This episode is all about mindset and thought work - specifically the impact intentionally choosing your thoughts will have on you and your emotional life right now and moving forward after divorce.
Did you know that the thoughts in your brain are not just truths being handed to you? Your brain gathers thoughts, ideas and beliefs in two main ways; through your life experiences, teachings, socialization, senses, etc and through your cognitive bias. Knowing this can open you up to the idea that thoughts aren't necessarily truth. This is great news. Once we know our thoughts are up for questioning and consideration, we give ourselves permission to decide on purpose what we want to think and believe that is in line with moving us toward what feels good and right for us.
To schedule your complimentary consult with Karin click here.
Make sure to follow and rate the podcast on your favorite podcasting app.
List to the full episode:
Grief and trauma are the two biggest struggles women deal with as they go through their divorce. It's highly likely that you are experiencing both and don't even realize what you're feeling. I'm here to tell you that it's okay for you to grieve your marriage (even if it was shitty) and it's normal to be experiencing some kind of trauma (which is essentially a disconnection from yourself - your mind, body and soul). I can help guide you through the grief in all of the forms it shows up so you can heal. I can also teach you how to ground yourself in healing so you can ease through the trauma. Schedule your free consult by clicking here.
Featured on this episode:
Interested in the Divorce Betrayal Transformation? Learn more here.
Are you lost and confused about who you are after divorce? Don't worry. I've got 51 Ways to Get to Know Yourself Again. Click here to download.
Want to work first hand with Karin so you can stop worrying about what your life will be like after divorce, and instead begin making it amazing today? Click here to schedule a consult to find out more about working 1:1 with Karin as your coach.
Haven't left a review yet? No problem. Click here to leave one.
Full Episode Transcript:
If you're looking for guidance with your mental and emotional needs as you go through your divorce, then you are in the right place. You are listening to Becoming you Again, episode number 165, and I am your host, karin Nelson. Welcome to Becoming you Again, the podcast to help you with your mental and emotional well-being during and after divorce. This is where you learn to overcome the grief and trauma of your divorce. We're going to do that by reconnecting with yourself, creating lasting emotional resilience and living a truly independent life, so that your life can be even better than when you were married. I'm your host, karin Nelson. Welcome back to the podcast. My lovely ladies, I am so happy that you're here Today.
I'm going to be talking a little bit more about mindset. It's actually been quite a while since I have done an episode specifically on mindset and being able to recognize this idea that you have a lot of control over the thoughts that you think, over what you decide to think, over the intention of where your brain goes at certain times. Now, of course, let's be real we are not 100% ever going to be intentionally deciding what we're thinking at every moment of every day. If we did that, we would not be functional human beings. We need our brain to go on autopilot Sometimes. We need our brain to be running in the background doing things. We need our brain to filter and to put things in the forefront and take some things to the back of our mind that we're not paying attention to and to as we scan and, you know, see things in our daily lives and live. We need our brain to filter some of those things in and out so that we can actually function and get things done, but on a constant basis. If you've ever actually paid attention to what is happening in your brain, you have got thoughts just running all the time, and so learning how to be intentional with certain thoughts in your life can really give you focus, it can give you direction and it can give you a sense of control over what it is that you actually want to think and believe, instead of just taking everything that your brain throws at you at face value. And this is an important step when it comes to stepping into your power, owning the truth of who you are and living a life that is really authentically you and that is of your choosing. So one of the most important things when it comes to thought work is number one being compassionate with yourself as you are learning to change your thoughts, as you are deciding on which thoughts you want to adopt and believe and embrace, and as you are trialing and erroring your way to believing new things, new intentional things that you want to believe in your life, that you want to accept in your life.
If you're not compassionate with yourself as you do this process of mindset work, you will beat yourself up. Every time you don't remember to think the thoughts that you wanted to think in the first place, you will tell yourself you're doing it wrong. You will be so mean and self-critical Anytime you make a mistake, anytime you don't think perfectly, anytime you think in your old thought pattern over your new thought pattern. If you think your old thought rather than your new one, you will beat yourself up. You will show up in a way that is very unkind, unforgiving and keeps you, actually holds you back from evolving into the new version of yourself or into the new version of the person who thinks these new thoughts that you want to adopt.
You need more help on some background of why thought work is important and what it can do for your life. Please go back and listen to many of the previous episodes in this podcast If you haven't started at the beginning, but one of the really good ones that will help you with the idea of what thought work is and how you can intentionally choose would be episode number 52, rewriting your divorce story. That's a really good to help you understand the impact that thought work can have on your life and in being able to move forward. So, as I said before, self-compassion is a huge part of thought work. It is actually, I think, one of the most important components.
Yes, of course, we have to decide what thoughts we want to choose intentionally and how we want to begin to think and believe about things in our life. But we have to also take into consideration how we are going to treat ourselves when things don't go perfectly, when we don't think about things perfectly. We know we're never going to think about things perfectly. We're not always going to get it right. We are going to go back to old thought patterns and habits easily. Even if you've been doing it for a very, very long time, you still might have those old thoughts pop up, and if we aren't kind to ourselves through this process, we will get nowhere. We will not evolve into the person that we want to become, the person that we're working to embrace.
So kindness, that's the whole point, kindness. Be so kind and loving and soft with yourself. Recognize that you're not perfect. Recognize that you're going to make mistakes and nothing has gone wrong. When this happens, okay, be loving, be gentle, give yourself a hug, give yourself a pat on the back, celebrate the moments when you get it right, encourage yourself when you get it wrong. You are doing it, you are working, you are growing and it's all part of the process. Okay, so, number one, self-compassion.
But the thing that I really want to focus on here is not necessarily like the actual thoughts that you need to be thinking or how to choose the intentional thoughts. I think those are all really important things, and I've got many podcasts where I talk about how to choose what you want to believe about your divorce, about your story, about your life, about your family, about you personally, about your capabilities, about your power, about the kind of parent that you are Like. All of these things are intentional things. We can choose to think and believe about ourselves and about our lives and about the direction that we're going and about who we're becoming, and about our past and what our past meant. Those are all intentional things, but what I really want to focus on in this podcast specifically is thoughts themselves.
So often we assume that every thought that our brain thinks is just true. It is just giving us all of the information and all the data, and it has objectively changed, gone through everything and decided well, here you go, here's the information, I've filtered it, here's the thoughts. Now you just take them as truth. And I don't think that that's helpful, because if you logically believe that most of your thoughts in general are true, or they're probably true, but some of them aren't, then you're just going to get confused about well, how do I know which ones are good and how do I know which ones are bad? And that can be an uphill battle of trying to decide which ones are the exceptions to the rule, which ones do I trust, which ones do I just believe automatically, or which ones do I have to question? One of my mentors taught me this idea that what if you just decide that it's possible that none of your thoughts are actually true? They're all up for questioning, they're all up for consideration, they're all up for this idea of should I keep it or should I discard it.
There's two ways that our brain comes up with thoughts. In the first place, like I said before, our brain is not this objectionable thing. That's just like taking all of the information and filtering it and going oh, because I see this thing, it must be true, because I saw that thing, it must be true. Here's the thought. Now, just believe it. Our brain is not objective at all. Our brain is literally just taking in all kinds of information from all of our senses and then our brain just decides kind of what to do with it. It comes in filtered through our experiences, through the way we were raised, through what we've been socialized to believe and think, and then our brain decides okay, should I bring this into awareness? Should we ignore it? Should I put it away for later? Like it's an interesting thing, and if you start to pay attention to this, you'll see it a lot more.
But I remember many, many years ago, and this has happened in many different ways, but this is just an example that's off the top of my head. But I remember many, many years ago, and this has happened in many different ways, but this is just an example that's off the top of my head, but I remember many, many years ago when I was pregnant with my first child, with my daughter, and I started showing for the first time. Everywhere I went I saw other pregnant women. It was like my brain was just like, oh, we're pregnant, okay, we're going to look for all of the other pregnant women and we're just going to bring all of those people into our awareness right now. And before that, I swear it was rare if I noticed a pregnant woman on the street, in the grocery store, at the mall, like wherever right. But once I was pregnant and once I started showing, it was like all the time I just saw pregnant ladies, like everywhere, and I was like how is everyone pregnant? This is so weird, but you'll notice this.
Maybe you buy a certain car and then you start to see your same car everywhere you go. Or like with the new lingo of the kids these days the riz and the sus and all. I'm probably even outdated on the lingo the riz and the sus and all. I'm probably even outdated on the lingo. Let's be real, I'm terrible and I don't know any of the words, but my partner's kids are teens and they say these words and these were words that I never heard, and they've been, or some of them have been around for a couple of years even Words that I never heard before. And now all I hear is these words. When I'm, you know, on Instagram or I'm scrolling, or I see a music video somewhere on YouTube or something, all I hear or read are these new words.
So once it comes into your awareness, your brain is starting to decide, like, what needs to be in the awareness, what do we need to filter? But it's not doing it objectively. It's doing it based off of the way you were raised, the environment you've been in, what you know you're around, what is going on around you and all of your senses. And then the other way that our brain gets thoughts and decides what you should be thinking about or what it should be bringing into your awareness is because of our confirmation bias. We have these confirmation biases or these cognitive biases, right. We have these confirmation biases or these cognitive biases right. This is where you only believe or agree with information that already supports what you believe in the first place, and then your brain just rejects any other information, any other evidence and from these other outside things that don't support what you already believe. So for me. I you guys know this I grew up in the Mormon church.
I was raised Mormon. I'm not no longer affiliated with that religion or any religion, in fact but I used to have this belief, much of it because of the religion and the society that I was raised in that it was a woman's job to be in the home and to raise the kids and to support her husband in his job, to be very supportive and loving and whatever he wanted to do. And if he was happy in his job, then everyone in the household would be happy. And I used to like say that, well, as long as my husband is doing something that he loves, then I'll be happy and I'll be grateful and happy to support him doing that. And I believed that. And if somebody came to me and was like, yeah, but what about your desires to work outside of the home, or what about your ambitions, or what about things that you want to do with your life outside of being the stay-at-home mom, do you have any of those and isn't that important to you? I've been like no, it's not important to me, because this is the most important role that I can do is support my husband and what he wants to do Like I truly believed that and any evidence to the contrary. I just couldn't see it.
And so we have these preexisting beliefs we do. Depending on how and where you were raised and by who and who you spent a lot of time with, and what you watched and read, you've got preexisting beliefs that will support what you already believe and your brain will just feed you that information and filter out the rest. So it's important to know that what I believe and my cognitive biases and the things that I've been raised to think and believe differ from what someone else, from what you maybe have been raised to think and believe and see in your cognitive biases and the information that you are getting that's being filtered in from your brain and society and environments and all of that. And so all of our thoughts, no matter where they are, where they're coming from, are basically just made up, and knowing that gives you the power to decide for yourself what is true for you, what is right for you self, what is true for you, what is right for you.
Once you recognize that, that's when you can start to ask questions of does this make sense to me? Do I want to believe this? Do I want to intentionally continue to believe the things that I've been told for my whole life, or this idea about this thing or this idea about myself, or do I want to start to question it and bring it into my consciousness and decide if this is true, if I want to discard this, if there's something else, I want to intentionally start to work on believing, because the more we're willing to step away from the idea that my brain is just feeding me true thoughts Like I'm so fat, how could I ever accomplish that thing? Because I'm overweight, I'm divorced, how could I ever accomplish that thing in my life Because I'm a divorced, overweight, 40 something year old that nobody's going to love or want ever again? Maybe your brain is feeding you a thought like that. I know mine has fed me a thought like that before. Right, and if I just took it as truth, then I would just be sad and lonely and full of grief and self hatred.
I get to intentionally decide. What if that thought isn't true? What if many of those thoughts have been fed to me by an environment that I've been raised in, have been part of my cognitive bias, that I've been seeing my entire life? What if it's not true. What if it's not true? That I'm, you know, a sad, overweight, 40-something-year-old divorcee and that means that I'm worthless? What if that's not true?
We get to start questioning our thoughts and taking a look at what we want to believe, what we want to understand and how we want to intentionally think about things moving forward. So I don't want you to become obsessed at this point of trying to prove whether or not this thought is true and that thought's not, and this thought must be true and that thought's not. We're not doing that because that's a waste of time. What we're doing instead is we're taking a look at a thought and going does this serve the direction that I want to go in my life? Is this thought good and helpful for me and the person that I want to be, the person that I feel like I am, the person that I'm moving toward becoming? Those are the questions that you want to be asking it's. Is this serving me? Is this good and helpful? Is this something I want to continue to believe, or do I want to discard it and think of something new? Believe something new, come up with a new thought to replace that old idea, that old way of thinking, that old thought. That's where you want to start.
All right, my friends, start to take a look at some of your thoughts. What if they're all up for questioning and discerning and deciding intentionally for yourself what is good for you, what gets you moving forward and evolving into the person that you are becoming, the person you want to become? That's where we need to go with this thought work. I hope this is helpful. I love you so much. Thank you for being here. I will talk to you soon.
Hi, friend, I'm so glad you're here and thanks for listening. I wanted to let you know that if you're wanting more, a way to make deeper, more lasting change, then working one-on-one with me as your coach may be exactly what you need. Together, we'll take everything you're learning in the podcast and implement it in your life, with weekly coaching, real life practice and practical guidance. To learn more about how to work with me one-on-one, go to karinnelsoncoaching dot com. That's wwwkarinnelsoncoaching dot com. Thanks for listening. If this podcast agreed with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give me a rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and for more details about how I can help you live an even better life than when you were married. Make sure and check out the full show notes by clicking the link in the description.