177) Getting Out of a Rut Consciously

In this episode  I share my insights on how to navigate through life's ruts and initiate meaningful change. I discuss the significance of meeting ourselves where we are and the importance of our mindset and emotional state when trying to change a behavior pattern that we have been engaging in for along time. We'll peel back the layers of our habits to reveal the subconscious and unconscious forces that keep us tethered to them, whether it's smoking, drinking, or any other routine that's lost its purpose.

I share my own experience with learning to drink consciously to illustrate the power of patience and the importance of self-compassion in the face of setbacks. Change isn't about flawless execution; it's a journey where each misstep is an opportunity for growth. By spotlighting the necessity of not only positive thinking but decisive action, I guide listeners through the transformative process of altering mindsets and habits. Check out my my blog post that corresponds to this podcast episode for a call to action and an opportunity to join the conversation and share your take aways.

https://www.thebrainbs.com/post/getting-out-of-a-rut-consciously
https://www.thebrainbs.com/
https://www.facebook.com/maureen.kafkis.52
https://www.thebrainbs.com/brainbscommunity

Click on the platform of your choice to follow the podcast and write a review so we can spread the news and reach more people!

Apple Podcasts

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-brain-bs-podcast-learning-to-live-consciously/id1548758744?i=1000643769866

Spotify

https://open.spotify.com/show/4RWxW7Ni1EHTAywriOwY9z?si=d9c181834529414d

Google Podcasts

https://podcasts.google.com/search/The%20Brain%20BS%20Podcast

Amazon Music

https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/09208f98-6c21-4fea-abbf-14a495cabd09/the-brain-bs-podcast-learning-to-live-consciously

I Heart Radio

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-the-brain-bs-podcast-learn-76710324/

Pandora

https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-brain-bs-podcast-learning-to-live-consciously/PC:60845

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

This is Maureen Kafkis, the brain BS coach, here to tell you about the episode today.

Speaker 1: 0:04

So in this episode we're going to talk about how to get out of a rut. The first point I want to make is about meeting yourself where you are, and then the second one is how important the emotion and the mindset you have going into trying to make a changes. And then the last part is trusting the process. So make sure you listen to the end, because then I tie it all together and kind of bring up like what I think is the most important part that's necessary to manifest something new and to change a behavior. So sit back, settle in and let's get started with episode number 177 of the brain BS podcast getting out of a rut.

Speaker 1: 0:49

Consciously, do you want more out of your life, but not exactly sure what that might be? Are you longing for something but can't quite put your finger on what it is? That is the universe speaking to you and it is time to listen up. I'm your host, maureen Kafka, as the brain BS coach. I created the brain BS podcast to help people define what success means to them and show them how to get it. I help you to let go of fear and doubt and prepare your nervous system for success. I show you how to understand your own energy and to trust yourself to make all the decisions. If you are ready to go inward and stop looking outside yourself for all the answers, this is the podcast for you. Now let's get started. Hello, and welcome back to the brain BS podcast.

Speaker 1: 1:33

I am really excited to be here today because I'm kind of changing things up at the podcast and it feels good because I'm gonna like be more short, more to the point, more concise with what I'm trying to teach you. So I don't waste your time and I make the best use of my time because I am on a mission to inspire people to live consciously. So I need to try to do the best I can with that, and which is why I experiment and I change things up at the podcast and I try all kinds of different things, because I will eventually figure it out. So the first thing I want to talk about today is being in a rut. So a lot of times people don't even know they're in a rut because they just think it's life, they think they're like doing the grind, it's the nine to five Same old thing, same old thing and they just think that that's what their life has to look like, and they don't really even have a choice and that it's not optional to change it. But I don't care what your schedule is like or what your responsibilities are, there are always ways to change it up. And even if you can't change anything outside yourself, you can change the way you're perceiving the situation and the way you address it. So let's begin with the first point I want to make.

Speaker 1: 2:48

When you're in a rut and you want to make a change and that is and this is like making a change consciously so you could decide that you want to make a change, like quitting smoking, and then you could try to do it the traditional way, and then you kind of white knuckle it and you wait for the cravings to go away and then you feel like you succeeded and periodically the waves of desire will come up and often you will end up giving into that temptation and you will start smoking again. So the reason for that is because you did not address the subconscious and unconscious programming, the part of you that it was planning on continuing to smoke all along. And I am a smokeer so I can relate to this. But I also knew in my subconscious programming I had made a decision early on in my teens that I was not going to be a lifelong smoker and in my mind, for some reason, I thought 30 was super old, so I was not going to smoke past 30. And I tried multiple times to quit before then, but it wasn't actually until it was, um, I was 29 years old, the new years, uh, before I was turning 30, and I did it because it wasn't even questionable for me an option, it was just a waiting game for the cravings to go away. And that smoking is kind of an easy one because you don't really have a whole lot of cognitive dissonance around whether you should quit or not, right?

Speaker 1: 4:16

I think there's plenty of evidence to suggest that, like we don't want to smoke, so other things that you want to change can be a little bit more challenging and a little bit more difficult. And now that we know what a kind of looks like and when you want to make a change, I think one of the first, most important things that you have to do is meet yourself where you are and not where you want to be, so I can decide that I want to do things, sort of like the smoking example. Okay, I knew for sure I was going to quit by 30, but I tried multiple times before then and I didn't want to quit then because I didn't have that. I just didn't have the reason for it. I didn't have a commitment that would make me stick to it. I didn't have the fear because in my mind I hadn't till 30, so that really didn't work for me and I was trying to do something before I was actually ready to do it.

Speaker 1: 5:16

Now. This is often the case when you're trying to make a change. It doesn't happen overnight and it's not like one and done and you've completed it. So you really do often go through the process more than once, multiple times, and that's okay. That's, that's what I want to tell you. It's okay. You don't have to be, you don't have to figure this out the first time you're trying to do something. You don't have to get it quote, unquote right. You just meet yourself where you are and you do the best that you can in the process.

Speaker 1: 5:45

But you really want to know what's going on in your subconscious and unconscious programming. You want to know why you're doing the behavior that you're doing. What is it solving for you. Why is it your go-to way of behaving and how does it tie into your unconscious self, that part of you that gets triggered into in different situations by different people, that that part of you who reacts instead of responds, because that's the. That's the part of you that usually goes back to the habit that you're trying to stop or the behavior that you're trying to change. So you really want to be in touch and really understand your conscious self, which is actually a module in the mastering brain BS for six score for success course. And another thing that's in that course, and it's really important, is you want to identify your primary state of mind around wanting to change its behavior. If you figure out that you are anxious, depressed, critical of yourself in a really negative way, that's going to create a different result for you and it's not going to be one that you want. So you want to be aware and you really want to understand how your emotions are feeling in your body, what trying to change this behavior is creating for you. And don't squash it down, don't like, not pay attention to it as if it's not important. I want you to really pay attention to it and embrace everything that happens when you try to change your behavior.

Speaker 1: 7:23

And the last part of this first part, where you meet yourself, where you are, you have to fully accept who you are in this moment right now. So for me like I'm gonna talk about this a little bit in this episode because I'm learning how to drink consciously and change, I have it a weekend sort of habitual pattern. I've had for the majority of my life that weekends are for drinking and probably in the last 15, 20 years, primarily wine. So I am I'm gonna use that as a context of everything that I'm saying today to help you understand how I implement all of these points into my own life. And one of the ways is that when I've tried quitting drinking before, I really I didn't realize it at the time and that's why I'm sharing it with you now I didn't know that I wasn't ready to.

Speaker 1: 8:16

I didn't know that I didn't have a nervous system to support making this big change. I didn't have the knowledge or the insight or the awareness of what was going on that was driving me back to wanting to have drinks. It all I knew was that it was I was gonna stop and I could always stop. You know, I've always had a certain amount of discipline where I can stop something and not do it. But then my mind would be like, well, why did we stop doing this? Like what's the point? And it would be like on board again. So you really wanna know what's going on in your mind, meet yourself exactly where you are, and where you are is perfect, okay.

Speaker 1: 8:53

Then the second part of this is that I want you to tap into curiosity and experimentation instead of heaviness and the feeling of lack that comes with being in a rut. Typically, when we feel like we're in a rut, we are not experiencing positive emotions, and that's okay. You don't have to be positive. But if you're dwelling in negativity, you are way less likely to make a positive behavioral change. I want you to really try to get curious about this and look at all of it as an experiment. So experiments, my word for 2024. And that's exactly what I'm doing around alcohol. I'm experimenting with changing my relationship with it and my habit with it. So I am open to all the possibilities of what's gonna happen in this experiment. I'm not tied to any outcome. I'm not tied to any rules or days of the week that I'm gonna drink or number of beverages I'm not doing any of that. I am experimenting and playing around and seeing what happens and really learning about myself in the process. So you wanna pay attention to what happens in your brain when you try different things.

Speaker 1: 10:10

For instance, dry January is a popular term and I did give up alcohol at the beginning of the January month so that I could see what it was like. But I was really adamantly not making this a dry January, because this is a long, lasting, lifelong change that I'm trying to make here. It's not just about one month, and that's something new for me too, because I didn't realize before, when I was doing this, that I was just always waiting to get back to the habit. But I've had a shift since then, so it feels different to me and it feels like it's the only way to really get valuable data was if I did have a couple drinks this month, and I did last weekend. So I did that and I really paid attention to what was making me wanna have the drink. What was there any motion that I thought was gonna be solved? And what did the drink actually do for me? And I noticed that it really didn't do anything for me. It didn't solve anything. It didn't make what I was doing more fun. It didn't do what I thought it used to do in the past, because now I have awareness around what I'm doing and I'm paying attention, whereas before it was like kind of unconscious and I was just going through the motions of my old, checking out on the weekend, partying, have a good time, have a little indulgence, and then get back to this plan and taking care of yourself during the week.

Speaker 1: 11:43

Another important point is that when you're doing this and you decide, you know that you are going to have a drink or you give into a craving for whatever the habit is that you're trying to change, whether it be, you know, food and beverage, netflix, arguing with your partner talking back, being snitty. You know, whatever it is, that you don't beat yourself up over it when you're not perfect, because this is not about perfection and it never ever will be. It's so easy to love yourself when you're perfect. That's another reason why I'm not completely quitting at this point, because I am my mind's eye. There is this perfection with not drinking at all that you must be really evolved and really. But I know a lot of people that aren't, that don't drink. So I know that's brain BS.

Speaker 1: 12:37

But you have to accept that you're going to try different things. You're going to probably drink sometime, you're going to give in to whatever the urge is, and then you want to pay attention to what happens when you do that. This is not all or nothing, and then you just give up and you stop doing it or you stop trying to make the change. But you want to really pay attention to what's happening when you do do these different things, because it's data, it's like collecting data, and then you find out more and more about yourself as you go with the process and you're like like last weekend when I did have one, I decided to have a second one. Well, there was a part of me that was like you shouldn't be having the second one, you shouldn't be having that. And whenever we have shoulds and woods, we know it's brain BS, especially if it's like two glasses of wine.

Speaker 1: 13:29

In my opinion, it's up to me. I'm an adult. If I want to have a glass of wine, I can have a glass of wine, but there's this sort of like breaking the rules and feeling like I'm not being perfect and doing it. You know the absolute best that I can do and that has always been a trigger for me and something that makes me feel bad about myself, and I've always had this thing with if I drink too much or drink it all. Sometimes it's guilt that I shouldn't be wanting it, I shouldn't have it. And this kind of goes back to meeting myself where I am and when I first started working on this and reducing my desire and planning to seed for all of it, I really liked drinking like, I really loved it and I didn't want to stop. And now, because I've done this whole process and I'm going through it, my desire for it isn't what it used to be, but it's not gone and that's okay. But I bring this up because meeting yourself where you are is really important and I am where I am is a different place because I've been working at this for years.

Speaker 1: 14:34

The third thing I want to talk about when you're trying to make a change in addition to meeting yourself where you are and really understanding what's going on in your subconscious and unconscious programming and looking at your behavior and refraining from judgment about anything that you do, and having an experimental sort of curiosity where you're just collecting data and being objective so you can really begin to understand and see things about yourself that you couldn't see. Then you're going to also this is so important and this is so needed in every area of your life, so I'll probably talk about it a lot on the podcast and that is trusting the process. This isn't going to happen right away. When you're trying to make a change, first of all, it starts with a thought. That typically leads to a feeling and that inspires you to take an action, and that's how you get a result. But sometimes people aren't aware of their thoughts, so it feels more like it begins with the feeling, and like the feeling I was just talking about before.

Speaker 1: 15:39

Whatever it is, whenever you're trying to change a behavior, you're basically trying to manifest something new. Now we hear this term thrown around quite a bit manifesting and a lot of people think that they just conjure up what they want. They get to envision. Law of attraction dictates that if they say in a positive vibe, then they're going to get what they want. But that's not actually how it works. It's really law of cause and effect that makes it work.

Speaker 1: 16:07

So you have to take actions to change the behavior to get what you want. You can't keep taking the same actions. So if I want to quit drinking unconsciously and having these weekends where I just do it as a habit, like I have been, then the only I would have to keep drinking that way, and that's what I did for a long time. I just kept drinking that way and I was thinking I wanted to change and I was envisioning wanting to change, but I just wasn't because I wasn't taking different actions. Now I'm taking different actions. I didn't have any alcohol for the majority of this month and I plan on limiting the amount of alcohol I have and being really mindful and conscious about anything that I ingest, moving forward. So my actions are different. You can't keep taking taking the same actions and get a different result. So something has to give, something has to change, and that's like with anything. If you're trying to start a business, if you're trying to find a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a partner or whatever it is, you have to do something different.

Speaker 1: 17:17

So it begins with your thoughts, your mindset, what actions you're taking, and then that gives you the result that you want. And in order to make a change like this, it requires a lot of repetition, it requires time, it requires you staying in a positive frequency, it requires you to learn all the lessons along the way and be open to them and stay present for them, and it requires you not to get into a funk and to remember the law of polarity that we want something and we pray for it and we ask for it and we don't think that prayer is being answered because it doesn't look the way we think it should. But it is being an answered and it's the way it's supposed to look. It's just you don't get that and you don't see it because you're so fixated on what you thought was going to happen. So this is probably the most important part of changing your behavior and getting out of a rut that you just have to. You have to trust the process and it takes time and it's divine. Timing determines when that desires really going to start to change for you, when that shift is going to take place inside you. Everything aligns and everything you need to make that happen will come to you if you stay in the solid belief that it's going to happen.

Speaker 1: 18:41

Success at anything is inevitable if you keep doing it and you don't give up and you stay in a high frequency and you keep taking actions over and over again. There's no doubt in my mind that I'm going to be successful in my business. I mean, I already am to a degree and it's really good about what I'm doing and what I'm putting out there. But I'm talking about being even more successful and being more financially successful and being more recognized as an expert. I know all those things are coming to me because there is no other way that this can play out.

Speaker 1: 19:15

If and this is a very big if if I continue to keep the mindset that I have, be aware of my subconscious and unconscious programming, stay in a state of curiosity, refrain from judging things all the time and getting caught up in the drama and the brain BS of all of it, and just understand that, yeah, everything's cyclical and sometimes we're gonna do well and sometimes we're not, and we don't have to keep making this a big deal. So that's what I have for you, because typically when we wanna get out of a rut, we're in a negative energy and what I'm suggesting to you is approach it like with a little bit of light-heartedness, a little bit of fun, a little bit of playing around with it, like I'm thinking maybe this weekend, instead of having a glass of wine, I'm gonna have like a really mild Henrik's and Tonic and see how I feel about that and what that's like, to have that instead of the wine that I usually have, and find out what comes up, because I'm collecting data and that's the way it is. Now, just as a disclaimer here, as I'm finishing up this episode, and I'm using alcohol as an example, what I'm talking about and what I'm trying to change is not for someone who's an alcoholic, somebody who is dependent on alcohol and has a lot of not only if they're physically dependent on alcohol, but they have a lot of drama and a lot of problems and a lot of shit going on because they're drinking. This is not gonna work for you. Usually, you'd see professional assistants or find something that is a little bit more specific to giving up alcohol. This is like a psycho-educational, spiritual kind of program where I'm offering you a different approach to drinking if you are just someone who's caught in a rut with drinking and not someone who's an alcoholic. So I am starting before I finish here.

Speaker 1: 21:19

I am doing a blog now that accompanies this podcast post, and it's the first time I'm doing it, so I'm not sure how it's gonna play out, but what I'm gonna do is suggest that you go to the blog on my website, wwwthebrainbscom, and check out the blog, and I'm going to put show notes in there and I'm going to give you a call to action in that blog post. And if you would be willing and I would love to hear from you I want you to come back in the comment section and tell me what it is you're trying to change and maybe what you tried, and if you have any questions, you can ask there or you wanna share and then people can interact there, because there's a comment section in the blog where we can get a discussion going about it. I also have a community, the BrainBS Community, where we interact in there and we do bi-monthly calls. So if that's something you're interested in, you could check that out at the website too.

Speaker 1: 22:19

So I'm going to continue the same closing on the podcast where I say audience, I know you learned something valuable here today, but I'm gonna add but it doesn't really matter if you're not implementing it and your life's not changing for it. If your life's staying the same and you're learning all this stuff, it's not good enough. It's time for more. It's time to start making some changes and I'm here to support you and help you do it. I will see you in the next episode.