Episode 79: Life Changing 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 thought you think. And that, my friends, is 100% awesome!

Hello, podcast Universe! Welcome to Episode 79 of the 100% Awesome Podcast, I'm April Price, and I am so happy to have you out there listening. You are awesome! Thank you for being here, and thanks for sharing the podcast, I appreciate it so much. Well, you guys, it happened, last night I had my first dream where I was wearing a mask. What a milestone, right? So, I guess my brain has officially adapted to life in the pandemic, it only took nine months. And it just reminded me that, like, my birthday was the very first week in April, and for my birthday, one of my friends made me a mask. And I remember thinking, like, how funny that was, right? Like this little joke on my birthday, right? I had no idea that it would actually be using that mask in my life, and it never would have occurred to me that I would be using it in November. I think sometimes it really still surprises me how much our brains believe that they know how it's going to go, or how it's supposed to go, and how in reality, all the time they are just making it up, right?

Our brains have no idea, they don't know. They don't know what's going to happen, or what could possibly happen in the world. Our brains are just prediction machines, right? They're using the past to predict the future, but it has no idea that any of that is going to happen. And I want to offer you that the same goes for what your brain thinks about you as well. Your brain thinks it knows what's possible for you, and has looked at your life through its negative, fearful lens, and it has decided that you can't have what you want, and you can't be what you want, and that you're ridiculous for trying to be different, and think you could have something else. But your brain doesn't know the past is totally irrelevant to what is possible for you. And your brain just can't predict what you can do. And that is kind of what I want to talk to you about today.

So, the other day I was looking at my calendar, and it was full of coaching appointments. And there was this phone call with my accountant to talk about my business, and like that in and of itself, that sentence right there, "I had a phone call with my accountant to talk about my business," is completely crazy to me, right? Anyway, I also had like a business strategy call scheduled with my coach, and I had all these tasks on the calendar, like write a podcast, and work on the launch of my group coaching program, and all these things on my calendar that kind of gave me this moment of awe. Because as I looked at that week on my calendar, at the end of October, I just had this mental picture of me, and my calendar to Octobers ago, when I was pretty new to being even introduced to what coaching was. And I went to this week long coaching event with my coach. And I could remember that October, how different my days were, and how differently I felt about myself, and my life, compared to just a week ago. And I was just struck by the thought that my brain did not know right at that point in my life two Octobers ago, my brain had decided that I wasn't going to achieve my dreams at that point in my life.

3:57
Let's be honest, I wasn't even sure what my dreams were. My brain had pretty much decided that I was hard to live with, and I always would be. It had decided that I couldn't change, and that I had failed at almost everything, at least at all the things that had mattered, and it was too late now. And my brain believed that none of this could really ever change my coaching business, my podcast, my relationships as they are, my health, all of it, none of that existed like it does now. And my brain could never have imagined this last week in October that I just lived. And what I want you to know is that your brain doesn't know any more than mine did. Your brain doesn't know what you are capable of, and it doesn't know that you can have anything you want. And it doesn't know that the future has nothing to do with the past. Your brain, like my brain, thinks that change is hard, and that change takes too long, and it's just too late.

And I want you to know that none of those things are true. Change is not hard, and change can happen fast. Now, let me clarify that, right? Because I know that change feels hard, and change, truly, the way you're trying to change right now is hard. It's actually almost impossible, right? I know, because I tried doing it that way for years. But the only reason that I couldn't create the changes I wanted was because I was trying to change what I did, and who I was without changing the way I thought. Fundamentally, the reason that my life today looks so different from the one that I was living, even two years ago, fundamentally all of that was created because I changed the way I think. The way I think about myself, and the way I think about my life.

Now, you might be saying, but, April, how can I do that? I have so many thoughts. How can I possibly change all of these thoughts? I can't even catch them all. My mind just starts thinking, and it feels like I don't have any control over it. How can I change all these thoughts? And what I want to offer you is that you don't have to change. All the thoughts are unstoppable. Brains are producing over 60,000 thousand thoughts a day, right? And a majority of those are really skewed to the negative, right? Most of them are there to point out what has gone wrong, and where there is a problem. That is the factory setting. That is the underlying programming installed into every human brain. And we don't have to manage every one of our thoughts in order to change our life. In fact, I think that just a handful of thoughts can change everything, and that's what I want to share with you today. And I'm going to try, and share a handful of thoughts that I think made the biggest impact on my life. The thoughts that change the way I felt about myself, and my capacity, and my Earth-life experience the most.

6:51
But you can find your own handful of thoughts. You can look at your own life, and the thoughts that are holding you back, and you can create your own handful of thoughts to be able to get the results you really want. I know that you have heard me say before that all of our actions, and results are just coming down stream of our thoughts, right? Every result in your life is because of the thoughts you think, and so when we can change some of these fundamental beliefs we have about ourselves, then everything downstream of those thoughts automatically changes. And that is what happened for me. You don't have to scrub out every thought and perfectly discipline your mind all the time to get real change, to get real results. You just need to adopt a handful of powerful, life changing thoughts.

Okay so, here are a few of mine. The first thought that I want to offer you is that there is nothing wrong with you, okay? And hating yourself, or wishing you were different, or thinking everybody would be better off if you could just be better is never going to work. Change is created through love. Hating yourself is not going to give you the change you want. And I know you don't believe me, I know you think that if you love yourself, and the mess that you are, and the hurtful, angry, disappointing failure that you are, then you will be stuck here forever, and you will never change, and you will be even worse than this. But I promise you that you are wrong about this. I changed more things faster by loving myself than I ever did from decades of hating myself. And this fundamental shift from self-loathing to love is the most powerful decision you can make, and the most powerful thought you can use to change. But I want to make sure you understand that I didn't change, and then get to love myself, I loved myself first, and then everything came downstream of that.

So, as you know, every human being is 100% lovable, even you as you are right now. And if you don't love you right now as you are, it's not because you aren't lovable, it's because you have put some conditions on loving you. You think you need to do things differently, or be different in some way, before you can love you. I want you to think for just a minute about what conditions you have put on loving you? What are the things that you think you need to do in order to be able to love yourself? You could even make a list of those conditions, the things that you wish you would do so that you could love yourself. And then, I want you to notice what it would be like to love yourself without any of those things, without any of those conditions. What would that feel like to just love yourself anyway? Ask yourself what would be different if I loved all of these things about me?

9:53
So, I want to give you a little example of this, but first, I want to tell you why it's possible to love anything about you. The reason that it's possible to love anything about you is that there is nothing wrong with you. Not really, right? There is who you are, and then there is what you do, and the reason that you do what you do. The reason you act the way you do is because of what you are feeling. And the way you feel is because of what you're thinking, meaning you have a good reason for doing what you do, and for acting like you. Do you have a good reason for showing up in the world, and in your life the way you do? But what you do is just choices, it isn't you, right? It's not that you're just a generally terrible, broken, unlovable, flawed person. It's that you have had thoughts, and feelings, driving actions that you don't really like. But that doesn't mean you aren't loved. You are just a human taking action, because of thoughts, and feelings that you haven't examined. And sometimes, yes, that makes a mess, but that's okay, you are still 100% lovable. So, let me see if I can kind of show you this better with an example.

So, one of the conditions to loving myself that I had set up was that I needed to be more loving. It's kind of ironic. I thought I needed to be more loving to others before I could love myself. I would get irritated with people that I loved, and then I would kind of ice them out, and I really hated this about myself. And the more I hated myself for this, the more irritated I would get at myself, the more angry I would get at myself. And this only made me more prickly, and irritated around the people I loved. So, like I said, I made this decision to give up all the conditions I had on loving myself, right? Not waiting to be different before I loved myself, my coach had said, "Look, you've tried to change, and be different by hating yourself for years. Why don't we try it my way? Why don't you try loving yourself? You have nothing to lose." So, I did. I was doing this experiment, I was trying to love myself, and seeing what a difference it would make in my life. So, I decided to love all these parts of me that I thought were unlovable. And I decided to love this part, the part that didn't really do a good job loving other people, the part that got irritated and iced other people out, and made a big deal about things, right? I decided to love that part of me, which to my brain felt totally wrong, of course. But I realized that hating myself was not making me change, it was only compounding the problem.

And so, I just decided to go all in on loving this part of me, right? I had nothing to lose. And so, not long after this decision, I remember getting irritated with David, and we were having this fight, and icing over. And I remember David saying, "You always do this, you always just shut down." And I knew he was right, and I saw in that moment that I had a choice, that I could either love this about me, or I could hate this about me. And I knew that I had committed to love it. And so, I just said, "I know, right? I always do." And then I smiled, and he just looked at me, and we started laughing, right? And I just had so much compassion for myself in that moment, because I could see exactly why I was doing what I was doing. I could see how the actions to ice David out had come, because I chose to think certain thoughts about him. And it just made so much sense to me in that moment. And I just decided that I could love me even when I did that, even when I chose thoughts that didn't serve me, and made me show up like this, even when I don't act like I want to, it is still possible to love myself completely, because I am not my actions. I'm not even the thoughts, or the feelings that created the actions, I am just me making a choice. I chose a thought, and that drove everything else, and I can still love me.

That is still an option. And seeing that I could still love me, no matter my choices, made me feel like choosing differently a lot more often. Compassion for me, love for me, having grace for myself, made it so much easier to choose compassion, and loving, and grace filled thoughts for other people. And this works in all the areas of my life as well. Loving the way I spent my money made me make different choices with my money, loving my body made me make different choices about how I took care of my body. Even loving the way that I had tried to obey, and failed, made me think differently about the choices I made in my spiritual practice. When you can see that there is you, and that you are just making choices, you don't have to condemn yourself for those choices. And from that loving place, you can make any other choice you want. I'm telling you, love is the way. Learning to love myself despite my choices, changed so many of those choices.

15:09
Moving forward, loving yourself is always available. And when you find something about yourself that you think is hard to love, ask yourself, is there ever a time when love is not a good choice? What would be different for me if I just loved this about me? Loving yourself is a powerful thought that can change so many of the other choices in your life.

Okay, the next thought that changed so much about my life was the thought that, in life there is always discomfort, no matter what, right? That it's always 50/50. And then, not only is it totally okay to feel bad, there's actually no way to undo the human condition where we feel bad half of the time. No matter what we do, there is always going to be discomfort in our life.

Okay so, this idea is powerful for a lot of reasons. And the first thing is that once I realized that I was supposed to have negative emotion, I was able to let go of the story that I was doing something wrong because I felt bad. And that was such a relief to me. It was such a relief to know that my brain was always going to find 50% of my life negative, right? That was built in, and it didn't mean anything bad about me. It didn't mean that I was ungrateful, or bad, or doing it wrong, it meant that I was having a human experience, and that I had been designed by God this way. This thought released me from judging myself for the negative emotion I had, and it also made it so that I could stop avoiding all this negative emotion in my life, right? So, as humans, we do all these things to try and avoid feeling bad, to try and avoid negative emotion. And so, many of the habits that I had that had negative consequences like overspending, or overeating, or over entertaining myself, all of those habits were created because I was trying to avoid feeling bad. And when I no longer had to feel bad about feeling bad, it exposed those habits for what they were. Just distractions from feeling bad. Just a way to buffer away from feeling bad, which allowed me to give a lot of those up.

And the other powerful thing about this for me is that I realized that if I couldn't change the 50/50, right? And that the 50% negative parts of life were built into the human experience because of our brains, and because of the fall, if there was always going to be discomfort, then I might as well experience discomfort, and do all the things I was avoiding because I was afraid of how I would feel. So, for example, I want you to notice how many things in your life you aren't doing that you wish you were doing because you're scared of how you will feel, because you're scared that it might be hard, or you might feel bad, or you might have a bad experience. Like, I didn't want to lose weight, because I thought I would have to feel hungry, or deprived. I didn't want to write a book, because I thought someone might reject it, and I was scared of failing. I didn't want to start my coaching practice, because I didn't know how, and that would be humiliating. Over, and over in my life, I could see how I was avoiding doing something, because I was afraid of a feeling. And when I could say, "Hey, April, you can't take away the 50% negative that whether you do this thing, or you don't, you are going to feel negative emotion." Then I figured out that I might as well do the thing right, I was going to feel bad either way, so I might as well do what I really wanted to do. I might as well do what I came to Earth to do. So, the other day I realized that everything in my life that I'm really proud of, everything that I had to work at, and use effort for, and use energy to achieve all of those things that I wanted. They were all on the other side of discomfort, they took discomfort to get them to lose weight, took discomfort to build my muscles, takes discomfort to build my business. It takes discomfort to create a podcast. It takes discomfort to serve God. It takes discomfort to create children. It takes discomfort.

19:18
But notice that if I don't do any of those things, I don't avoid discomfort altogether, right? I don't avoid the 50% negative. It's still there. If I don't fit in my clothes, that's going to be uncomfortable. If I don't use my talents, that's going to feel uncomfortable. If I don't create what I came to create, that's going to feel pretty bad. Like you can't get rid of the 50/50 so you might as well use the negative emotion your brain is going to create either way to get the life you want to get. What you want, you only have to pay with your discomfort. And guess what, this is a price that you pay either way, which is so powerful to know. That thought changed so much for me because I started taking action, knowing that either way I was going to feel discomfort. And that has allowed me to create so many amazing things in my life.

Okay, the last thing that I want to give you that changed so many other thoughts for me is, that you can have any result you want in your life. So, I used to think that there were limits, right? To what you could expect, that it was kind of dangerous, or ridiculous, or wishful, to believe that you could do, or have whatever you wanted. But getting results is just a matter of taking action for as long as you need to take it. And I used to think that that was the part that I was never going to get right, that I was never going to be able to do. I just was never taking action. I never was doing the things that I said I was going to do. And almost three years ago now, I still remember this so vividly, I was vacuuming my family room, and I was listening to Brooke Castillos, one of her very first podcasts. And it was this episode called, "Why You Aren't Taking Action." And she explained that the only reason that I wasn't taking action was because of what I was thinking. And I remember turning off the vacuum, and sitting down, totally stunned. I wasn't taking action because of what I was thinking. Not because I wasn't disciplined, not because I was broken, or flawed, or terrible at keeping commitments to myself, or that it was just impossible to really achieve your dreams. I wasn't doing the things I wanted because of what I was thinking.

And you guys, that thought changed so much for me. I felt like somebody had given me the key to the universe, because if I could figure out what I was thinking there was creating all this in action, then I could think something else. And that was all I had to do to change what I was doing, and create anything I wanted. So, as human beings, we are obsessed with actions, right? We are always thinking about what we should do, what we need to do to get what we want. Now, in coaching, we call our actions the A line, right. We think that "A line" we think the action line is creating our results and it never is. Your actions aren't the problem, your actions are the symptom. All those actions are just coming down stream of your thoughts, which means that every result in your life is because of the thoughts you think. Your thoughts drive your actions. And that means that all of our work to create the life we want is in the T line, the thought line.

And this is such a powerful, life changing idea. Reframing things from focusing on the actions to focusing on the thoughts is where we're going to get change. So, wherever we notice that we aren't getting the results we want in our life, whether it's in our health, or our money, our relationships, or work, or spirituality, wherever you look, and where you don't like the outcomes you're getting, we can move from, I'm not doing things right to, I'm just not believing the right things. We can move from, I'm not doing enough to, where am I not believing enough. We can move from, it's not working, to what beliefs need work. And when I say our work is in the T line, I don't mean that we just like sit around thinking beautiful thoughts. We just sit around thinking hard, or believing hard. Believing is choosing. Its choosing to think about yourself in a certain way, and believing powers your actions. Belief powers difficult action.

So, I like thinking about how belief is something that you do on purpose. It's something that you grow on purpose. I kind of look at my beliefs about myself, and my life, and my capacity to achieve what I want as a three-year negotiation, that I have been steadily building my beliefs brick by brick. It's not just like a quick overnight change in one thought, or some sort of magical transformation into blissful belief. Belief is work, and I'm building my belief all the time. The beliefs that I have are hard won, I fought for them. I had to negotiate for each and every one of them with my brain. So, don't give up! Recognize that if you aren't taking action, it's not because you are fatally flawed, or destined not to achieve like other people. I used to think this, and it was never the case. If you aren't taking action, it's only because your thoughts are not powering action. And that is where your work is, in your thought line, in your beliefs. And you can start with the belief that you can have any result you want by focusing on the thought line, and not the action line.

24:57
You don't need more action, you only need more courageous thought. Decide to build your belief one brick at a time, and you can start by going to the very basics, right? To the foundation, the things you know for sure, the things that you're totally solid on right? What are you certain of? Find the thoughts, or the sentences that you don't have to fight, or negotiate for, right? That the sentences that don't bring up any drama from your brain. What are the sentences, or the thoughts that your brain can't argue with, and start there? For example, you can start with the idea that you are having a human experience and you have agency. You get to choose. You have the capacity of choosing your experience. You also have the ability to grow. You have been given gifts from God, if you can believe those things, then build from there, one thought at a time. I started simply. Even when I was first starting my coaching business, and I couldn't think like I'm the most amazing coach ever. I just started with, I can help. These tools work, and I just built my belief from there. And the deeper my belief, the bigger my impact. My belief creates my results, and your beliefs create yours. You can create anything you want if you are willing to negotiate with your brain, and fight for the things that you want to believe.

Okay so, I want to end today with something that I've been thinking about for the last couple of weeks. So there's this part in the Book of Mormon where after Christ is crucified, and resurrected, he appears to the people that were living on the American continent. And after this visit, the people had peace in the land for 200 years, right? After his visit, they had love for each other, they shared everything they had. And it was this time of amazing peace, and love, and it stayed that way for 200 years. And over the last few weeks, I have thought so much about that. I have thought about the experience that those people had, and that their experience with Christ was so profound that it changed the way they thought for 200 years. It changed the way they thought. It changed the way their children thought. It changed the way their children's, children thought, right? That's how profound that experience was. That brief interaction with their Savior changed their thoughts, which, of course, then changed their feelings, and their actions for 200 years. And I have thought about that, like, what did they think after his visit that they hadn't thought before? What did they think that the people who came after this time of peace no longer thought? And I don't know all the answers to that, but I do know that it is possible for a handful of thoughts to make a history changing, future altering, difference in our lives.

I know that changing the way we think about things changes everything else, and that the thoughts we choose have the power to create a completely different Earth-life experience for us. I know that was true for them, and that has been my experience as well. And in no way am I suggesting that the thoughts that I have given you today are as powerful as the ones that they had. But I want you to see that the only thing between you, and any life experience you really want to have, is your thoughts, and changing those thoughts, changes everything else. So, what are the handful of thoughts that will change your life? What would change everything for you if it were true? Because just so you know, you get to believe whatever you want. And if you want things to be different, they can be! It doesn't take forever, and it's not impossible for every single one of us. The life we want is only ever a handful of thoughts away. 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 one hundred percent 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!