00:00 

Hey there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 145, "How to Get What You Want." 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. 

00:21 

Alright, hello there, my sweet friends. Thank you for joining me today. Can I just tell you that I love this coaching stuff so much? I just got off a call with a client and I'm just like...this is so amazing. I love when my clients get that "aha" when they have these moments where they just figure things out. It's so exciting for me to help them see their brains, to help them see what's going on and to help them start to create the life that they want to create. And it's just fun. It's exciting. It's engaging and it's brilliant. To be honest with you, I just wonder what I did before coaching and how did I progress? I did progress, but I will tell you that in my own life, once I've gotten into coaching and doing it the way that I do it now, my personal progress is speeding up so much. I just feel like my growth path is so quick and so fast and I'm learning things so amazing about myself. And not that it's all amazing stuff, but some of it's pretty not good stuff, but it's stuff that is moving me forward and it's stuff that's just making my life so rich and so beautiful. And just the rate at which I'm progressing is so exciting to me and I love it. 

01:46 

And I want that for you. I want you to step into this place of growth that is exciting and engaging and enticing and thrilling and step out of settling for a life that is not satisfying to you. And that doesn't mean that you have to move across country. It doesn't mean you have to get divorced. It doesn't mean you have to change jobs. It means that we just have to start being onto our brains, of paying attention to our brains and sometimes changing our thoughts and creating thoughts on purpose. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. 

02:25 

So today's topic is how to get what you want. Our society talks a lot about goals. And goals are always coming, not always, but mostly coming from what we call the A line, the action line. So I know that a lot of coaching, a lot of books, a lot of self help books, talk about how to accomplish what you want, and they move right into the A line. "Well, you just need to start doing this. You need to start having a morning routine. You need to start having a night routine. You need to start exercising, you need to start eating this way." And it all comes in with actions that we need to change. 

03:05 

Now, actions do need to change in order for us to change, but this is what happens...When I am working to change a behavior against my will, now I may want to do it, but if my thoughts are not on board, we do what we call "white knuckling." You know how when you're holding onto something so tight that your knuckles turn white? And you can only do that for so long before you lose the strength to continue to white knuckle. I like to imagine myself hanging from a rope. And I can see myself hanging there for a short amount of time. And I would be holding on and my knuckles would be white and I would be struggling and I'm not gonna make it very long before I just cannot hold myself up anymore. And that's because when we're just trying to change things in our life from the A line, from the action line, it's white knuckling. We don't have the energy to continue doing it. 

04:09 

So I wanna talk to you about how to get what you want, how to set these goals in a way that does not create exhaustion, but in a way that creates energy, that actually creates more energy to get what we want, which is kind of an amazing thing. And we do that through a process called "thought line coaching" or we call it "causal coaching:" go back to the cause of what's going on. And basically what this means is we're figuring out the thought that will create the result we want, not the action that will create the result we want. Because if we just go to the action, we will not be able to sustain it for very long. Okay, think about maybe if you've been on a diet and you can sustain it for a while, but in a way that creates energy, inevitably, if it's just the action that you're changing, you're just eating a certain way, but your thoughts are always thinking, "oh, I hate this. Oh, this is hard. Oh, this is difficult. Oh, I don't like this," then eventually you will give up on that diet, the action that you're creating. But when we can learn to go back to the thoughts and we start putting this in a thought model, then this is  exactly how we can start creating what we want in our lives. 

05:32 

So one way that I want to teach you to do this, which is I think kind of fun, is we're going to take the end result that we want, and we're going to start with the results. So we're going to put it in a thought model, but we're going to start with the results. So let's say that the result that you want is a better relationship with your husband. Alright, so we're going to put that in our result line now. The line above the result line is the action line. So we need to figure out what actions. Do I need to create in order to have a better relationship with my husband? So we may put there in the action line "I want to be more forgiving. I want to accept him more and don't expect him to change. I want to not try to control him as much. I don't want to yell at him. I want to compliment him. I want to seek to fulfill his needs. I want to pamper him. I want to tell him that I love him more regularly. I want to treat him as though I love him more regularly." So then I'm thinking those actions. 

06:32 

Now this is where it gets tricky, because a lot of people, that's where they stop with trying to get what they want, with trying to change their life. But I'm going to walk you through a couple more steps here. So let's talk about if I want to create all of those actions, what feeling do I need to have in order to do that? There's probably a lot you could put there. In my line, I'm going to put in my f-line, my feeling line, I'm going to put unconditional love. If I feel unconditional love for my spouse, being more forgiving, accepting, not trying to control, not yelling, complimenting him, seeking to fulfill his needs, all of that is going to come much more naturally. It's going to feel good doing it. Whereas if I don't have unconditional love, if I have resentment in my feeling line, doing all those things is very hard and very painful and it's energy-draining. But if I'm doing it from a place of unconditional love, those things are energizing and they create energy. 

07:37 

So then we say "if I want the feeling of unconditional love, what thought or thoughts do I need to think in order to create unconditional love?" So here's some that I came up with. I could think "I'm so blessed to be married to this amazing man. He worked so hard to take care of our family and our loved ones. And I'm so thankful for that. He is a good man with a good heart. I am grateful he is patient and loving with me." Alright. So when we start with these thoughts, those thoughts then create more feelings of unconditional love. The unconditional love creates all those actions we talked about in a way that it's creating energy. And then our end result is that we do have a better relationship with our husband. 

08:30 

So if we want to not be white knuckling and hit a point where we're exhausted, we have to go back to the thought line because the thought line has all the answers. Everything we want to create in our lives starts with the thought line. Okay, I'm going to give you a couple of examples here because I just really want to show you how this works. So let's say that the result is that I want a better relationship with one of my adult children. So what actions do I need to take to create that better relationship? I could reach out with clean love. I don't want to manipulate. I don't want any passive aggressive statements. I don't want to try to control what they're doing or be judgmental of them. I want to accept their decisions. I want to treat them like an adult. Now those can be hard to do if we're coming from a place of irritation or a place of resentment for them. But if we move into creating the feeling that's going to naturally create those feelings. So the feeling that I chose was a feeling of trust of my child. If I trust them, then doing those things is going to come so much easier and it's going to be energizing rather than energy draining. 

09:53 

But if I want to create a feeling of trust, what thoughts do I need to be having? So here's some examples of thoughts that I came up with. "I'm so proud of the person he is growing into." "I trust her to make the right decisions for herself." "He is smart and capable." "She is on the right path for her." Now some of those you may or may not believe. We always want to make sure though that our thought is a thought that is believable to us. If it is not believable, then we do what's called "ladder thoughts," which are smaller thoughts that kind of work us up to those bigger thoughts that we really want to have. Alright. So it's a process of working through that, but we want to get to a thought that in this instance would create trust, that would create those actions in a positive engaging way, that then would create a better relationship with our adult child. Okay, catching on to this. Okay, I've taught this and taught this and taught this throughout a lot of my podcasts, but this is the first time I've really taught it this way. So I'm kind of excited to share this with you from this angle. 

11:08 

Okay, so let's look at another one. Let's say that the end result is that you want to get a promotion at work. Okay, so what actions would we need to take in order to secure that promotion? Well, let's say that I need to communicate really well with my boss and develop a relationship with the boss. I need to take the initiative with projects that are coming up. I need to step into leadership among my peers. I need to be proactive in accomplishing things and not waiting for me to receive directives that I need to get those things done. So if I want to create those kinds of actions and feel energized about it, what feeling do I need to have? Well, I put "motivated." Okay, so if I want to feel motivated, what thoughts can I think that are going to help me feel motivated? And I put, "I'm fully capable of getting a promotion at work and doing this job. I know that I can do this job. I have the skills and the intellect to succeed in this position." So when I take those thoughts, they create more of a feeling of "motivated," which then creates those actions, which then creates the results. 

12:25 

So this is what we want to start doing. We don't want to just change our behaviors. Changing behaviors is exhausting. We don't want to live our lives exhausted. We don't want to live our lives on the verge of checking out. We want to be checked in. We want to be living. We want to be engaged with our lives. And we do that by managing our thoughts, not managing our actions. Alright? Thoughts create everything in our life. Okay? So now I'm going to give you a couple of examples of some unintentional thoughts that hold us back. Now, this is where having a coach is so, so helpful. 

13:07 

So the first example I'm going to give you, and I think I've shared it with you probably a couple of months back, I was working with my coach several months ago and I put a thought out there and she called me on it so fast. I'm so glad that she did because changing this thought for me has created such a difference in how I'm living my life and in what I'm doing and what I'm creating. But I had this thought that I didn't even know I was having. And I put that thought out there just like it was a fact. And I told her, I said, "I'm not a risk taker." And to me, that was a fact. I could look back in my life and I could find evidence from that about that from when I was a teenager all the way up until now, here I am 53. Alright? I could find evidence. And so it just seemed like a fact to me that, "listen, I'm not a risk taker." But let's look what happens. If I have the thought "I'm not a risk taker," then my feeling when something comes up that might require taking a risk would be tentative. My action then became inaction, procrastination, not doing all the things. And then my result ended up being that I didn't take the risk. I didn't get anything done. I did not move in the direction of my goals and my dreams and my desires. Having that thought, "I'm not a risk taker" was not serving me. It was not helping me create what I want to create in my life because getting where I want to go ,and I can promise you getting where you want to go, is going to require that you take some risks. It may not be a financial risk. It may be an emotional risk of knowing when to be vulnerable. 

14:59 

Okay, this kind of gets to me a little bit because I've seen such a change in my life in the last several months since I have been able to identify this thought and start changing it and start deciding that my thought is, "you know what, I am a risk taker." And this is what I want to share with you that I think is so amazing. When I look back on my life, all the way to being a teenager, guess what I see? I see that I have been a risk taker. I was seeing exactly what I wanted to see. When I said "I'm not a risk taker," I could find proof for not being a risk taker in my life. But now that I'm moving into the thought that says "I am a risk taker," I can find proof throughout my whole life that I am. And that changes my entire thought model. I am a risk taker. The feeling: courageous. The action? Totally move into whatever action I need to make that happen. I procrastinate less. I step into vulnerability. My result: I take the risk and I start moving the direction that I want to move. And this has been what such a beautiful experience for me. Now, has it been easy all the time? No. Has it required me dealing with a lot of uncomfortable emotions along the way? Absolutely. And I'm still dealing with those. But I am seeing what I want to see because I am now thinking the thought I am a risk taker. And I'm moving and I'm growing in ways that I didn't before. And in areas of my life that I didn't before. And it's fascinating to me and it's exciting. And I want us to see what we create. 

16:57 

So recently I was working with a client and this client had the thought that "I'm a lazy person." And I was like, "whoa, whoa, whoa, let's stop right there. Let's talk about this thought: 'I am a lazy person.'" So we put it in a thought model. "I'm a lazy person" thought. What's the feeling that that creates? The feeling that she came up with was apathy. Well, when you feel apathy, what actions do you engage in? And she was like, "oh, inaction, procrastination, I don't do anything." The result: she is lazy. She doesn't get anything done. Now, have you noticed that the thought creates the result? In fact, very often the thought becomes the result. They almost mirror each other. So for example, in that one, "I'm lazy. I'm a lazy person," creates the result that she is lazy. She doesn't get anything done. Right? And mine, "I'm not a risk taker," was creating the result that I didn't take the risk. But now my thought more often, I still have the other thought, I'm still working on changing that out more, but now when I have the thought "I am a risk taker," what's the result? I take the risk. It's so fascinating and  it's so exciting and I love it so much. This is what I want you to understand about the thought model. You can get what you want if you can learn to manage your thoughts and learn to be aware of what is going on. 

18:33 

And this is why a coach helps so much, because I was saying, that thought, "I'm not a risk taker," over and over and over and did not even think about it being a thought. I thought it was a fact. And having a coach show me thoughts that are holding me back has been life changing for me. Okay, so those are thoughts. We have these thoughts like "I'm not a risk taker" or "I'm lazy." These are unintentional thoughts that we oftentimes don't even know are going on in our head. But we can also have some more focused thoughts that we're not aware of that do move us forward. Okay, we might have the thought that "I will do whatever I need to accomplish." I'll fill in the blank, right? To accomplish whatever I want. We may have that confidence in ourselves that I'll do it. And when we think the thought "I'll do whatever I need to to accomplish this," then the feeling might be "driven." The action would be that I do all the things that I need to do to accomplish it. I put things in play. I take the initiative. I talk to who I need to talk to. And then the end result is that I accomplish the thing. 

19:45 

Now I have things in my life that I have had unintentional positive thoughts that have moved me in the direction that I want to go. But I also have unintentional negative thoughts that have held me back. And that's what we want our coaching to do, is to help us recognize the thoughts that are moving us forward and the thoughts that are not and make adjustments accordingly. Now, it doesn't mean that we're horrible or wrong if we're having thoughts like, "I'm not a risk taker" or "I'm a lazy person." Those are just thoughts that our brain wants to think. But how often does your brain lie to you? I'm going to suggest an offer to you that your brain lies to you a lot. How often has your brain thought, "Oh, I can't do that," and then you turn around and do it? How often is your brain thought "I'm not capable of that," and then you find out you are capable of that, right? We do this all the time. Our brain just makes up crap. 

20:43 

It goes back to what we talked about a few weeks ago, that our brain just wants to fill in the story. It wants a beginning and a middle and an end. And if our brain only has one piece of that, it will make up the other pieces. And those made up pieces will so often create so much drama in our lives. They just do, right? They just create drama. I was talking to somebody the other day and just was able to point out that, "you know what? You don't know that." And they're like, "yes, I do. This happened..." and so I know that they were thinking this and I know that this was a piece of that. And I'm like, "you don't know that. That's not a fact. That's your brain creating drama. That's your brain making stuff up to fill in the story." And our brains want to do that. 

21:33 

So let me give you another example. This is something a little bit more personal for me that I've been working on since about the same time that I came across the thoughts of "I'm not a risk taker." I also was working with my coach on dating more and getting myself out there to date and do all that kind of stuff. And my thoughts at the time were just like, "ugh, online dating sucks. It's horrible. It's such a miserable experience." Those were my thoughts. Well, okay, you know this well enough by now. Where is that thought going to take me? My end result is inevitably going to be that online dating sucks, right? That it's horrible. So here's what I've worked through for me. When I have the thought that "online dating sucks," then I feel annoyed by every stupid comment that I would see. And I would just be annoyed by the people on there. 

22:31 

And then when I did get some kind of a match or start talking with somebody, I was coming in with a very negative vibe. I didn't engage very well. I started avoiding even getting on the apps and then I would quit the apps and then I just wouldn't even give men a chance when I saw them on there. And the end result: online dating sucked. All I was finding was annoying people on there. Now, it's not that there's only annoying people on there. There's a lot of amazing great people there, but because my thought was that it was horrible, I was creating horrible for myself. So my coach walked me through this and, I'll tell you, it wasn't a one session. We spent several sessions talking about my ideas about online dating and my beliefs about online dating and the things that I thought were facts that were actually thoughts. And we had to work through a lot of this. 

23:36 

So I finally got to a point where I decided that I wanted my thought about online dating to be that "online dating is a great way to meet lots of people and to practice my dating and people skills." That became my thought. And my feeling then was that I was more engaged when I got online. I was like, "oh look, this is just gonna be fun. It's gonna be a fun way to meet people. It's gonna be a fun way for me to practice showing up as me and not trying to pretend that I'm something else, but to really just practice showing up as me." So then I was more engaged. When I was more engaged, my actions were that I was more curious with the people that I was connecting with. I was more positive. I was online more, so I spent more time in the searching process. And when I met people, I was more open and engaging myself. And what was the result of that, do you think? Yeah, I was getting more dates. I was getting more practice. I was having more fun. I was finding that people were fascinating rather than annoying. It is so intriguing to me that our thoughts create all of this. Our thoughts create it all. 

24:54 

Let me teach you something. So long before I knew the thought model, I'm gonna share with you an experience that I had, oh let's see, I lived in California at the time, so it would have been about 20 years ago. 20 years ago, I had an experience. I was a young mom. I had three littles at home. And my house was always kind of messy. I didn't grow up in a clean house so I didn't see that. My house is so much cleaner now. But I'm not a perfectionist as we've talked about before. But it was always kind of messy, and I didn't like it that it was messy. And I was reading two books at the same time. One was called, I think it was "The Cleanies and the Messies." Something like that. And she talked about what clean people have in common is that the dirtiness of the house bugs them. And it bothers them when things are not clean, when things are not put away. And I never was really bugged by it too much. But I wanted to have a cleaner house than I had. 

25:58 

And so I took that, and then at the same time I read another book called "The Book on Mind Management" by Dennis Deaton, I think. It's an older book as well, obviously, because I read it 20 years ago. But he was talking about how our minds can create all of this. So he was talking about a lot of the same stuff, although not presented in the thought model. It was a lot of the same content. Putting those two books together, because they were both on my nightstand at the same time, I decided, "okay I'm just going to use the power of my brain to start changing the way that I think about dirty dishes." And so I decided that just every time I walked in the kitchen I was gonna say, if there were dirty dishes in the sink or on the counter, I was gonna say, "oh those just bug me. Those bug me." And I started to do that over and over. And sometimes I would force myself to go over and clean the dishes and get them in the dishwasher. But I really started to just tell myself that those dishes bug me. It bugs me that they're dirty. And I will tell you what. Within about two weeks, I really did start to get annoyed by the dirty dishes. 

27:10 

So here's when I go at this point. Now I put this in the thought model. I look back at what I was creating. And I put it in the thought model that I have now. I have my thought: "those dirty dishes bug me." My feeling was annoyed. My action then was that I would clean the dishes. Right? And the result was that I had the clean kitchen that I wanted. And I really did become bugged by the dirty dishes. It's so fascinating how powerful our brain is. Okay? So here's what I want you to understand. This is not a woo-woo kind of thing. I know that there are some things that are like, "well, you put these brainwaves out there and they come back." And I'm not even saying that that's not true, because I do believe that there is some truth to the power of the law of attraction. I believe in that stuff. But what I'm teaching you right here is not that. This is not saying we create brainwaves that are amazing and things just come into our lives. This is actually creating thoughts that create feelings and actions. It's the power of creating what we want by using our thoughts to influence and create feelings and actions that will get us what we want. 

28:37 

So this is the process that I want you to understand. When we want to change behavior, when we want to get what we want, we cannot stop at the action line. So we can't just look at this is the result I want. These are the actions I've got to take. It is so imperative that we move it into the feeling line and then up into the thought line. Because when we just go from the action line, we will white knuckle and eventually give in and give up and not create what we want. If we can get it back into the thought line, that will be changed forever. Let me tell you what, a dirty kitchen to this day makes me a little uneasy. I don't like it. Dirty dishes bug me. That was a thought from 20 years ago that I implemented and it has stayed with me and now my kitchen is almost always clean, unless one of my ornery kids gets in there and messes it up right? But that's another story, that's another thought model all in and of itself. 

29:43 

So here's what I want you to do this week: I want you to pick one thought to implement this week. So I want you to think about "what result do I want to create," and then think what actions will create that result, what feeling is going to create those actions, and then what thought will create that feeling. So I want you to find that feeling or that thought, good heavens I just lost it all. Okay, find the thought that will create the feeling and then the action and then the result and then I  want you to all week long implement that thought multiple times a day. So from what we talked about today let me give you some examples. Yours will be uniquely yours, which it should be, but here's some examples from the ones that I gave you today. "I'm so blessed to be married to my husband." I'm so proud of the person my daughter is becoming." "I have the skills and the intellect to get that promotion." "Online dating is a great way to meet people and practice my dating skills." "I love a clean kitchen." Okay, so this is what I want you to do. I want you to just implement the thought. I don't want you to go to the action line. I want you to just start thinking that thought multiple times a day and just start seeing what happens, what starts to shift in you. Give it a week maybe two, possibly three if it's a tough one but I want you to start implementing this thought on a regular basis. 

31:28 

Now, you may start doing this and feel that motivation right away to start moving into an action line. That's fine. I'm not saying you can't move into the action line, but I don't want the action line to be your focus. I want your focus to be the thought and just implement that thought over and over again, over and over, and then see what happens. This is the process of how to get what you want. Change your thoughts. Create what you want starting with your thoughts. Because your thoughts create your feelings, your feelings create your actions, your actions create your results. To get the result you want, we have to start at the thoughts. And I can tell you, when you start just in the actions, it will be energy-draining. If you go back to the thoughts, it will be energy-creating, which keeps you more focused and more creating what you want. 

32:28 

Okay, that is awesome, right? This growing up gig, sweet. I love it and I hope you love it too. If you're not loving it, we need to chat, my friend, because this is the time of life where all the pieces are coming together. This is the time of life where all of our wisdom, all of our experience, is coming into play and we're able to create the life we want to create because we have the tools at this stage. And this podcast is helping you to create the tools that you need. If you need some help with this, contact me, go to tanyahale.com, get your free consultation. Let's talk about how this coaching can help to increase your awareness of your thoughts so that you can start creating the results that you want. You can start getting what you want in life. This is what I do. I love it and I know I can help you with this. Okay, thank you so much for joining me today. 

33:31 

If you have not left me a review on iTunes, get on there my friend. Leave me a review, okay? Subscribe if you have not and share this with people who need this information. This is so good and so life-changing and I want you to have it and I want everybody in your life to have it. That is it for me today. Have a terrific day and I will see you next week. Ciao! 

33:56 

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!