00:00 

Hey there, this is Tanya Hale with Intentional Living and this is episode number 101, "Conscious Unbelieving." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:22 

Alright, hello there today. I hope you're having a wonderful experience with your COVID experience. As we, I know in here in Utah, we've gone to yellow and things are lightening up a little bit and it just feels good to not be so busy, but it's been such an amazing time. One of my friends the other day said something about, you know, "I bet in a year so many of us will be saying, 'I wish we could go back to COVID when things were like so much slow paced and we had time to spend with our families and we got all these jobs and chores done and projects finished.'" And I was just was laughing. I thought how funny it is that so many of us are always discontent with where we are. And if we can learn to just really be content with where we are and what we are experiencing at the time, wouldn't life be amazing? Wouldn't life be amazing to really step into acknowledgement and awareness and gratitude for where we are and what we're learning even when it's not what we had scheduled or planned, right? Anyway, I thought that was a fascinating thought. 

01:36 

Okay, and I'm just going to tell you, I just got off the coaching call with my coach and tell you what, this coaching process is amazing, but sometimes the things that I learn about myself, I'm so grateful to be growing up, but boy, this was an emotional one and I shed some tears and I'm processing what's going on in my head and what thoughts I'm having and how it's impacting me. It's just a brilliant beautiful process and I love it. I love it. This growing up gig is amazing but it's also challenging and difficult at the same time but I wouldn't trade it for anything. I love where I'm at. 

02:19 

So one thing that I do a lot of is I listen to other coaches coach. I do this within the same company where I got my life coaching certification because I love the concept. I really feel strongly that the way that I coach is a brilliant, very amazing helpful way to coach. So I listen to a lot of coaching so I can hear what other people are doing. And the other day when I was listening to one. I heard one of the coaches use the term "conscious unbelieving," and I was stopped in my tracks. I was like, "what an incredible phrase: conscious unbelieving." So right then I knew that this was the topic for today's podcast. 

02:57 

So let's talk about what conscious unbelieving is. So let's start by breaking it down and we'll figure out the how, the what, the when, the where, the why of the matter, right? So let's start by talking about the word conscious. This is a word that means "awake, perceiving, noticing something with a controlled thought." I love that, don't you? Wouldn't it be amazing if we could live more of our lives in this place of consciousness, of being awake in our lives, of really noticing what's happening on purpose, of really being aware? Think about your own life. How would things change or shift if you were to be more conscious, more aware of what was going on? I know that for me there's a lot of false comfort sometimes in not being consciously aware. 

03:45 

It feels really good to just go with the flow and not pay attention to anything. It's like numbing out on Netflix for the day. But the thing about that is that it feels really good in the moment, but afterwards it feels horrible and it becomes an opportunity for us to beat ourselves up, kind of like eating that third dessert, right? Good in the moment, horrible afterwards because then we just feel too thick and bloated like I ate too much, right? And choosing to be conscious can sometimes feel like work. It's like my coaching session I just got out of. It feels like work to be this conscious of what's going on in my brain and trying to be this conscious of what I'm creating and what's happening. It is work, right? It doesn't just feel like work, it is work. 

04:33 

And it requires thinking, intentional thinking. We can't just let our mind go wherever it wants to. We can't just believe everything that goes on inside our brain. We have to question, we have to get curious. The part of our brain that is in charge of being conscious is what we call our prefrontal cortex. This is the thinking, the planning, the creating part of our brain. This is the part that we need to intentionally engage and put into motion. 

05:02 

The other part of our brain that doesn't require intentional engaging and putting into motion is what we call our primitive brain. This is the part that does everything automatically and it's a really amazing part of our brain. Because this part of our brain is what engages our habits. If it notices us doing something over and over, it will create a neural pathway so that eventually we don't have to think about doing the something. And our primitive brain just says, "girl, I got you." And it takes over. That way our prefrontal cortex doesn't have to engage in any conscious thinking. It conserves brain energy and the process still gets done. And I love this part of our brain, the primitive brain, because it keeps us from entering into decision fatigue by 10 o'clock in the morning. Or if I had to think about every step I took, about every arm movement or turn of my head, I'd be exhausted even before my day had started. We have a lot to thank our primitive brain for. 

06:08 

But our primitive brain also gets a lot of crap because this is also why it can be so difficult to change behaviors or patterns in our lives, these habits. This part of our brain is very resistant to new thoughts that will require changing old thoughts. It loves our old thoughts because they're easy and they don't require any energy. Here's something else about our primitive brain that we may not totally love: it doesn't have any filters regarding what is right or wrong, what is good or bad, what is healthy or not healthy. So though this part of our brain is amazing at keeping things running at status quo, when we're seeking to make some changes, our primitive brain will fight us all the way. Constantly it will be saying things like, "oh this is too hard. I don't want to do this. I'd rather sit and watch tv. Can we eat? We can eat this tonight and then we can start eating healthier tomorrow." Because, you see, the primitive brain has no thought for tomorrow. It only thinks about what will be the most comfortable right now. It focuses on avoiding pain right now, seeking pleasure right now, and conserving energy right now. It doesn't have any thoughts for the future. That all comes from the prefrontal cortex. 

07:31 

So though our primitive brain does amazing things to keep things running smoothly, it wants to keep things exactly as they are. Any change requires energy and pain and our primitive brain's job is to protect us from expending energy and feeling pain. This is where the "unbelieving" part of "conscious unbelieving" comes in. Our primitive brain not only engages in seeking feelings and behaviors that are comfortable and easy, but more importantly the thoughts that create those feelings and behaviors. 

08:09 

For example, let's say that at some point in your childhood you had come to you this thought that you were unlovable. If you told yourself enough times that you were unlovable, your primitive brain turns that into a neural pathway or a path in your brain that is thought so easily that it doesn't take any effort at all to think about. It doesn't take any consciousness at all to think it. So here we have the thought "I'm unlovable." Our primitive brain thinks it all the time and it thinks it so much that it becomes part of the unconscious thoughts that run in the background of our brains all day long. Research says that we have about 60,000 thoughts a day. The vast majority of these thoughts are unconscious thoughts running in the background; thoughts we generally aren't even aware that we're having. 

09:02 

For example, look at the position of your body right now. Do you know how every body part got in the position that it's currently in? How does your legs get crossed or your head tilted that way or your arm on the armrest of your chair? Our primitive brain will think "my leg is starting to get tingly, I'm going to move it," and without any conscious thought we will move our leg into a more comfortable position. Brilliant and dangerous at the same time. Brilliant because it doesn't require any conscious effort, but dangerous because in other situations we really need to be aware of what thoughts we're thinking. 

09:41 

So again, let's say we have the unconscious thought of "I'm unlovable" going on in our brains multiple times a day and we have no idea. We're getting ready to go to a friend's house for dinner with a lot of other people and our primitive brain says "I'm unlovable, these people won't love me." That thought, even though it's unconscious and you're unaware of it, will cause feelings of anxiety, insecurity, or nervousness inside of you. And then when we get to the party feeling already insecure or  anxious or nervous, our actions will be one that will then avoid other people by not engaging with them or we may even go to another room. 

10:23 

And the other part is that we might also start to label ourselves as "shy" or "anxious" or as an "introvert" when in actuality our brain is just thinking that we're unlovable and our feelings and our actions are responding accordingly. And we may have never even considered that our brain is thinking that we're unlovable. We just know we don't like meeting new people. So this thought that we're unlovable has become a belief in our brain because we've thought it so many times. That's what a belief really is. It's just something that we've thought so many times that we now believe it to be true. 

11:01 

And this is where coaching work is so brilliant. Working with my coach I will discover all kinds of thoughts that my primitive brain believes and plays on repeat all of the time. And guess what? They're not true. They're not helpful. These thoughts are not making my life better. So when I discover them, when I discover these unconscious thoughts, then I can start the work of conscious unbelieving. This is when I identify thoughts that I believe that are not serving me and I start the process of training my primitive brain to unbelieve them. And this is work. 

11:43 

So let me give you a personal example from some things that I've been learning about myself in the last several weeks. I've always thought myself to be a fairly confident person, someone who felt my worth was great. And I didn't think that I compared myself to others much, if at all, really. I've never really felt like I've compared much. But during some coaching, and also some self-coaching that I've been doing, I've began to see some thoughts going on in my brain about the fact that I do compare myself to others. But generally, rather than thinking that others are way better than me, I tend to be on the other end of the spectrum. And sometimes I will see myself as better than other people. And then I began to realize that this comparison was really a judgment of myself and of other people. It was a judgment based on what I do and comparing what I do with what others do. 

12:37 

So I've always been the kind of person that I pushed myself to do things the right way, whatever that means, right? And because of that, I was having a tendency to see myself as better because I always think that I do things the right way. Like, I'll see a video on "this is the right way to peel a banana," and I'm like, "oh, I better change the way I peel my banana," right? Which really is ridiculous. But I've always had this, "oh, there's a right way to do it. I'll change it," right? So I really began working on this thought and talking with my coach about it and discovering at deeper and deeper levels. 

13:13 

And then one day, a few weeks into that process, I started to connect this idea with the concept of pride. Though, like most people, I've always identified parts of me with pride. I've always been able to see some really prideful parts. I had never connected this part of me with pride and I began to see how even in small ways I was judging other people, mostly because I was also judging myself. And a lot of the work that I've done, especially the last six months or so, has really been showing me how often I judge other people. And I think we all do. I think any time we have an opinion about somebody else, that becomes judgmental. And so realizing how often we do that has been very insightful to me. But it's always amazing to me that how we treat and respond to others is often the way that we treat and respond to ourselves, okay? 

14:16 

So then during another coaching session that I had, I discovered that my judging myself was based in ideas of feeling like I needed to be perfect. OK, now this, I have never really connected with the idea of perfectionism because mostly I connect it with how things are around me, right? Like, although my home is clean, I don't really care if it's super clean. It's rarely dusted. I'm not a duster. Things like that, I can go all week and not vacuum and be totally happy, right? I'm not a perfectionism in that way. But when I saw this propensity to judge myself, I could see that I was expecting perfectionism in myself in the form of always making the right or the best decision, always doing what was best, always trying to be the example for others. 

15:09 

So let's be clear that I really am not any of these things. But in my mind, I was trying to be, okay? So now if those things, making right decisions, doing what I thought was best, trying to be an example, if those things are founded in love for myself, love for other people, I don't think those things are an issue. But my reasons for doing those things was founded in fear, a fear of rejection, rejection from myself even, because I was always judging my lack of perfectionism. 

15:46 

So this is when I began to realize that for me to accept others in their human imperfections and stop judging them, I first need to accept me in my human imperfections and stop judging me. But underneath all of my consciousness was a thought that I needed to be perfect. And I will say that this was a shocking revelation for me. And it took me a few weeks of processing it to really even begin to understand it. And it seems like when I get to a place where I'm like, "okay, I can see this, I can accept this," I have another coaching session, right? And so then during another one, I had another huge aha, and this was the next level of my progress. 

16:31 

I began to understand that all of this perfectionism was grounded in the thought that my worth as a person is based on what I do. And this has nothing to do with our worth. But I have had this unconscious thought about it going on for my whole life. My worth is based on what I do. Quite the thought, right? And I'm starting to see the repercussions of that ongoing unconscious thought throughout my life. So here's what I ended up writing during my own thought download about 10 days ago: "I'm starting to see that I've always connected my worth with what I've been doing. Because my house is clean and I cook good meals, I'm disciplined to get up early in exercise, that I am creating my value. This is the next layer that I need to start figuring out. How do I separate my worth from the things that I do? How do I embrace myself, my worth, just as it is? How do I get to the point that I don't need what I do to make me feel my worth? To take away all the stuff, all the actions, and my worth is still there. I know that in my head. Now how do I move it to my heart?" 

17:47 

So that was the first day of my big worthiness aha. I know that our worth is not based on anything, but somewhere along the way I thought I could create my own worth by doing things. And that became an unconscious thought in my primitive brain. A thought that I would use often to create insecurity, to create judgment and comparison. Right? My primitive brain is doing all of this for me. And this is something that is particularly fascinating about our primitive brain. It can believe and understand two opposite ideas at the same time. My brain was believing that our worth is set, because I do believe that, and that there's nothing that I can do to change it, and that every person's worth is the same. And then it was also believing that I could create my own worth or increase my worth by what I did. So I was hustling and hustling to create and increase my own worth, even though I also knew that I don't have anything to do with my worth. 

18:56 

So remember, for as amazing as the primitive brain is, it doesn't know right and wrong, it doesn't know good or bad, or it doesn't even recognize intelligent or not intelligent or smart or not smart, right? There is no disconnect in the primitive brain to think two opposite thoughts and to believe them both. So for me, personally, this was all really amazing insight about myself, these ideas about my worth. 

19:25 

So now that my awareness is heightened, I am understanding the thoughts my brain is believing, and now I can start to work on conscious unbelieving. This is intentionally changing the world. the thought that I can hustle my own worth and then replacing that thought entirely with the belief that all worth is set by God and there's nothing I can do to create or destroy my worth. How do I start this process? That's what this really comes down to. If I'm going to invest in all of this coaching to get this kind of insight into what is creating my feelings and my behaviors, the important part for me is how do I change out one thought that I don't want for another thought that I do? 

20:11 

So I want you to think about a consistent thought in our brains as being like a path in the forest. If I walk that path multiple times a day for 50 years, what is that path going to look like? It will be so completely worn down, a hard dirt -packed path with no weeds, no rocks, no branches or logs, it is so easy to walk and we could probably do it with our eyes closed. This is what has happened with this thought that I have control over my worth. My brain has thought for 50 years that I can create my worth by what I do, and it really got out of hand for me. I think when I felt so out of control and worthless as a wife because my marriage was such a difficult place for the two of us and so I started doing all the things I thought would give me worth as a wife and as a mom. I started to see my value as a person wrapped up in how good of a mom I was and if the laundry was done and if we had great meals and by how happy we were. This neural pathway became so well worn and now my brain goes there without even me being consciously aware that it is going there. 

21:27 

So I've discovered for myself that my indicator for this is when I start judging myself or others. So right now I'm on heightened alert for catching myself judging either myself or judging other people, and when I do I'm working on stopping myself, realizing that I'm having the thought that our worth is based on what we do, my worth and other people's worth, and I'm intentionally reminding myself that God gave me my worth and I have no control over it, that my worth and other people's worth is set and always has been. So what I'm doing here is working to create a new neural pathway, a new path in the forest. So now I'm also very aware that my primitive brain doesn't want to do this. It takes energy for my brain to be on the lookout for judging and to consciously create a new thought. And the primitive brain doesn't like using energy. Remember that it just wants to avoid pain, it wants to increase our pleasure, and it wants to conserve energy. 

22:32 

Intentionally creating a new thought goes against all three of these. It's like forging a new path in the forest and having weeds up to my knees and rocks and branches and logs all over the place. I'm not familiar with the terrain and all of this makes this new path a lot of work. But eventually as I walk the path of this new thought multiple times every day, day after day after day, this new path will begin to get beaten down. I will have kicked off the rocks and the branches. I will have moved the logs. The weeds will be broken off at the roots and the roots will die and I'll get a hard packed dirt path that becomes easy to walk. This is my new thought, right? At some point in this process my primitive brain will start to say, "okay, this is a pretty easy path to walk," and it will stop fighting me so vigorously. At first my primitive brain is like, "oh, I don't want to walk that path. That's a hard path to walk. This other path we don't even have to think about, and this one is so hard," right? But over time, the other path, the old thought will start to grow over, and it will become more and more difficult to walk. And the new path will become easier and easier, and our primitive brain will make the new thought the go to thought. 

23:53 

But what this takes is conscious unbelieving, intentionally taking a thought that is not serving us and changing it out for a thought that does. It's a process, but it's also a process that right now I am willing to go through because the person that I really want to be is on the other side of this process. So the first step here is awareness, becoming aware of thoughts or beliefs that our brain is thinking that we realize are not serving us. For me, this is where my life coach becomes so valuable. I will take something I've been thinking about to a session and they will help me see my thinking more clearly. Things that are difficult for me to see because I'm so used to them or because they're running unconsciously in the background and I'm not even aware of them. But once I become aware, it's important to keep searching because there is often something layered beyond what we originally discovered. My process started with judging and working on that, and then eventually I connected that with perfectionism and I worked on that thought. And then that became connected to my worth. 

25:02 

And it's been an amazing journey for me these last couple of months as I've gone through this. It's one that I'm sure is not over yet, but one that I love not just for the end destination of who I will become, but for the experience of the journey that I'm having right now. I am absolutely in love with this process of self-discovery. And once we've discovered what thoughts we're having that are not serving us, also important to identify what thoughts we want to have that will service. 

25:38 

For me, this new thought is, "God gave me my worth and I have no control over it. My worth is set and always has been." This new thought is shifting me into a more compassionate place for myself and a more compassionate place for others. And I'm finding myself being less judgmental of both. And this is the person that I want to be. I want to be someone who loves unconditionally, without judgment, who recognizes other people's worth and can see the amazing people that they are. And I also want to be someone who loves myself unconditionally without judgment, who recognizes my own worth and can see the amazing person that I am. Because I truly believe this is in alignment with what God wants for us. 

26:30 

I'm not expecting this path to become well-worn in a few weeks or even in a few months. It will take a lot of conscious unbelieving for me for a long time, but I'm going to stick with it because it's who I want to be. It's the next best version of myself. And this is what growing up is. Growing up is intentionally choosing what we think so that we can become the person that we want to be. Growing up is awesome. If you would love some help from me to help you begin this process of conscious unbelieving, you can go on my website, tanyahale.com, and you can schedule a coaching session. Or, you can go to my Facebook page, which is Tanya Hale LDS Life Coaching. where there is also a link. It says "book now," I believe is what the button says where you can book a free coaching session with me. 

27:32 

I can answer any questions that you have, can talk to you about how my processes work, what I do, how you can hire me as your life coach. Is it an investment? Yes. Is it painful? Yes. I have been going through growing pains the last couple months that have been painful at times but that have also just been engaging and exciting and fulfilling. I think for the first time in my life in this last year I've started to realize what it means to grow in the gospel and to grow as a person and to really get where I want to get. It's a beautiful place and I hope that you'll join me in this process. If nothing else, then just continuing to show up here on these podcasts, invite your friends to join you on this journey because this is the journey of a lifetime. This is what it's about. And it's a beautiful, beautiful process. Okay, my friends, that is going to do it for us today. I wish you all the best in your own journey. And I guess that's gonna do it. It's an amazing journey. Take the leap and do it. Okay, talk to you next time. Bye. 

28:56 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.