Differently: Stop living by default. Start living by design.
Differently is for when you need to get out of your head and back into your life.
Created and hosted by Carla Reeves, creator of The Differently Journal, her work is built on over 20 years of helping people use writing to navigate real life. Not as a habit to keep up with, but as a way to calm your mind, get clear, and move forward.
You are always writing your life, whether it’s in your mind or on paper.
It's time to take the pen back.
Turn overthinking and self doubt into clarity, confidence, creativity and momentum.
After a decade of coaching high achievers, one of the greatest challenges I see show up again and again is negative thinking and defeating self-talk and how quickly it can rob our confidence and take us off our game.
On today's episode, I talk about how our own internal story telling can wreak havoc in our lives and share simple steps that you can use again and again to build your resiliency.
Learn more about Carla: https:/www.carlareeves.com/
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SPEAKER_00
I'm Carla Reeves, and this is Differently, a podcast where we explore the ins and outs of what becomes possible when we're willing to think, do, and show up differently to the moments of our everyday lives. Before we dive in, I want to welcome you to the Differently podcast. I'm Carla Reeves, your host. I'm a mindset coach, mentor, and trusted advisor for leaders who are committed to a life that is not only productive, but fulfilling. Our work together is to equip them with healthy mindsets, increased resiliency, and mastery over their time. I'm also a mom, wife, grew up in a sleepy beach town in California, and now live in Arizona on a small farm known to have cows, chickens, horses, and my beloved family. I believe in ditching the illusion that life will be great someday in the future. And here to remind us to wake up our thinking and change our approach to create and live a juicy, rich, meaningful, everyday life now. After a decade of coaching ambitious leaders, one of the greatest challenges I see show up again and again is the ability we have as humans to be masterful at storytelling and how quickly it can take us off our game. By storytelling, I mean the ability to take the simple facts of something that happens and masterfully, quickly craft a story that most often works against what we most want and often is not based at all in truth. Let me give you a simple example from my own life. A couple weeks ago, I emailed a woman after doing a workshop for her and her team and wanting to schedule a follow-up meeting. No response. A story began in my head rather quickly that she didn't like the workshop, that she had no interest in getting together again, quite even questioning the workshops that I do and on and on. When in reality, the facts were I sent an email and I had no response yet. I decided a week later to send another follow-up email under the assumption that she's a busy woman and might have missed my email. I decided to stand in confidence that the workshop was a success and that she was a very busy woman. I immediately had a reply back. She loved the workshop and we scheduled the coffee date. If you feel weighted down by your thinking and deeply desire to harness your time and energy for the things you really want to be focused on and doing in your life, this episode deserves your attention. I see people waste enormous amounts of time and energy spiraling in negative thinking. Here's another example. I just actually got off a coaching call with a client who had slipped into a place of feeling less than, had lost her confidence, which was impacting her level of passion and motivation. When we identify what had been happening and the story she was telling herself, it's not because she's lost her passion or she's lost her motivation or she's lazy. It's simply because any of us who undergo a barrage of negative self-talk, naturally we're gonna lose that matter, that motivation and that passion. So what can we do about this? The negative thinking is gonna happen. Uh, I think it's part of being human, but there are things that we can do to minimize it and really eliminate a lot of it in our life. And the first one is to identify the root. When you find yourself in a very familiar thought spinout that leaves you defeated and feeling less than, it likely comes from a root story that you began telling yourself a very long time ago and have likely built so much evidence for how this is true that it's become your truth. These are the trickier kinds of stories that we need to work on because they feel so real and true and likely they've been around for a really long time. In my one-on-one coaching program, Elevate, one of the first things we do is to identify and free you of old, outdated stories that get in your way and prevent you from being and doing the things that you're here to do, to create lasting sustainable change. It really involves getting to the root and being committed to doing the work here. Number two, regular check-ins. Check in with yourself regularly to see what thinking you're allowing to hang out in your mind. Is it dragging you down or propelling you forward? The negative thinking is going to happen. It's how you respond to it and how you let it perpetuate, is where you have control. Clean it up to be sure that your thinking environment is a place that supports the things you want to do in your life. For example, if you want to forward your role in your job, but all day you're perpetuating thoughts of not feeling good enough, not being able to contribute, not being, not having good ideas, not having the talents others have. How is that going to make you feel? And how is that way of feeling going to impact the actions? Likely, if you're telling yourself that all day long, you're going to lose the motivation and passion and energy to do the good work that you do. And that is going to impact your actions and your results. And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Just like when you're planting a garden and you want to prepare the soil and plant in a place where it can really cultivate life. The same is true in the, you know, the bed of your thinking. You want to make sure you're, you're, you've got a place where you can cultivate good things and good outcomes. So write it out. Write out the thoughts. Get them out of your head. Call out the untruth. Remember what you do want. And then ask what thinking and actions align with that and go do that. Number three, check your story. We talked about this, but here's exactly how you do it. You want to ask yourself, what are the facts? And what am I making this mean? Or what story am I telling about the facts? And you can write this down. You can separate it so that you can really get clear about what actually happened and what you're making it mean. This is a tool that I use all the time with my one-on-one coaching clients. We separate the facts from the story they're telling because it often gets all collapsed and then it all just feels like the truth. And then we respond to all of it, creating a lot of unnecessary drama and suffering in our lives. Here's another example. Years ago, a client was dating and she wasn't getting a text back from the guy. And she was meaning, uh making that mean that she wasn't good enough, he wasn't interested, she was never gonna find anyone, and ultimately that she was always gonna be alone. You can imagine how that made her feel and how that impacted her actions. When in this moment, all it really meant was that she hadn't received a text yet. So we worked with her to do the very next tip I'm gonna tell you around negative thinking, which is to assume positive intent until you know otherwise. That's number four. This saves so much time and thinking energy. When you find yourself in a situation like this, my client had, or one of worry, when there's really nothing that you can do. What if you assumed positive intent until you know otherwise? There's a quote by Mark Twain that says, I lived a long and arduous life and 90% of it never happened. That's the craziness we make in our mind. Imagine again all the time and energy you can harness by simply taking some different action here. Number five is align your focus. When you're stuck in negative thinking, allow it to be contrast for what for identifying what you do want. Write out what you do want, read it every day, and then knowing that, ask yourself what can you think and do right now that will move you a little closer to what you do want and go do that. Storytelling, what are those stories that go around and around in your mind? Are they giving you mobility or keeping you stuck? Are they even true? When you're willing to take responsibility for this crazy making in our minds, you harness your inner power to really make profound change in your life. When you shine a light and check for truth on what you're telling yourself and call out the nonsense, the stories lose their power. And with practice, you can build muscle by checking the stories regularly and making sure that they're aligned and taking you forward to create the life that you want now. Stories have power, they can cause lots of negative thinking, or they can create lots of forward momentum. And when you start to choose them intentionally and live into them, things are going to change in the most amazing way. You can come back to these reminders when you get caught in your head. It's a practice, not a perfect. Here's to getting out of your head and into your life. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Differently. I hope it stirred your thinking, and I invite you to take one inspired action from something that stood out to you. If you want to hear more conversations like this, hit follow on your favorite podcast app. And if this episode could impact someone you know, please pass it along. Remember, new episodes drop weekly. See you next week.
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