just took our brains thought as the truth.

Okay so, this can be such a game changer for you, but admittedly it seems like such a subtle shift that you might think that this cannot possibly work. But it does, because it shows you your power to choose. It shows you the agency you truly have to continue thinking certain thoughts, or to stop thinking others. So, as you go through your life as you wake up to the criticism of your brain, or you go through your day and you notice your brain's negative commentary about you, or your life, start to shift it by adding that to your thoughts. "I am thinking," and it will start to change things in a big way. Because once you can see the choice you have then you can redirect your brain to some alternative thoughts. It's like I am thinking this, but also I need to remember this other thing. I am thinking this, but also, I could totally think something else.

Okay, and that brings us to what I want to do on the rest of this podcast. I want to give you some alternative thoughts that you can keep on standby. Alternative thoughts that you can think in these moments of awareness when you notice you're thinking one thing, but that you also could choose to think something else. And I hope that these are thoughts that you can keep close by, in your back pocket, close to your heart. Remember, that no matter what your brain says, these things are true, and they are always 100% available for you to think, and believe. So, you'll notice that for the most part your brain is going to offer you the exact opposite of these thoughts, and that's why I want to give them to you, so that you can know that you're allowed to believe them. You are thinking one thing, but you are allowed, and you can think something entirely different. Think about it like subverting the terrorist in my own brain. Overthrowing the tyranny of my brain. And I'd really like to challenge her authority by choosing to believe something else. And that's really important to understand, these thoughts that I'm going to give you aren't just wishful thinking. They are a choice that you can make to liberate you from the tyranny of your own skewed, human, limited judgment. So that you can get unstuck, and work towards what you really want in your life.

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Okay, so here we go. One of the tyrannical thoughts that the brain offers us all the time is that, you're doing it wrong, and then, you're never going to get it right. That you're failing as a human, and doing it all really badly. So, the first alternative thought that I want to give you is that, you are doing it right. Always, you are always doing it right. It was always supposed to go the way it is, and you are doing it exactly right. So, I know already you might have some resistance to this thought, but I want to start with a little story to explain this thought because I'm going to be using the words right, and wrong here a lot for the next couple of minutes, and I don't mean them in the way that we usually think about them. And when we use them in a traditional sense our brain really likes to argue with this. So, let me show you another way to look at things.

So, a couple of days ago my son had a birthday, and I made him a birthday cake. Now, to be fair I am not really great at making cake. I only make cakes for birthdays and so, that doesn't give me a lot of practice. Anyway, I scoured the Internet for this perfect cake recipe with the best reviews, and I made this chocolate cake, and it was so terrible. It was so dry, you guys, bone dry! My son took one bite, and he didn't even eat the rest of his piece, right? I slathered mine in frosting, and I choked it down because hey it was chocolate cake, and theoretically it should have been good. And so, I kept eating it just because of the principle of the thing.

But anyway, for like three days afterwards my brain kept telling me I had done it wrong, right? That I'm terrible at cakes, that I'm never gonna get them right. That I had failed as a baker, and as a mother, I was always going to get it wrong. And this wrongness bothered me so much that I actually went back, and looked at the recipe, and I noticed that I had left an ingredient out. I was supposed to put in one and a half cups warm water with the rest of the liquids, right? With the eggs, and the buttermilk, and the vanilla, and I had left out one-and-a-half cups of water out of the cake. And I am no Baker, but I'm thinking probably that's why it was dry.

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So, what I want to show you is that according to the recipe I did do it wrong, according to the rules of the cake, I did it wrong. We could argue that. But what I want to show you today is that in fact I did it right. Exactly right in the sense that it turned out exactly right, exactly as it was supposed to. Given the choices I made, nothing went wrong. When you omit one-and-a- half cups of water, cake is dry, but it's not wrong in that. That is exactly what was supposed to happen. The cake was right, given my choices. The cake was right. It was the right result given the actions I took given the knowledge, and experience I had. I had done it right. And really the result is only wrong if I think dry cakes are worse than moist cakes, but that's just the thought. That's just an opinion. That cake turned out exactly like it was supposed to. It was right. Only my idea that it was supposed to be different, made it wrong. The cake was right. And if I ever want to do it differently, of course now I know another way to try it, right?

But what I want to offer you is that applying this idea to the way you are living your life can be really powerful, and it can release you from the tyranny or criticism from your own brain. So, notice that in our lives we have all these rules that we make up. In fact, I was just talking to a client today who said, "Houses are supposed to be clean." I said, "Says who?" Right? Somebody just made that up. Somebody had a thought that houses are supposed to look one way, and we all adopted that thought, we made up a rule. David and I were just watching a show the other day, and one of the characters was saying like how much she hates breakfast. She said, "It's all eggs!" And then she said, "Who decided? Like who decided the rule that eggs are for breakfast." Right?

But that's the thing it's all just made up all the rules, and ways of living an appropriate breakfast choices, and the texture of cakes are all just thoughts that someone else made up. And we have rules about houses, we have rules about bodies, and what size they should be. We have rules about parenthood, we have rules about finances. We have rules about rules even, right? Like God has rules, and we made it a rule that you should obey the rules. But notice that he didn't. He rules, and then he said we could choose. My point is that our brain uses the rules, we have to tell ourselves that we are doing it wrong. And of course, you are allowed to live your life by any rules you want. But when we make ourselves wrong, then shame starts to take over, and we can be imprisoned by it. So, our brain uses these thoughts about what's right, and what's wrong to condemn, and judge ourselves.

But that judgment is the thing that prevents us from ever doing it differently. I think it is so liberating to think you are always doing it right in that there isn't any other way to do it. It is the way you did it, you did leave out one and a half cups of water out of the batter, you make choices given the knowledge, and capacity you have in that moment and it's all right. We can stop arguing with the way we did it, or the way we're doing it, and simply decide if we want to keep doing that way without any judgment. Not because we're wrong, but just because we want to have a different experience, maybe we want to try moist cake next time. The beautiful thing about this thought that you are always doing it right is that it allows you to drop the shame you have for doing things wrong. You are always supposed to do it in the exact ways you are. Because the way you are doing it is a result of the thoughts you are thinking and the feelings you are feeling. It is a result of who you are and what you know right now. And when you know more and when you think differently, you might do it differently, but that doesn't make it wrong it's always right because it's always what is.

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So, I'm going to give you one more example of this that I hope will help, and I may have shared it before but I hope it will help you. So, in 2005, at the height of this huge housing bubble, David and I, we bought a house. David really felt like we needed to move our little family, and so, we bought this house, and then three years later the housing market crashed, and our house was worth half of what it was when we bought it. And then a couple of years after that, before the market recovered, David lost his job, and when he got a new job we had to move, and we lost the house. And all the money that we had invested in it, on the down payment in the years we had paid on the mortgage, and we had a short sell the house and not only did we lose all that money, we ruined our credit, and we couldn't buy another house. And there we were like, 40 years old, with four kids, and our brains told us we had done it all wrong.

I for one had a lot of shame about it, right? Like there are rules about being responsible adults, and meeting your obligations, and we had broken them. I'm pretty sure we had violated everyone of Dave Ramsay's rules, and my brain said, we were wrong, and you are bad human beings. But what I want to offer you is that even when you do it wrong, you are doing it right. We can't actually do it wrong because who's to say that not losing the house was better than losing the house. How would we know if it was wrong? It's always just the thought that we're doing it wrong that it would have been better another way. It's a judgment call by the brain that is making the call. And we can decide that we are doing it right, always. Because arguing that we should have done it differently, or that we are doing it wrong doesn't change things, but it keeps me stuck, and in shame. When I realize of course we were supposed to do it exactly like we did, that how we do it is always right, then we can stop spinning in shame, and decide now what.

And this applies to every area of your life even the ways you are behaving and acting in your relationships. If you make yourself right in whatever you do, you can drop the shame, and judgment long enough to show yourself other options. For example, I have a client who gets really irritated at her sister-in-law, and she tells herself that she's doing it wrong. She judges herself for her behavior. She doesn't like herself for her behavior, she tells herself that she isn't being a good sister, and she isn't being a good Christian, and she isn't being a good person. And this never makes her show up differently. She gets even more irritated with her sister-in- law because if her sister-in-law could behave differently, then my client wouldn't hate herself so much for doing it wrong all the time. But if she can open to the idea that she is doing it exactly right, that she's supposed to get irritated, she wouldn't have to get so mad at herself. She could stop hating herself, which would allow the irritation to not feel so threatening. And this in and of itself would allow her to show up differently, and see other ways of being.

Because notice what's really happening here, she is thinking thoughts that create irritated. And so, it's absolutely right that when she thinks those thoughts, she feels irritated. That's what happens, right? When we think thoughts, we feel feelings. When we leave out water, cakes are dry, this is what happens. Everything is right, she is doing it right. And when she stops telling herself that she's doing it wrong, that in fact it's right to feel irritated as she thinks these thoughts, then she frees up all that energy she was using to get mad at herself, and she can just use that energy to watch herself think thoughts. And after that it's an easy step to thinking other thoughts about her sister-in-law. So, instead of making yourself wrong about whatever you're thinking about that other person, make yourself right. And they get curious about how else you could think about it. You are doing it exactly right. You aren't supposed to do it any other way than the way you are doing it. If you were you would be. It's as simple as that.

If it was supposed to be different if you were supposed to be different you would be. But you are doing it exactly right. The second thought that you can believe about you regardless of what your brain offers you is that you cannot fail. Your brain wants to tell you that you can't succeed that you're never going to make it, but that is impossible. You cannot fail because Earth life is about education. The only failure possible would be not learning, and you can't not learn. You learn without even trying in every experience you have. Even if you have to repeat experiences, you are still learning. It is impossible not to. We think that learning has to include visible change in some way, but learning is just about experiencing taking in new information understanding the data. Every experience adds to our database of knowledge.

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So, I used to go to church and take the sacrament, and I think here I am again asking for forgiveness for the exact same things. I keep failing. I'm never going to learn, but in fact every week I am learning. Every experience is adding to my knowledge every moment of my life is giving me learning. It can't not give me learning. And in that way, I simply cannot fail because no knowledge is ever wasted. No experience is ever for not. We cannot fail to add to our knowledge, and learning just by experiencing our life. You cannot fail. We tell ourselves we're failing at motherhood, it's totally impossible, right? There isn't a score for motherhood, there is just the experience of motherhood, and whatever your experience is it's right. We tell ourselves that we're failing in our discipleship. We tell ourselves we're failing at finances. All of it is totally impossible, right? There is only the experiences we are having, and whatever your experiences it is, right? And you are learning our definitions of success, and failure are based solely on arbitrary measurements given to us by our finite brains by our society, right? Income, talent, outcome results, all of these things are just arbitrary, finite measurements, but they are just constructs of the human experience, and they are not relevant at all to what is really happening here. You cannot fail as a human, it is impossible.

So, finally the last thought I want you to know is that you are infinitely beloved, and there's nothing you can do about that. So, your brain says that you would be more lovable if certain things were different about you. It says that you need to change to be loved, but it is wrong about this as well. You cannot be more lovable. So, yesterday I got a message on Facebook from another coach that I met in my mastermind and he wrote, "I secretly dream of my mom coaching with you." And then he said, "I would love her to have a Christian coach, who can teach her that God loves her." This thought that God loves you does not make some of you feel better, right? You know this, but it's not making you feel better, because you think, "Well yeah, God loves the unlovable, right?" So yeah maybe he loves me, but he shouldn't, because I'm unlovable. He shouldn't love me because all these things. And we each have a list of things make me unlovable. And if we're being honest, we're pretty sure that God has his reservations about loving us as well. We sort of think that he couldn't really love us, not really. That he'd like to love us, and in theory, he does love all of his children, but he can't really love me, because I'm such a mess in so many ways. And how I know this is because you think you have to change for him to really love and accept you.

You think you've just got to be better in order for him to approve, and we kind of imagine that God is up there saying, "Oh my goodness look at how you are failing, sure you slightly disappointing human child. You are hopeless. You keep trying but you keep messing up. Luckily there is a savior and if you plead for his mercy and you try really really, really, really, hard maybe we can overlook all your problems, but you have to try harder, or it's not going to work for you." That's what we think. But notice that in our minds there is this subtle insinuating thought that you have to earn grace, and love. That you don't really deserve his love, and you aren't really enough as you are. But, because God is good he's going to endure your ugliness, and he's going to put up with your unacceptableness. This is what our brain thinks, but I think that is in direct opposition to the truth. To the way that God really loves us. As we are, 100%, not as we're supposed to be, but as we are, not because we don't have flaws, but because he knows we do.

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He sees them all but he doesn't think we shouldn't be flawed in the exact ways we are. He sees all of us who we were, who we are, who we will be. And he doesn't think we should be any different than exactly who we are right now. And he loves all of it. So, I was talking to a client about this, this week, and he said, "But doesn't God want us to obey, like doesn't he want us to be good?" And I believe he does, for us, because obedience opens up certain experiences in life that I think he would love for us to have. But I don't think that desire for us has anything to do with his love for us. His love is unlimited, and unconditional. So, I want you to think about the story of the prodigal son. So, we call it the story of the prodigal son, but that is because we are so focused on the actions of these boys in the story, right? Just like our brains are focused on our own actions, we are focused on their actions. And in the story, we are paying attention to the choices that the boys are making, but I don't think that was ever the point of the story.

I think Jesus told this parable to tell us about the father. I think we should call it the parable of the father, because notice how in the story no matter what the boys choose, the father's love did not change. The father's love was constant. Now did the father want his boys to have everything he had, yes of course he did. Did the father want his boys to have food, and shelter, and safety, and live in his house? Yes he desired them to have everything he had, but their choices were whether or not to have it to live in his house, and to have the blessings of his wealth had nothing to do with his love for them. The boys in the parable had different life experiences because of those choices. But that did not make either one more lovable, or more valuable. And if the point is learning to choose, neither one of them did it wrong either. They both did it exactly right. Your choices whatever they are will of course give you different life experiences, but they cannot change your father's watchful care. His love, his value of you. In fact nothing you do adds, or subtracts from your worth, or your love ability in any way.

Of course, you are doing it all right, you can't do it wrong. You are doing it all perfectly. You are doing it in the exact ways you are supposed to. Failure is impossible. You are here to learn, and your ability to do that is inevitable. Your brain's measurement of success, and failure are irrelevant to the growing, and learning you are here to do. And finally, you are always 100% lovable, and there is nothing you can do to change that. This is the truth.

So, I saw a quote on Instagram the other day that I loved, and it said, "I will believe the truth about myself, no matter how beautiful it is." This is what I hope you will choose to believe as well. The truth that you are doing it right. That you cannot fail, and that you are infinitely loved, and no matter how beautiful that truth is you get to believe it. And that my friends is 100% awesome! I love you for listening and I'll see you next week!

Thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. If you want to take the things I've talked about and apply them in your life so that you can love your Earth life experience. Sign up for a free coaching session at aprilpricecoaching.com This is where the real magic happens and your life starts to change forever as your coach. I'll show you that believing your life is 100% awesome is totally available to every one of us. The way things are is not the way things have to stay, and that my friends is 100% awesome!