Why didn't someone teach me this in high school!?! (Day 14 of 30)

Do you want to understand why you feel so crappy or amazing in any given moment? Take a look at your thoughts (not just your conscious thoughts, but also your unconscious ones). Why is this so important? Because your feelings are why you do or don’t do anything in life. They drive your behavior - all your actions and inactions.

Most of us believe that external circumstances (weather/vacation/Super Bowl/city you live in/etc.), things (cars/houses/riches), and other people (spouse/friends/children etc.) cause our feelings. So we go out into the world and try to manipulate our loved ones, purchase things, over-eat or over-drink, or take action so we can FEEL BETTER, when in reality our feelings come from our OWN thoughts!

Learning that my thoughts created my feelings and that I have control over them with practice was probably one of the biggest discoveries from my life coaching studies with Master Coach Brooke Castillo. It wasn’t the circumstances of my life that were causing me dissatisfaction over the last decade, it was the meaning my mind was attaching to the facts of my life!

Wow! Why didn’t someone teach me this in high school?! Who cares about calculus and AP History! Sure I’d heard catch phrases like “your beliefs become your reality,” but I’d never taken a course on what it REALLY meant and how it played out in our lives. I could write a whole dissertation on this.

Beliefs and Practice

What are beliefs anyways? They are simply thoughts we’ve thought over and over until we believe they are true. They usually come from our PAST and are influenced by our parents, siblings, schools, communities, cultures, and coworkers. We often let them go unexamined for decades, and rarely stop question whether they are serving us at this stage in our life.

They say 95% of our thinking is unconscious. So learning how to bring awareness to our thoughts, which create our feelings, which lead to our actions and thus the results in our lives takes practice. But once you make the connection between these components, it is easier to decide to put in the effort to make the change.

Creating deliberate thoughts doesn’t happen over night. It is a skill worth learning. We have to program the new thoughts into our brain and into our life with conscious repetition, creating new neural pathways. It takes a willingness to believe in it and commit to daily mental rehearsal.

An Example of How Jane Applied This in Her Life

For example, take Jane who had taken seven years off to care for her two kids. Previously, she worked long hours as a teacher for over a decade making $45K a year. She was frustrated and burnt out. Even though she loved the summers off she didn’t want to return to work as a school teacher. She wanted to transition careers to the non-profit sector in a mid-senior role and needed an income of $65K a year to cover her expenses, but was plagued by thoughts like “no one will ever hire me with without direct experience in the field and pay me this salary range.” This thought made her feel deflated. Feeling deflated she half-heartedly researched the non-profit education sector, applied to limited job opportunities, didn’t let her network know she was looking, and wasn’t self-confident in the few interviews she got. She wasn’t aggressively putting herself out there, creating opportunities for herself. Instead, she watched Netflix, ate cookies, scrolled on social media, and complained to her friends about having to possibly go back to teaching. This ultimately led to her not landing a job in the non-profit sector, creating evidence for her original thought that no one would ever hire her.

Fast forward six months. Jane hired a coach and learned how thoughts create her feelings. This was a GAME CHANGER. She took ownership over her results. She realized her negative thoughts were creating her feeling of deflation, so she focused on visualizing how she would feel when she landed her dream job in the educational non-profit sector. For her it was excitement. The thought that created this was “My dream job is waiting for me to find it”. The feeling of excitement gave her the energy to go out and take the actions needed get closer to her goal. She a) researched opportunities in educational non-profits, b) set-up informational interviews, c) let everyone in her network know she was looking, d) practiced her elevator pitch, interview and salary negotiation skills, e) applied to dozens of jobs, f) had her own back (i.e was kind to herself/compassionate/never made a rejection mean something terrible about herself), and g) redefined failure as learning. As a result, she eventually found a job as Program Officer in a non-profit that provided educational services to underserved communities that made her heart sing.

If you want to create new results, it starts with your thinking! You have to change your feelings first, to get the result you want, not the other way around.

✨See you tomorrow for Day 15 of 30 lessons learned from 2019!

💫 Are you a career break mom looking to re-enter the workforce, dream big and design a future you love? I’m passionate about helping you get there. Sign up for a free consult to learn how you can get started on your relaunch journey today! Click here.

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