00:00 

Hey there, this is Tanya Hale with Intentional Living and this is episode number 107, "Why Our Thoughts Are So Important." 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. 

00:23 

Alright, my friends, how you doing today? I just wish you all the best. I hope that you are moving into healthier places. I hope that you are learning things that are helping your life to be better. I know that I am. I actually had two coaching sessions today. I had one that I do with a business coach and then I had another just like personal life coach today and both of them were just so enlightening for me and I'm learning so much about me and about the things that are holding me back in my growth, in my business growth and in my personal growth, and in my relationships. It's just brilliant to be able to take a look at my brain and take a look at my thoughts. And it helps so much for me to have a coach to help me with that, but to see what's really going on up there and what I'm creating through that. So fascinating. 

01:22 

So in the course of that I had the same podcast that I was ready to do last week and was getting ready to prepare it and I got started on it today and it turned into something completely different. So I changed the title and I'm going to share with you what happened today. I just I think in the in the midst of everything that that I'm working through and trying to create in my life, this is what came out and I'm hoping that that this is what God wants me to share with you. I generally pray before I prepare my podcast because I want to share things that are helpful. I want to share things...if God can use this in some way to help somebody see something or experience something or understand something, I pray that this can be the source for you. 

02:14 

And anyway, so I prayed before this morning and it was just crazy to me how this, I knocked out my preparation for this a lot quicker than I usually do. It just felt like the ideas were there for me. And so I'm thinking that somebody out there, at some time, that this information will make a difference. And I hope it's you. 

02:36 

So let's just go ahead and jump in. The title of this one is "Why Our Thoughts Are So Important." So over the course of my life, I've read a lot of self-help books and I've been fascinated with them and I've loved learning how I could make my life better. I've loved it since my early 20s. I've been reading these books and as I look back over the past 30 years or so of reading these books, I see a pattern that really intrigues me. So many of these books jump right into the action line of teaching is how to change our behaviors and become better people and we see this pattern almost everywhere we look when it comes to self-improvement. 

03:19 

So for example, take a look at diet programs. Almost always they will instruct us with what to eat, how much to eat, and when to eat it. We will be given specific actions to perform and often we can adjust our behaviors to accommodate those actions for a time, right? But we can only exert self-control for a short time before we just can't anymore. Some studies show that we actually have a limited amount of willpower. So we may start off the day doing really good with our new eating plan and then about three o'clock we've used up all of our willpower. It's an exhaustible resource and then the plan is out the window and it's a free-for-all for the end of the evening. I know that I have done that more than once. Or we may do really well for a few months and then we start to peter out and we end up quitting or changing direction or getting distracted by a different eating plan. But just managing our self-control or our willpower is not sustainable long term. 

04:23 

So let's look at another example: planning and reworking your daily schedule. So let's say you decide to change it up and  start getting up early to exercise or read the scriptures. Doesn't it usually seem like the first week or so it can go really well, right? And then after that it starts getting harder and harder, right? We change our action line. The action is getting up at five, getting up at six, whatever. But again, long term it's not sustainable. because what we're doing is what I call "white knuckling," okay? We're hanging on as tight as we possibly can to force ourselves to change our behavior, but eventually we get tired, our grip loosens, and we let go of what we're trying to sustain. 

05:12 

Now I know darn well that I am not the only human to go through this process over and over and over in the course of our life, but in our defense almost everywhere we are told to just change our behavior and we can obtain the desired result. So it's bred into our culture that we just have to have enough willpower or self-discipline if we want to obtain our goals. But I'll tell you what, I've got a lot of self-discipline and it can still be extremely hard to accomplish the things I want to when I approach it from the action line. Just changing my behaviors does not change me. And the phrase "fake it till you make it," we've all heard that and we've probably all tried that before, right? Let me tell you, I tried that for over 20 years in my marriage and I still didn't make it. It doesn't work. Just changing the behaviors doesn't work. 

06:16 

But here's what does work. Changing your thought that creates the feeling that then motivates the action. This is the thought model that I teach you about. Learning to be aware of our thoughts and then managing them to create what we want to create in our lives is really how we're going to create lasting change that also feels good and that doesn't have us white knuckling it all the time. 

06:46 

So one of the most influential self-help books is "Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill, and this was published in 1937 and it still has a huge following. Now interestingly enough it is not a book about changing behaviors but rather about changing your thoughts, using your mind to create the results that you want to seek in your life, okay? But even Napoleon Hill was not the first to touch on the idea that our thoughts are really what create change. Socrates and Aristotle have quotes about it, as does the Bible. I'm sure most of you are familiar with Proverbs 23 7 which says "as a man thinketh in his heart so is he," or as I prefer to say "as a woman thinketh in her heart so is she," okay? 

07:36 

The concept that all living really starts in our mind with our thoughts is, I believe, an eternal principle. Think about the Creation. We are taught in the Pearl of Great Price that all things were created spiritually before they were created physically. So where does all creation begin? It begins with a thought. Everything begins in the mind. Everything we create in our lives begins in our mind with a thought. So part of what has happened though is that we have been so indoctrinated within our culture to believe that we can just white knuckle things. That if we were just strong enough, we would have the willpower to accomplish our goals. If we were disciplined enough that we would do what we set out to do without any problems. 

08:29 

But all of these self-help books, though the information has been great, it's also been wrong. It's not just about changing our behavior. Ultimately, we need to change our behavior if we're going to change the results in our lives, but just changing the behavior is unsustainable. And let me tell you another reason why it's unsustainable. When we are just focused on changing our behavior through white knuckling it, it drains our energy. We cannot sustain it because these are behaviors that use a lot of energy, but they don't replace the energy. We literally run out of energy to keep doing what we're trying to do. That's why by three o'clock the food eating plan is out the window, right? It's back to the idea that we only have so much willpower and once we've used it up that's it. We're done. It's not sustainable because it doesn't replenish itself. But when we work on changing our thoughts first, the actions become a natural byproduct of those thoughts and then they don't drain our energy but rather, this is what's fascinating, they end up creating energy. 

09:48 

If this is really the case then what's up with the tens of thousands of self-help books that focus on the action line? Why do people, "experts," if you will, keep putting out information that teaches us that we just need to implement certain behaviors and our lives will be better? Because really that's true. If we can change our behaviors our results change but the missing piece again in so many of these is that just changing behaviors is not sustainable. We have to look at the cause of the unwanted behavior in the first place. Why do I engage in that behavior? What is my reason for the behavior? 

10:31 

This, my friends, is the clinch pin. This is what we've got to start learning to focus on. Take any behavior that you want to change. Let's say that you always give unsolicited advice to your children you're always telling them what to do. That would be the behavior or the action. So eventually that behavior has a high possibility of pushing your adult children, or even your teenage children, away. They will stop talking to you about important matters or even stop coming around to your house or visiting with you because you can't keep your nose out of their business. So that's our action, right? We can learn to just stop giving advice. We might be told to just bite our tongue or to avoid those topics of conversation, to just don't talk about it and we will. But it's exhausting, right? To just try to change our behavior is really hard, and not just on us. It will be hard on our relationship with our child as well. We will start shutting down and avoid talking about things that really matter. What good does that do for our relationship? Absolutely nothing. 

11:44 

We have this relationship that we love and we want to nourish but we find that we're damaging it if we talk about the important things, because then we either give unsolicited advice or we're damaging it because we don't talk about important things and then there's no depth to our connection. So at the end of a visit, we're either exhausted because we've been holding back the whole time or we're left unfulfilled because we didn't talk about things that really matter to us. So what's the answer to this? How do we change our behavior? In this case, stop giving unsolicited advice but also nourish our relationship without walking away exhausted from white knuckling it? Here it is: the thoughts. 

12:30 

Our thoughts are the key. This is when it's so important to start recognizing our reason behind our behavior. This is what so many self-help books are missing. The understanding that just changing our behaviors doesn't last long term but understanding our thoughts behind our behaviors and cleaning them up and changing the thoughts is the real key to changing behaviors. This is why books like "Think and Grow Rich" are still around and still being sold 83 years later, because the people who understand this figure it out. Because accessing our thoughts is the only way to really change our behavior in a healthy way, but thought work is freaking hard. Most of us have no idea how to access our thoughts, let alone manage them, especially when we have 57,000 unintentional thoughts a day, 57,000 subconscious thoughts a day, okay? But thought work is the only way to do this. This is the crux of all the work that I do as a life coach. I help people to access some of those 57,000 thoughts, learn how to really see what's going on in their brain, and then learn to manage those thoughts, right? To realize that those thoughts are either helping me or they're not helping me. 

14:06 

So let's get back to our example of the parent who wants to stop giving unsolicited advice. Let's put that in the action line of our thought model. What we want to start discovering here is the thought that initiates the giving of the advice. When we can discover the thought behind it, then we can see why we're behaving the way that we behave, because it all starts with the thought. Okay, so working our way back up the thought model, right above the action line of giving unsolicited advice is the feeling line, or the F line. 

14:38 

So what feeling makes you want to tell your child what to do to give that unsolicited advice? Is it fear that they won't be successful or that they'll fail? Maybe it's you feeling out of control, like "I can't control their behavior." Maybe it's frustration because you see them making a mess of their life. There's loads of feelings that you could put there, but what we wanna do is isolate for you. What is the feeling that's causing that action? And once we identify the feeling, then we want to start to figure out what thought is creating that feeling. 

15:14 

So the thought line goes above the feeling line, right? So let's just choose one of those feelings. Let's say that it's fear that they're going to fail. So what thought are you having that is creating the fear? Very possibly it's a thought like, "I'm smarter than they are on this topic", or maybe "I see their potential and I don't want them to mess up their life." It could be any variation of something like this, but I will tell you this can be a lot of work. This is why so many people just want to white knuckle the action line rather than going into their brain to see what they're thinking and what's creating that action. It's hard. This work is hard and it's time consuming. 

15:58 

And for me, it's very often quite painful to see my raw self thinking things that are not pretty. This is why I love to do this  work with my coach because I'm always tempted to skirt around or ignore my real thoughts. And my coach doesn't let me do that. She makes me go to the places that I'm embarrassed of and that are painful and that I think are kind of ugly, right? So first we get to take a look at our thought. 

16:31 

So let's say we identified, "I don't want them to mess up their life." First of all, isn't that just a cute, lovely thought? It sounds so sweet, so nice and so loving, but really what's going on with that thought? Okay, do we think that they're not smart enough to figure it out on their own? Do we think they can't figure it out? Do we think that we will always know better than they do? Do we want to keep control of them? When we start looking deeper at these thoughts going on in our brain, we will see some things that we really don't like. We will see possibly a lack of trust in them. Or we may see that we think that they're immature or incapable or maybe not smart enough. We might even see that we think that we're better than them or smarter than them and that we have better judgment. When we start seeing these kinds of things, I know that I very often realize that I'm coming from a very self-righteous place. 

17:36 

I was the queen of unsolicited advice to almost anyone I met for probably the first 45, 50, not quite 50, but close, years of my life. Right? When I did this work and got into my brain and realized that that unsolicited advice for me was coming from a place of self-righteousness, of thinking that I knew better, I also started to realize how judgmental I was being of other people. If I think I'm better, then the judgment is that they're not as capable as I am. Right? And guess what? That is not the kind of person that I want to be. I don't want to be judgmental. I want to be loving and kind. I want to be the person that accepts other people for who they are and gives them the space to figure out their own path and walk it. God will give them, not me, what their next step is. And my thinking that I know what it should be or thinking that they're on the wrong path does nothing but show me my own things that I have to work on. 

18:48 

So really getting clear on my thoughts shows me my work. Why do I offer that unsolicited advice to my adult child? For me it was because at some level I thought that I was better than them, that I knew better, and that's my work that I have to do. This is the importance of figuring out our thoughts, because it shows us where our own work is. Okay? My work: learn how to manage your judgmental thoughts. Right? So in this instance, my own work is learning to embrace that my child is the expert of her own life. Giving her the space to be human, to make mistakes, and to learn to see her own potential. That doesn't happen when I'm all judge-y. It will only happen when she has experiences where she recognizes what she's capable of, when she makes mistakes, and makes decisions, and makes amends if necessary. 

19:49 

And then here's the miracle of thought work. When I learn to start changing out my thoughts that cause me to give unsolicited advice for new healthier thoughts, then the action line miraculously takes care of itself. So now instead of thinking "I don't want her to mess up her life," which leads me to fear, which leads me to giving unsolicited advice, I will start learning to think instead "she's totally capable of figuring this out one way or another." Or maybe I'll think "she's smart and determined, no doubt she'll work through it okay." When I think one of those thoughts, then the feeling that's created could be confidence or relaxed or accepting. 

20:39 

And when I feel one of those feelings, then the actions that naturally come aren't giving unsolicited advice. Natural actions that result from those thoughts and feelings are that I listen without judgment. I don't feel the need to tell them what to do. I accept their course of action without making it mean anything about me. And when I can step into this place of action, it doesn't drain my energy because I'm not white knuckling it. This action comes as a natural byproduct of my thoughts and it actually becomes energy creating because then I am building my relationship with them. I am being the person I want to be and that I was meant to be. I'm actually creating the life I'm seeking for and that creates energy. 

21:33 

So this concept is so life-changing. It means that I don't have to fight against myself every time I want to change. But learning to tap into your thoughts is the big hard work. It's the more difficult work and it definitely is work to learn to change our thoughts, especially ones that have been simmering for 50 years. It is the way to create lasting change in our lives and it is the way to create energy that we need to move forward every single day. The amazing thing is that this process works with any struggle you find yourself in. 

22:13 

The example we used today was a relationship with your child struggle. But it will work with any relationship across the board in your life. It will work with eating or weight struggles. It will work with daily schedule struggles. It works with organization struggles. It works with overcoming addiction struggles. Learning to step out of the action line. Stop white knuckling it and get into the thought line is attacking our struggle at the cause of the struggle. This is what we call "causal coaching." We get to the cause of the struggle. The reason that we act the way we do and the reason we feel the way we do, which is our thoughts. So get out of your A-line. Get out of your action line that causes you to white knuckle change and that drains you of your energy. Learn to get into your T-line, your thought line, that causes you to understand what your mind is thinking. Make any necessary adjustments and that creates energy and change in the way that you desire. 

23:25 

This, my friends, is the importance of your thoughts. All long-lasting change comes from intentionally choosing our thoughts and all energy that we create in our lives comes from intentionally choosing our thoughts. And that's why this podcast is called "Intentional Living," because my goal is to teach you how to intentionally choose the life you want to live and how to get there, which is managing your thoughts. Is this kind of intentional growth work? Absolutely, and I will tell you that it's actually much harder than just changing our behaviors. This thought work can be painful and ugly and embarrassing. Sometimes what I see in my thoughts mortifies me. But this is also the most meaningful and life-changing work I have ever done, and it's the work that has the long-term benefits. This thought work has helped me to become a better person. It has increased my mental and emotional health, and it has helped me to be more loving and kind and more accepting and forgiving. The work I have done here has been the best investment of my life. I've invested time, energy, and money into becoming a coach and into doing my own work here. And honestly, it has been the best investment of my life. 

25:02 

As a result of this work, I can say without hesitation that I am currently in the best place of my life. And you, my friend, are worth investing in. You are worth the emotional, the physical, and the mental price you will need to pay to have better relationships, better mental and emotional health, and more fulfillment in your life. Being middle-aged only means that we have a lot of years left. And wouldn't it be great to live those years from your best place ever? Wouldn't it be amazing to heal your wounded relationships, to heal your body and your mind, and to love yourself, to find peace in how you interact with the world, and to embrace your self-worth and increase your self-love? 

25:56 

This is our time. We have the time. We have the experience and the perspective, and I'll tell you what, we have the issues. We have a lot of issues growing up in the generation that we did, and this is the magic of our middle age, is doing this work, getting things in place so the next 30, 40, maybe even 50 years of our lives are so much better than the first half. I love growing up. I love, love, love this. Can I tell you that enough times? I think middle age is magic. I think it's beautiful, and I love the place that we are. So let me tell you this, my friends, this work is so amazing okay. I know that for me, working with a coach is one of the best things that I have ever done for myself. Investment in money for sure, but guess what? So worth it. So worth it I promise you. The time and the energy that I expend doing this work, so worth it. So worth it. I am, like I said, in such a great place. 

27:13 

So if you want to discuss how this works, if you want to talk about it, if you want to find out how to hire me as your life coach, you have a couple of options. One, you can go to tanyahale.com. On there, you can go to the "contact me" tab and under there you can get right into my calendar and schedule a time for a free consult, question and answer, whatever you want to call it. You can schedule some time to meet with me to see what this is about. Alright, or you can find me on Facebook, Tanya Hale LDS Life Coaching. You can like and you can follow me there and also there's a button that says "book now" where again you will have access to my calendar. So get on there and set something up. 

27:57 

This is brilliant work. I promise you, promise you, amazing stuff. Okay, that is it. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else. This is the most important work we can do in our lives and there's so much great free content here. I don't hold back on information. Everything that I teach my clients one-on-one, I teach you here. But the one-on-one experience is a very different, individualized, let's get down to the deep dark dirty work of our brains and figure out what's going on. That's what makes the individual coaching so important. Okay, and that's going to do it. Have a really, really fabulous day. Get your thoughts. Look at your thoughts, figure them out, and your life will be different. Have a great one. See you next week. Bye. 

28:49 

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!