Start in the Middle

Breaking Free from Negative Self-Talk: A Journey to Self-Acceptance and Rediscovery

• Kristi Ballard Falany • Episode 166

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Imagine a life free from the chains of negative self-talk and filled with genuine self-acceptance. Join me, Kristi Ballard Falany, as I share my heartfelt journey of taking a break in September to refocus and realign my thoughts and goals. This episode kicks off with a personal conversation on why we internalize negative comments and dismiss compliments so easily. Drawing from my own experiences and my work with clients, I discuss the importance of being mindful of our developmental stages and how these shape our responses to feedback. Learn how automatic negative thoughts can impact self-perception and discover strategies to break free from their grip.

In the second segment, I reveal the transformative power of my 90-day planner. This planner is more than just a tool—it's a pathway to feeling more organized, reducing stress in your relationships, and cultivating meaningful connections. With every purchase, I include a free strategy success call to ensure you get the most out of this life-changing planner. Whether you're looking to reignite your passion or simply need a structured routine, my coaching services are here to support you on this journey of rediscovery. Email me to get your copy and visit my website for more information. Let's embark on this transformative journey together!

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Speaker 1:

Hello, my friend, hey, I just want to clue you in on a little secret. At least once a year I take some focus time off. At least once a year I take some time away from doing my day-to-day so that I can really refocus my brain, refocus what I am doing in my business. So for the month of September, on my podcast, I am choosing some of my favorites that I want to share with you. So if you have been in my community for some time, I'm hoping to discover that my favorites were also your favorites. And if you are new to my podcast, I hope that you will enjoy the episodes that I have chosen for you. And then in October, I am coming back with brand new content, brand new things to share with you, and I am so excited what this refocus time is going to mean for me and what it's going to mean for how I am serving you. So enjoy this episode.

Speaker 1:

Hi, I am Christy Ballard-Fellaini. I am a certified life coach who found herself at 42, freshly divorced kids off to college and having never dated in my adult life, I was starting in the middle. If you haven't yet hit start on your middle time in life, let's do it together. Let the journey begin. Hello, hello, my friends, I hope that this podcast finds you well. I hope that you are already having an amazing day, so this one is coming to you early morning.

Speaker 1:

As you can tell, I do have that raspiness in my throat, but what's funny about my podcast is that I find that when an idea comes to me, it's best if I just go with it. A lot of times I'll have ideas you know when I'm out and about, you know, and I'll write them down in my phone but a lot of times I don't ever go back to them, and so I absolutely love when an idea pops into my brain and I'm actually able to stop what I'm doing, come to my computer and press go, because I just find that the message comes out exactly as it was intended to, versus coming back to an idea and trying to recreate the magic in it. And so, as I was sitting down doing my morning routine, a conversation that I had earlier in the week popped into my brain. I met this amazing woman. This week.

Speaker 1:

Her and I have been following each other on social media and we had an opportunity to meet each other, and the thing about it is that we actually ended up in the same space twice during the week, and so I really have to, I like to stop and think about okay, is there something there? Is there a meaning there? Is there something that I need to pay more attention to? And so something that she had said in our conversation, as we were getting to know each other on a personal level because, as I mentioned, we had been following each other through social media, but now we had the opportunity to really have a conversation and get to know each other, and a statement that she had made was pretty much a universal statement and not so much the statement.

Speaker 1:

But I guess the conversation and the topic of the conversation is one that I find myself having with a lot of my clients and I find myself having even in a lot of my relationships, my friendships, my relationships with my adult children, my relationship with my spouse, and so it really posed the question as to why do we take things so personally when someone says something to us and we take it personally, or someone says something about us and we take it personally. Now, earlier in the podcast, I talked to you about what Dr Amon calls ants in our brain, so those automatic negative thoughts and what's really, really funny about this this whole idea of taking things personally is that we tend to take the things that our brain takes meaning of being negative. We take those things personally and we allow them to hurt us. Right. When we receive a compliment, we don't walk away from that compliment all day, filled up in the. Walk away from that compliment all day, filled up in the oh my gosh, yes, that's so true and that's so fabulous. Or, yes, I want to believe that about myself and thank goodness they see that in me, right.

Speaker 1:

Normally, when we take a compliment, we either don't know how to take it right, because oftentimes we have a hard time believing good things about ourselves, or we say thank you and we walk away and we move on from it. Right. But when someone says something negative to us, or when someone says something that isn't a compliment or goes against who we want to believe that we are, then that's really when we let it take up space in our brain. That's really when we allow it to be there, we allow it to bring up hurtful emotions, we allow some space in our brain of wondering if it's true. Okay, and so I first want to talk to you about where that stuff even comes from. Okay, and so, as I was thinking about this, I so I want you to do some thinking on this, I want you to do some reflecting on this, and so I want you to do some thinking on this. I want you to do some reflecting on this, and so I want you to take yourself back to your developmental stage.

Speaker 1:

Okay, because, in case you have not realized, you have gone through a very specific stage of development, a very specific stage of development. So, when you were first born, of course, your brain was like a sponge and you were soaking up everything. You're learning everything, right. You're learning how to walk, you're learning how to talk, so you're watching everything around you to discover how to do those things yourself. And then, as you get older, this is where you start to experiment in those things. You start to try new things. You start to try things and see if it works out for you and if it doesn't, and we see this in our toddler stage, right?

Speaker 1:

And so there's very specific stages that you go through throughout your physical development, throughout your mental development, and so, when we take the thoughts of others or when we hear someone say something about us, and we make it mean something about ourselves, we bring it on as hurt or we bring it on as negativity. I want you to go back to that developmental stage when your brain was still developing, and I would be willing to bet you that somewhere along the way, someone had said some really unkind words to you. Maybe someone had given you an unkind name. Maybe in your developmental stage you had made a mistake, you had tried something to see how it was going to work out, and so maybe during that time when you made that mistake, maybe it was that your caregivers spoke words of shame over you. And what happens is that all of these things start to create a neuropathway inside our brain, and so we think to ourselves subconsciously that, oh, maybe I am that unkind word, maybe I am that unkind name, maybe I should be carrying shame when I make mistakes. Okay, because you've never challenged these before. Okay, you've never. You've allowed them to continue to subconsciously come back up in your mind when you go through similar circumstances throughout your life, and because they've been there so long, you've just never challenged them.

Speaker 1:

I know for me, for a long time, a very long time the majority of my childhood, through the majority of my adulthood. My sisters had always put this name to me. From a very early age they called me Fuzzy, wuzzy, and so that's just what I believed about my hair. My hair is out of control, my hair is, you know, ugly. My hair is this, that, whatever. And in fact I was just sharing with a group of ladies the other day that on my first wedding day, if you look back at my wedding pictures, y'all, in my wedding pictures I have a mullet. Seriously, in 1991, I was wearing a mullet, okay, and all of this was because I had no idea what to do with this curly mop of a head, okay, and I just always believed that it wasn't pretty. And so what I would do is I would like cut it short in the front, where it was unruly, and do my best to tame it, and then in the back I would wear it curly, and for a long time through I think it was like from junior high through most of high school I wore it super, super short, Okay, and in the back of my mind it was because my sisters had put this name on me and I just kept it and just believed that my hair was wrong, okay, and so since then I have totally created a new neuropathway for my hair and, thank goodness, there is actually product out for curly headed people now today too. So thank goodness.

Speaker 1:

But anyway, I hope that you know that silly story, just you know, kind of gives you an example of where these things come from. You know, comes from unkind words, things that were said to us when we were younger, in our developmental stage, given unkind names, you know, back when we were in school and we had that sticks and stones may break my bones and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but words do hurt and they find a way of staying with us when our brain is still developing. And so the good news is, since these are neuropathways that were created back when we were younger, the good news is is that they don't have to stay there. You don't have to allow them to continue to be there, because all of this is not who you were meant to be at this season of your life. You get the opportunity to wipe this slate clean. Yes, it is a choice, and you may be saying to me on the other side of this podcast, christy, I don't know how to do that, and so I just want to say thank goodness you and I are in this relationship together Because, yes, we are.

Speaker 1:

If you have come back to this podcast more than once, we're creating a relationship, and so thank goodness that you and I are in this relationship together, because I don't want you to continue to have this type of thought process about yourself, and I am pretty positive that you don't want to hang on to it either. At this point, you might be asking yourself the question how do I not make it mean something about me? And so a couple of things that I want to share with you is that first, yes, you have the power of changing this old way of thinking about yourself. I have a specific process that I take my clients through in creating new thoughts about themselves and creating new narrow pathways in their brains to believing new thoughts about themselves. The other cool thing about having this knowledge in your back pocket is that you now can have the understanding for other people for when they say those unkind words about you. You now have this understanding of how this works in your brain, and so making it not mean something about you may look like having compassion for the other person, because the things that they say and the things that they do have nothing to do with us. The things that they say and the things that they do have everything to do with them, have everything to do with what they have experienced throughout their lives, the things that they have been through, the things that they were told about them.

Speaker 1:

And what ends up happening is that we tend to project our thoughts, experiences and judgments on to other people. We tend to take the judgments that we have for ourselves and project them onto the other people that we are experiencing in the world. Now, if you don't believe me, I want to challenge you on this, okay, because when you notice that you have a judgmental thought about someone else, I'd be willing to bet you that you have that same judgmental thought about yourself, and so notice this. The next time you have a thought pop up in your brain where you are judging someone else, I want you to think about it and say to yourself is this a thought that I actually think about myself? So having this knowledge around why we tend to take things so personally, I just believe is so powerful for the joy and the abundance that we want to feel in our lives.

Speaker 1:

Because when we know, first and foremost, where this type of thinking comes from. How it even got embedded in our brain that we are not enough, that we are not good enough, that we are not worthy. How those types of thoughts even got embedded in our brain. It gives us the opportunity to decide and to choose, to believe different things about ourself. Also, knowing this information helps us to understand and have compassion for the other people that we are encountering in our relationships, and having compassion and knowing that, the way that they are showing up in the world, through their speech, through the things that they say, through the judgments that they have for us judgments that they have for us we are able to have the understanding as to where that comes from from them. Therefore, we know that we do not have to take those things personally.

Speaker 1:

So this is the type of work that I do with my clients inside my 12-week Rediscover you program. As I mentioned at the top of the podcast, this topic seems to keep coming up in the conversations that I have with my clients, the conversations that I have with my girlfriends, and so it is in my brain so important to bring this back up to you. We may have talked about something very similar on the podcast before, but the more that we have the understanding around how we do have the capabilities of retraining our brain, the better that we are going to feel about ourselves, and I know that this is exactly what you want in your life. I know that you want to stop just existing in your life and you want to see your life as new possibilities. You want to have the love, the abundance and the joy that you may have once had and are looking for in this season in your life, and I can help you do that. Hey, have I shared with you yet about my brand new 90-day planner?

Speaker 1:

This 90-day planner was created specifically with my clients in mind, and that includes you, so inside my coaching program, the three biggest topics that my clients tell me that they struggle with is that they are tired of feeling unorganized in their everyday life, they are tired of feeling stressed in their marriage and they want more meaningful connections in all of their relationships. So this 90-day planner helps them do all of that. You do not have to be a one-on-one client with me in order to utilize this amazing brand new product, but what you do get with the purchase of your 90-day planner is a free strategy success call, because I want this to be one of the best tools that you have ever utilized in your daily routine. So to grab your 90-day planner, all you have to do is email me, christy K-R-I-S-T-I at christyfellinicoachingcom. I will send you the link for your 90-day planner and also your free strategy call.

Speaker 1:

I look forward to hearing from you. All right, you guys have an amazing day and stop taking things so personally. Who is your life coach? I would love the opportunity to work with you as you are rediscovering the woman you were meant to be. Visit christyballardfelainicom for more information on how we can work together to ignite that passionate, enthusiastic woman who may have been tucked away for some time. Let's start in the middle together.