00:00 

Hey, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 59. "My Life, My Creation, My Responsibility." 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, hi there. So glad to have you here with me. And I do consider this a time spent with friends. I appreciate you being here and supporting me and also hopefully learning things that are helping you to have a more emotionally healthy and mentally healthy life. I think these things that we talk about are so valuable and I love to be able to share them with my friends and I love that as I learn and incorporate and understand these concepts more myself, I love that it adds value to my life and that through this podcast I'm able to then turn around and hopefully add great value to your life. I know that these concepts are creating a better me and that is what I love and I hope that these are creating a better you. 

01:12 

Alright, so today I want to talk about how our life is entirely our creation and also entirely our responsibility. Alright, do you believe that or do you automatically want to defend your life by saying that other people affect what's going on? That it's someone else's fault that you are where you are and that you are who you are? I talk to a lot of people who really don't believe that where they are in their life is because of their choices or that who they are in their life is really because of their choices. They believe that their life is a product of other people's choices. 

01:50 

But remember the story of the talents in the New Testament. Three people were given talents before the master left. And even though they were all given different amounts when the master returned he asked for an accounting of what they had done with the money. Now, they didn't all have to come back with the same amount of money, but he wanted to see what they had done with what they were given. Two of them had doubled the amount of money that had been given them, but the other was fearful of losing it, and so he hid it, and all he could do was return the same amount of money. 

02:20 

So just as God gave each of the servants different amounts of money, He has put every one of us in very different circumstances. Some of us are raised in loving, God-fearing homes with parents who are Christlike and loving. Others are raised in fearing God homes, where the gospel is used as a tool to manipulate us into doing what our parents want. Some are raised in homes with some or no gospel influence. Some are raised in physically, sexually, or emotionally abusive situations. Some are raised with every opportunity to travel and learn and experience and explore the world, and some are raised with addictions and vices being celebrated and explored while others are raised in a very strict conservative environment. 

03:09 

But does how we were raised really determine how our lives are today? To some degree I believe so. I believe our past environments and situations have given us knowledge and experience and help to shape our views and our understanding of the world. But I also believe very strongly that we have the ability and even the responsibility to learn from our past experiences and move forward into a better life of our own creation. In essence we have the responsibility to create something more glorious than what we were initially given. Let me explain with a client example. And full disclosure here, she has read my text of this and she's given me complete permission to share everything I'm going to share. I would never tell these types of details without a client's acknowledgement and permission. 

04:02 

So I have a client whom I'll call Charity who grew up in a pretty rough situation. She had a really tough and, I think most people would say, an unfair childhood. She was sexually abused, physically abused, and also emotionally abused. Her home had a lot of drug and alcohol addiction. Charity was pretty much abandoned by her mother, as were most of her siblings,  and she ended up being raised by a relative. Tough stuff for sure, right? Charity's issues with all of this really started to surface a little bit later in life as these kinds of things will do sometimes. She found herself abusing drugs and alcohol herself, sometimes making other decisions that made her life pretty strained and difficult. And these behaviors wreaked a lot of havoc in her marriage and family life to be sure. So she continually lived with the belief that she was destined to live this way and it was what she knew. She blamed a lot of people in her past for not protecting her as a child. And should she have been protected? Absolutely. But she wasn't. 

05:09 

However, this isn't a story about the abusers and what they need to be held responsible for. This is a story about Charity and what she chose to do with her circumstances. So even as she grew into a woman in her 40s, Charity struggled to free herself from the ideas that everything bad that was happening in her life was someone else's fault, went back to those experiences from her childhood. She blamed those who abused her as a child for the addictive behaviors she was currently engaging in and she blamed her husband for her unhappiness. It was this victim mentality that kept Charity stuck in engaging in these destructive behaviors and she found herself looking in a lot of different places to find some happiness. 

05:57 

So by the time we met up to do some coaching, Charity had made some pretty good headway, actually. She was really working on getting clean from the drugs, but would occasionally have relapses that would set her back mentally and emotionally. But she had been to counseling and she was attending AA meetings, but she wasn't fully getting her feet underneath her. And part of the reason is because she was focusing on changing her behaviors, her actions, rather than changing her thoughts. 

06:24 

In coaching, we call this coaching from the A-line, right? She was trying to fix her actions first. So though the first few sessions I worked with Charity went really well, she wasn't really grasping it. She wasn't getting the hang of the thought model. When I tried to teach her how her thoughts were creating her feelings, which were then creating her actions, though she understood the premise of it because she's smart, it wasn't hitting home. It wasn't connecting with her own behaviors. She wasn't making the connection that the anger or the sadness or the loneliness she was feeling was a result of her thinking. She kept thinking that it went back to her circumstance. Charity still felt though what she was thinking and what she was doing was the fault of those people all around her. She didn't feel empowered at all and was at the mercy of family and friends who were in a tough place trying to heal themselves as well from the destructive environments she had helped create. Mostly her children, right, were really struggling to to work through this. 

07:31 

But by our third session, Charity had a huge breakthrough. We were going through the thought model again and I was showing her her thoughts, separating them out from the circumstances, explaining how her thoughts were creating her feelings of helplessness and depression and anger, and then showing her how those feelings were creating self-destructive behaviors. Those feelings were causing her to behave in ways toward her family that drove them farther away rather than drawing them in for support like she so desperately wanted and felt like she needed. And all of a sudden it just seemed to click with Charity. She realized that her behaviors were because of the thoughts she was thinking. She realized that her extremely negative feelings were because of the thoughts she was thinking. She made a huge shift in that moment from believing that everything she was feeling and doing was because of what someone else was doing or had done to realizing that everything she was feeling and doing was because of what she was thinking. 

08:35 

And from that moment on it's been as though I have been working with someone completely different. Charity has realized that she is responsible for everything in her life. She is learning to think more positive thoughts about the actions of other people and this also helps her keep her actions and her feelings in check. I love that about a week after her big aha, she sent me a text. Something challenging had happened with one of her grandchildren, and she was hurting a lot because of the situation. But after she kind of processed it a bit, she told me about it, and her response was, "I cherish the fact that he's very loved and very well cared for." And I have to say that I about started crying when she said that. Because two weeks earlier, she would have cried and felt so sorry for herself and started blaming someone else for the pain she was feeling. What they were doing would have been what she thought caused her pain. But now she got out of that place pretty quickly and went to a place of love and compassion. And it completely changed how she felt inside. 

09:45 

So when Charity stopped blaming others for her dysfunctional life, and with her thoughts started creating the type of life she ultimately wants, everything about her shifted. She became empowered and started making changes for the better that we didn't even discuss in our coaching session. It was all self-motivated stuff. Her energy level seemed to double in one session, and her ability to love her children unconditionally increased as well because she was no longer blaming them, right? It was huge for Charity to recognize and acknowledge that some really tough things had happened to her and even were continuing to happen to her. But what she chose to think about those circumstances created every feeling and every action that was happening in her life. 

10:32 

And this is the power of understanding the thought model. Realizing that whatever my life is has been created by what I have thought about it. And are there things that we go through that are crappy? No doubt. And some people seem to get their lion's share of crap. Charity to me just seems like, gosh, is there any justice in the world, right? But as we get older, it is so important that we learn to create the kind of life that we want. Regardless of what our past has been, we can be empowered by the understanding that we can choose to think whatever we want about our past and our present and even our future. It does not matter what it is or how horrible it may seem. I have control over what I choose to think about. My life is my creation. I love the empowerment that comes when we really start to understand that circumstances are neutral. All of the things in our life that happen to us are completely neutral. They only have power when we give them power and they have positive or negative power based on the thoughts we choose to think about them. 

11:52 

Now that does not mean that these situations are not hurtful or painful and it doesn't mean that while they're happening or shortly after we say, "oh my gosh, I'm so glad this is happening to me," right? Not at all. Not at all. But as we move past that initial pain, how I choose to think about it is going to make all the difference. We can take any circumstance and choose to create whatever life we want with it. So Charity's children could do something that in the past would make her angry or hurt and she would cry and feel sorry for herself. Part of this reason is because she was only thinking about herself when these things would happen. She was only looking inward. Now she's learning to think an outward thought like, "I'm sure they're really hurting as they work through all the tough stuff from when they were younger." Looking at all the decisions that she made and all the tough things that they went through she struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, right? They've got their own stuff to work through at this point and she's realizing that they're hurting and when her heart is feeling compassion for them, this compassion causes her to act in a more loving way like being patient when they don't reply to her reaching out or speaking with understanding rather than blaming or accusing them, giving them space to work through the pain of their own childhood. 

13:19 

And this new way of thinking, feeling and behaving is changing the ultimate results in how her children are responding to her. So now her circumstances are starting to change as well. Her children don't feel so attacked, they don't feel like they're being blamed and that creates a safe space for them to feel like they can start to reconnect. In fact, just this last week she had some pretty huge, pretty tough life changes come up that she was not anticipating. And her response in the past would have been to turn to alcohol or drugs, to buffer and to blame other people for what was happening. And her response today? Here's the text she sent me this afternoon: "as these changes are coming into my life, they previously would have devastated me for weeks. I see them as a fresh start. All of my children are grown and creating their own lives. This brings me peace. Now I feel that I can finally let go, forgive myself, and create a new life for myself. The sky is the limit. Here I go." Isn't that just amazing and beautiful? Her whole life has been turned upside down this last week, and yet she's deciding to create a life that is positive. Charity's choice to take responsibility for her thoughts, and ultimately the life she is creating is an amazing example of what can happen when we work from the thought line of our models. 

14:47 

So many of us want to work from the action line. In Charity's case, in the past, she would just try to get off the drugs or the alcohol. She would try to use willpower. She would just try to force herself to do this. She was trying to change her actions. But now she understands that the reason she struggled for so long was because until you change the thought, you don't permanently change the action. So she's now working from the thought line and she's creating a life where she is empowered to find happiness, peace, contentment, and purpose. 

15:21 

So here's the big message here: it is your life. What you are currently living, you have created by your thoughts, for good or  for bad. If you can learn to embrace that idea, it frees you up to embrace what you've created or to choose to create something else. When we choose to be responsible for our thoughts and for our creations and for what we've made, we step into a place of empowerment. And with that empowerment, we have the ability to create anything we want. 

15:59 

So this is our goal this week: start becoming aware of what your thoughts are in regards to the circumstances or the neutral facts in your life. And then don't judge yourself about them. Don't say, "oh my gosh, I'm so stupid," or "I'm such a horrible person." Don't judge yourself. Just start to recognize the thoughts you're having and then see if you can identify the feelings those thoughts create and then the actions that are created by those feelings. If you can start making that linear progression and say, "this is the circumstance, this is what I was thinking about it, oh my gosh, these are the feelings I had and this is how I was acting because of it," we can start to see the results in our life. But awareness of our thoughts is the first step for any forward movement we make in our lives. And once we're aware, we can change or not change as we see fit. 

16:56 

Alright, so if you're really struggling with this, coaching can help. I know I work with coaches who help me see my thoughts that I just can't see and I'm always a little bit shocked. I'm always like, "what? I said that?" And I realized that I did and it's so good to have an outside source help you out. They can make a huge difference. Alright, so good luck this week. This can be some tough stuff to swallow, especially if you have been in the habit of blaming others and thinking that your current life is at the mercy of your past life. But as soon as we start to take responsibility for what our life is and what it will become, everything changes. Trust me on this one. Growing up is awesome and this is one of those things that that requires emotional maturity to do to stop blaming and to start taking responsibility for what's going on now. I cannot change the past, but I can change my present by what I'm choosing to think. 

18:04 

If you would like some personal help with me, you can get on my website and you can go to tanyahale.com, go to the "contact me" and you can send me a quick email I took off the calendar so it's no longer there. You can send me a quick email and you and I can set something up. I do three consults a week is all just because I'm busy enough at this stage that I don't have time for more, but I love to help people see the possibility of what their life could become. Alright, thanks for joining me today. Share this message with someone if you know someone who could use this information. If you're loving it, the kind of people that you love are going to love it as well. Okay, my friends, thank you for joining me and I just pray that you can move into a better place. I pray that you can choose on purpose and that you can make decisions to create the life that you want. Have a terrific one. I'll talk to you next time. 

19:12 

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.