Episode 89: 3 Mental Habits to Improve Your Life

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 89 of the 100% Awesome Podcast, I'm April Price, and I want to welcome you to the podcast today. And I also want to remind you that no matter what happens in the world, or in your country, right? No matter how disappointed, or scared, or powerless you may feel, you always get to decide how you think about things, and that is going to determine your experience of it every time.

So, I was talking to a client this week who was talking about a meme that said, "Okay, we've tried the seven day trial of 2021, and now we'd like to cancel the membership." And I get it right, like I think we were all hoping, hoping beyond hope, that things would somehow be magically better in the New Year, but we've never control the circumstance. And here's the best part, the circumstances never control our experience. We don't need it to be perfect in the world, or nice, or even normal in order to feel okay, feeling okay is up to us. Feeling is always up to us, and I'm not saying that I think you should feel okay right now, I think you should feel however you want. But that is what I want to emphasize, you get to feel however you want, meaning no circumstance can make you feel anything. And that is the greatest gift Heavenly Father gave you, your power to choose in every circumstance.

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Don't abdicate that power, your power to choose your experience, to things that you can't control, or to people who you don't want in charge of your emotional life. If we disagree with the way they do things, we probably don't want to put them in charge of our emotional lives. So, don't wait for things to change, to feel better, in any given circumstance ask yourself, how do I want to feel, and then recognize that however you want to feel is created entirely by what you think. And then get busy thinking the thoughts that will create the feelings you really want.

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And that kind of leads me into what I wanted to talk to you about today on the podcast, because I find that even when we know the principles of thought were right. Even when we understand that our thoughts are creating our experience, that's going to fuel all of our actions and give us our results. And even though we understand that theoretically that, you know, we have the power to choose our thoughts, I find that it's easy to just kind of like let our brains run the show, not use the power we've been given, right? And to get a little lackadaisical about our mind management. We get tired of doing the work that's required there, and we think like, man, this should just be easier. And "it should just be easier," is one of the sneakiest lies our brain tells us to get out of doing things, right? Like we all have things that we want to do in our lives. And when we go to do them, our brain produces a whole lot of negative emotion about it so that we won't do them. And then, there we are full of all that negative emotion in our brain says, you know what, it shouldn't be this hard. It should be easier, right? We we shouldn't feel so bad. It should be more natural. There shouldn't be so much difficulty and resistance, right? And p.s. all of this difficulty, and negative emotion has been created by our brain, right?

It's like so sneaky. The brain makes all the negative emotion, then it says, "Hey, if we're really supposed to do this thing, it should be easier, and we should feel good doing it." In fact, by the way, I send a little video every week out to everyone that's on my email list. And this month, all the videos are about the goal killing lies our brain tells us, right? And, "It should be easier," is one of those lies. It's the one that I'm going to be featuring this week. So, if you aren't on my email list, you should get on there so you can get my Friday videos. I will help you with your thought work. You can sign up at my website to get those videos, or you just sign up for the email list, or you can text the word awesome from your phone. You just text 66866 and text the word awesome, and that will sign you up, okay? Anyway, as I was saying, we all theoretically know that deliberately choosing our thoughts, and managing our minds is possible, but it isn't easy. And so, we just kind of let our brains run on default, right? So, today I thought I would give you three habits, three mental habits that you can create in your life that will allow you to have more control over your thoughts, and therefore more control over your entire life experience. And if you put these three habits into place in your life, you are going to be able to manage your mind so much better, and that is going to improve your mental health, your emotional experience, and all the results that you're able to create in your life.

Okay, so the first habit is to do regular thought downloads. Okay, now I almost said daily thought downloads, afraid that all of you perfectionists out there would think that, it's not going to work if I miss a day, right? You can miss all the days you want, and this still works, alright? So, for those of you who might be new to my podcast, I'm going to explain what a thought download is, how to do it, and why it's so important to our mind management to do them kind of regularly. Okay, so a thought download is just a really simple writing exercise. You just sit down, and you spend five minutes, 10 minutes at the most, writing down what's in your head, downloading your thoughts from your head to paper, and whatever is on your mind is allowed you to start writing. And write for five minutes, one sentence after another, without stopping, without editing, without judging it, or telling yourself, I can't write that, or I shouldn't think that, right? We just write.

Before we can change what we're thinking, we have to become conscious of what we are thinking. And when we think it's bad that we're thinking certain things, or we think we shouldn't be thinking the thoughts we are, they like to hide. Instead, we want to know what our brain is thinking, because then, we have the power to change it. We want to be able to see what's in there. Remember, you are not your brain. Your brain is an organ in your body. And its job is to generate thoughts to keep you alive, right? And it is generating sixty-thousand thoughts a day. I thought download allows you as a person separate from your brain to see the thoughts your brain is producing. Your thoughts don't mean anything about you. Your thoughts are created by your brain, whose job is to source information, assimilate it in the best way to keep you alive. And we can start to get more power at directing those thoughts towards what we really want, not just the things that are going to keep us alive when we're able to look at the thoughts our brain is currently producing.

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Getting your thoughts on paper allows you to see what thoughts your brain is having, what that organ in your body is generating, okay? So just write for five minutes, and this one act alone, or even if you don't do anything with it, I promise you will make you feel better, and give you more awareness, and consciousness of your own power to think differently, okay? Because inside our head, our thoughts feel true. Inside our head, the thoughts feel like we are creating them, that we are the thoughts inside our head. The thoughts have power to create emotion in our bodies, inside our head, the thoughts remain unexamined, and then they just get to go on creating unexamined, unintentional results in our life. But on paper we are capturing the thoughts, and then they can be examined on paper, we can see the thoughts for what they are, just words, arranged into sentences. Just words arranged into sentences in a way that the brain thinks is the best way to keep us alive, avoid pain, and save energy. That's it. And when they are captured on paper, then we can purposefully decide if we want to keep thinking them. Every thought is optional. Every thought, whether it's on paper, or in our head, right? They're all optional, but when the thought is on paper, we can play with it, and question it, and decide if we want to opt in to continuing to think it, or if we want to opt out and think something else.

Okay, so the reason I encourage you to do this regularly is that I think it's a little bit like flossing our teeth, right? It doesn't seem like it's doing much every day, but over time it keeps stuff from building up, right? It's like dusting your house, even if you live alone, and you keep a clean house, in a fallen world, the dust just accumulates, right? And you just need to regularly dust everything off, and thoughts are the same way. Our thoughts accumulate, and we just want to dump out our brains regularly, so we can clean up the ones that we don't really want to keep. And I will also just say that I do regular thought downloads, probably four, or five times a week, but I also do thought downloads every time I want to feel better. Every time I just feel terrible, and I want to feel better, I'm like I need to do a thought download, right? Getting my thoughts on paper makes me feel better because they go from being real, and true, and terrible, and torturous, to just being words that my brain made up.

Okay, so I thought I would do something brave here, and just read you one of my latest thought downloads. I did this thought download on the Tuesday when I was starting my group program. So, just last week and I'm going to share it with you because I think it'd be really useful for you to see, like what happens as I have this thought download, okay? So, it says today is the first day of my group coaching program, and I have never been more scared. I might do a very public belly flop. This morning I stepped in Augie's poop and maybe I'm about to do it again. Step in poop, and die. My brain wants to do anything but show up here this morning. It says, what if I fail? What if everyone is disappointed? What if I can't do this? What if people think they wasted their money? What if I'm not good at this? What if I crash, and burn, and I see that if the worst happens, I will still be here. I will still be me, I will still have my life. David will still love me, probably. The worst thing that can happen is a negative emotion. What if I'm willing to feel what I need to? What if I'm willing to feel humiliation, or fear, embarrassment, fraudulent, stupid, inadequate shame. Yes. There you are, my old friend. Shame. If I choose to, I can feel all these things. They are just vibrations in my body. They are just experiences I can have inside my human body.

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Okay, so I hope you'll notice that as I started that thought download like the terror, and the fear felt very, very close to me, and it felt like really true to me, and by the time I had finished it, I had started to get some leverage over it. I had started to see, this is what my brain's producing, and the worst case scenario is that I just might feel bad, and maybe I can just do that, right? And so, that's what your thought downloads will do for you, they will allow you to become aware of the thoughts that are creating the emotions inside of you. And as you like, get them onto paper, they will start to lose their power, okay? So, do a thought download, see what your brain is thinking, and then you can just pick one of those thoughts in that download, pick one of those thoughts in the paragraph, and ask yourself, what if this isn't true? What if I didn't believe this? What if the opposite is true? And just see how that feels. That will show you the power that your thoughts have in creating your experience, and then you can decide what you want to think on purpose instead.

Okay, now that leads me to the second habit I think will improve your life experience. And that is, I want you to always be working on believing something new. Okay, so after I found that work, and I kind of cleaned up the thoughts that were causing me the most pain, and making me feel the most miserable, I sort of started coasting, right? And just living my life, and doing that downloads now and then, but not really stretching my beliefs past where they were, right? And then, I started setting some goals for myself, and I realized that what I can believe about myself, the things that I can choose to believe about my life, are actually unlimited, right? That it can be more than just not feeling bad about myself, that I can actually start to stretch my beliefs to grow those beliefs, and then that is unlimited, right? That I can believe anything I want about myself, or my life if I am willing to work on my beliefs, and build the beliefs I need to create results in my life.

Okay so, so many times I will hear people, or clients say, like, I just can't believe that, right? As if that's the end of it, as if there's not an option there, right? And what I want to tell each of you is that you can believe anything, anything if you are willing to work on the belief. There isn't a limitation on any of our capacities to believe, right? There may be a limitation on our willingness to work on our beliefs, but there is no limitation to our capacity to believe. Okay, so I want to give you just a little metaphor to think about. So, recently I had a friend ask me about my training in the gym, and he asked me what my goals were. And I was like, what do you mean, right? And he said, well, what are you working towards? And that was like, Oh, well, that's an interesting idea. I'd like to not just go to the gym, to go to the gym, but to actually, like, be working towards a goal, right? And so, I've been thinking about that what I want my goal to be. And I decided, okay what would it be like if I could lift three times my body weight?

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So, there is this challenge out there that some of you might have heard of called the thousand- pound challenge, or at least that's what I call it I don't know what it's really called, but I call it the thousand-pound challenge. And for the challenge, you have to be able to lift a thousand pounds over the course of three different lifts, right? The deadlift, the back squat, and the chest press. Okay, now, obviously, I'm probably never going to be able to lift a thousand pounds between these three lifts, but I thought, like, wouldn't it be cool if I could lift three times my body weight across these three lifts right now? That probably doesn't sound like much to you, right? Like, if my brothers are listening right now, they're like, this is pathetic. But for where I am now, and for what I'm lifting right now, I think that that would be about a 30% increase in my lifting capacity, right? I'd have to increase my strength by 30% to be able to do that. And so, that is doable, if I put in the work, right? If I work specifically on increasing my capacity to lift more.

And it's no different when it comes to our thoughts, right? Anything I want to think right, anything I want to lift with my mind, any weight that I want to be able to carry with my mind, so to speak, I could work up to being able to believe it. I could increase incrementally my capacity to think and, believe something over time. And that is true for anything that you want to believe, right? Sometimes, we're just going to the gym, but we start to make new progress, and really push our boundaries in our capacity when we're actually working towards something specific. And in the same way, sometimes we're just going through our life, we're just going through the motions. But we can start to make new progress and, create new results in our life when we're working consistently toward believing, and adopting new thoughts, certain thoughts. And when we are like specifically working to make new, incredible, helpful thoughts, our new default thoughts, and we do that by how much we work on them.

Okay so, that's my suggestion that you always have a thought that feels unbelievable, that you're working on believing, right? And then once you can believe that one, pick another one. Always have a new thought that you are working on believing. And imagine how your life would change if you did if you were always pushing the boundaries of your own beliefs like one thought at a time. So, one way that you can do this is to create a list of things that you want to believe about yourself, things you wished that you believed about your capacity, or your ability, or who you are, and then just pick one of them and start to put in some time, and effort into believing it, spend some time every single day believing it, right?

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You can just start with ten minutes. For ten minutes, I'm going to believe this thing about myself, right? And then, work your way up to an hour, then half a day, right? Suspend your disbelief, and all your brain's evidence to the contrary for half a day, and just decide to believe this new thing. And eventually, it is going to become your belief. The more time you can spend thinking it, the more times that you can redirect your brain when it thinks the old thought. And when it thinks like something that contradicts the new thought, right? Redirect your brain, manage it on purpose, be in charge of what you've decided to think about yourself first, for ten minutes, or an hour, and then for longer, and put your brain to work. Finding evidence of the new thought, we ask ourselves, how is this true? How is this belief true right now? And make your brain go to work proving it true. Like I make my brain make lists right when I was creating my group program, and my brain didn't want to believe the group coaching was any good, right? I would make lists every single day to make my brain look for evidence, right? Why group coaching is the best thing for my clients, I would write that at the top of the page, "Why group coaching is the best thing for my clients," and I would make my brain find evidence, right? And I did that day after day, until I didn't believe anything else. So, I think you should always have a belief that you are working on. When that one becomes automatic, go to the next one on your list, because this habit of always having a new thought that you're working on will change your life. Think how many thoughts, you could make yours in a lifetime. Think how many thoughts are available for you to think over a lifetime of consistent, disciplined work, right. It's pretty awesome!

Okay, and then, speaking of discipline, the last habit I have for you today is the habit of not letting your brain get away with saying mean, and disparaging things about you. Okay so, now your brain means well, it thinks that if you fit in, and there's nothing wrong with you, and everybody likes you, then you're going to have the best chance of survival. And so, to accomplish this, it goes on a mission of finding all the things that are wrong about you and, notifying you. This is just what it does. The problem is it never runs out of things, right? It notices what's wrong with you, and it lets you know forever. But sometimes these thoughts that our brain offers us become a habit, and we start to think them more and more often. You will probably know the ones that I mean for you, okay? So, what is the thought that you think about yourself often, right? That doesn't make you feel better, doesn't make you better in any way and is just mean, right? So, I want you to draw a line in the sand. Enough is enough. Like we don't talk to ourselves like that anymore, okay?

So, I want to give you a couple of examples of this. So, my daughter recently graduated from college, I think I told you, and she is figuring out what she wants to do with, like, her life and what's happening next, right? And she graduated with a degree in theater studies. And right now, there aren't a lot of theaters open, as you might know. And so, when she was home over the holiday, I noticed how she kept saying, "I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing with my life. I don't know what I'm doing, right? And you notice that every time she said it, she just looked so discouraged, she was just getting more, and more discouraged. I don't know what I'm doing with my life anyway. One day when she was home, she had an interview, but because of a mix up, it ended up being an interview not with a theater, but with like a personal makeup consultant who just wanted her to sell makeup, right?

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And she was like devastated. She was so disappointed and, discouraged. She said, I don't know what I'm doing with my life. She spent the afternoon driving around crying in her car, right? And finally, I said, Olivia, you do know what you're doing. You are doing this. You are living your life. You have an apartment with a friend. You have a job, two jobs, actually, right? You're going to do those jobs, and you're going to do the best. You know how until you decide it's time to do something else, until you decide you're going to go to grad school, or until more theaters open, and you decide to work for them, you do know what you're doing. Just because you don't know every detail of your future doesn't mean you don't know what you're doing every moment right now. You know what you're doing. And every time your brain says you don't, you have to put your foot down, right? You know what you're doing. You are living your life, and you know what you're doing. You are doing this, today. You are doing it, okay?

So, the thought that I always used to use against myself was I'm failing, I'm failing no matter what. It was from the laundry, to my kids, to my church, going to do my goals. If I ever forgot everything, I would just be like, oh, yeah, I'm failing. Oh, yes, I'm failing, right? Finally, I just told myself, like, I'm done with that thought. I'm done thinking I'm failing. Whenever my brain offers it to me, I'm going to say no thank you brain, right? I want each of you to remember that you set the terms, you set the boundaries, you get a say, and you get to choose to stop thinking the thoughts that aren't serving you. I have a client that says, "There's something wrong with me," at almost every session. She says always there's something wrong with me. And in our last session, I kind of got firm with her and I said, "That is my friend you're talking about, and there is nothing wrong with her. You're not allowed to think that any more. There is nothing wrong with you. And every time your brain says there's something wrong with me, I want you to say no, no, thank you. There's nothing wrong with me."

So, find the thoughts that are causing the most destruction in your life right now. Find the thoughts that aren't allowing you to get the things you want, or to believe the things you want and draw a line. Say no more. We're done thinking that. A lot of you went on a diet in January, you said, "Okay, I'm not going to eat that thing, right? And every time your brain offers you like, "Hey, let's eat that thing." You're like, "No, no, we're not eating that right now." I want you to do the same thing with this destructive thought. Whatever yours is, every time your brain offers it to you, build the habit of saying, no. No, we don't think that any more. You are in charge. I hope that's what you see from this whole podcast.

Yes, you have a brain and yes, it creates thoughts, but you are in charge of it, okay? So, make a habit of doing regular thought downloads to get some awareness of what your brain is thinking. Make a habit of always working on a new belief that you want, of always working towards a new belief about yourself, and finally make a habit of not letting your brain run roughshod over you. If there's a thought that your brain uses against you a lot, say, "No more, I'm done thinking that." And build the habit of not allowing your brain to say it to yourself anymore. You've got to be firm. You've got to be a little tough with your brain. You are in charge, and we're done letting the terrorist in there have a say, okay? That's enough brain.

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Okay, my friends, that's what I have for you today. Those three habits will change the experience of your life. Your brain is powerful, but you are more powerful. And your abilities to create the life you want is unalterable. No one can take that right away from you, not even your own brain. 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 the 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.