Think It, Become It: How Your Mindset Shapes Your Outcomes

When Sarah Centrella hit a breaking point in her life, she was left with uncertainty, pressure, and no clear path forward. In that moment, a simple shift in thinking opened the door to something new: the idea that her future could be shaped by what she chose to believe.

As an author, speaker, and coach, and the author of multiple books including her newest release Think It, Sarah has spent over a decade helping individuals and executives reprogram their mindset, aligning their thoughts with the outcomes they want to create. 

In this episode, she breaks down how internal dialogue shapes reality, why many people unknowingly reinforce the same patterns, and how small, intentional shifts in thinking can unlock entirely new possibilities.

 Episode Highlights

• The moment that sparked her mindset shift and changed the trajectory of her life
• How thoughts influence outcomes and why repetition plays a key role in rewiring the brain
• What mental fitness looks like in practice and how to apply it daily
• Why negative self-talk is often the biggest barrier to growth
• Simple tools, including the Power of Pause, to interrupt unhelpful thinking
• How visualization and future planning can create clarity and momentum

Sarah offers a practical and grounded perspective on influence, showing that real change starts internally. By becoming more intentional with our thoughts, we can begin to shape better outcomes in both our personal and professional lives.

Links and Resources

Connect with Sarah Centrella on LinkedIn

Learn more about Sarah’s Mindset & Vision Setting

Purchase Sarah’s Books

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Transcript

From Rock Bottom To One Question

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I truly felt like, oh my God, this is the worst thing in the whole world. And no one's ever been through it with me. And how do I live? How do I survive? And in that darkest moment, I had this crazy realization, but it was almost like it spoke back and it was like, what if you can? I kept on going, I can't. It was like, what if you can? And there was something about that that just unjarred me and helped me start looking for, well, if I could, what would I do? So what would I do tomorrow? And that just became this very first moment of now what has become the personal development that is my whole life.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Welcome back. We are back here with a new season of the Women of Influence podcast. And I cannot be more excited to share this new season with you. It's been a while. We were, we took a hiatus and have been super busy with work here at She Speaks and doing some really exciting things here. But we also have been craving to come back to you with a new season of the show and bring you great stories and great insights from the women we get to work with every day here at She Speaks who inspire us and have really good ideas and stories to share about their travels in the influencer space. So today we have a great guest to kick off this new season of the show. We have back as a guest's best-selling author, Sarah Centrella. Sarah was on the show a while ago, several years ago, to talk to us about her book Future Boards. She has a new book out that we're gonna talk about called Think It. I love this new book. I got a chance to read a few advanced chapters of the book, and I really think you are going to love this book and what Sarah talks about in this episode of the show. In her book Think It, what Sarah talks about, and just as a quick reminder on Sarah, if you don't remember, Sarah is somebody who found herself as a single mom on food stamps when she and her husband went through a painful divorce. And she used that experience and really transformed her life and developed something called the Centrella method, which talks about that in Future Boards. But what I love about this new book that she's got out called Think It is what Sarah really teaches us in this book is how do you stop a negative thought and just rewire your brain. So stop a thought that is not useful to you, mid-thinking it, and really convert it into a positive or I should say productive thought that can serve you and bring you forward. I think you are going to get some great tips in this episode. Sarah will give you some very specific ideas about how to do that, how to take a thought that you're having mid-thought and really reframe it. And she used this in her own life to really turn her own life into the life she wanted. She talks about mental fitness and what does that mean and how to build mental fitness. She talks a lot about this idea of how you change that thought in the moment. And I think for someone listening to this who feels maybe overwhelmed or mentally stuck right now, I think that you are gonna get so much great insight and so many good ideas for how to change your mindset and how to really understand the what she calls the power of the pause. And you'll get some really great information about that, how to stop negative thinking, and to really create a way of thinking that is useful and productive for you in your life. I really enjoyed this conversation with Sarah I think you are going to enjoy it as well. Feel free to share it with anyone else who you think is also maybe stuck thinking and needs to kind of reframe and sort of recharge, maybe jumpstart the way they think to achieve what they want to achieve and to live the life that they want to live. With that, I'm gonna let you hear my terrific conversation with Sarah Santrella. Here we go.

SPEAKER_00 4:38

Sarah, welcome back to the show. Uh, thanks for having me so much. I love having these conversations and I can't wait to dig into it today. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 4:46

I think where it would be helpful if we start with your origin story, how you got into this space to begin with. You were on the show before to talk about your other book.

SPEAKER_00 4:58

Yeah. So last time I was on, probably talking about future boards, which you can see my board behind me. It's all about manifesting the life that you want using my future boards method. And then this one that just came out is think it, and it is how to align your mindset so that you can truly get anything you want, not only influence your outcomes, but others as well. Yeah, I'm excited to get into this conversation. They both tag team well together.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

Yes, 100%. And it's so up our alley, the idea of influencing how we think because of what we get to do day to day. So let's go back to your origin story because it is very much where things start for you down the path that has sort of led you to where you are today. Tell us a little bit about where your life was when you got onto this path.

SPEAKER_00 5:47

Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for asking that because I think it is the only way to make everything else we're gonna talk about kind of make sense. Because for me, everything started back in 2008 when I was then married to my high school sweetheart. We had three little kids. We had twins that were a year, year and a half old, and our son was five. And he had come home from work one day, and I literally saw a text message on his phone while he was in the shower. And it's This is your husband.

SPEAKER_01 6:15

This is my husband. You saw his text message. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 6:18

This is my husband. We've been married eight years together, 16. And the text message said, I can't wait till you're online, finally free, no more sharing. Smiley face. And I, up to that point, had never, ever, in the 16 years that we had been together since we were 16 years old, had the thought that either one of us could cheat. Just was not in my orbit, never thought about it. And so the instant full body reaction that I had to this was just any woman who's ever been in those shoes knows exactly what I'm talking about. It's just this almost out-of-body experience. And I remember I literally went into the shower, turned the water off. He was like soaked up head to toe, and said, get the fuck out. Literally, he got out, didn't even dry himself, put his clothes on, kissed each of our kids goodbye, threw the ring at me, and walked out the door. And it was like 10 minutes had passed, and my entire life had blown up. And the thing was, is like it had happened at the worst possible time. We had literally just lost our house in foreclosure. This was the end of the bubble. We had just had to file bankruptcy after having twins. I hadn't been working for almost two years, had been a stay-at-home mom with these babies. We had no money. We were behind on all the bills. The car wasn't in my name. I didn't have a checking account in my name. Uh, and so I just remember like that night, I was laid out on the floor, obviously been crying, my face like stuck to the hardwood. And I just was doing what a lot of us women do. We're trying to problem solve. And I was running all these scenarios through in my head, going, like, how do I do this? What am I supposed to do tomorrow? How do I take care of my kids? Like, I don't have a job, just going through all this stuff. And I just kept on thinking, like, I can't do it because everything that I was trying to sort out was hitting that dead end. Like, well, job's not gonna pay for daycare and you know, all that stuff. And and I just kept on thinking, like, I can't, I can't. And and this was before social media, so now it's like hard for us to wrap our head around, but back then we only knew the people that we knew. So I didn't know a single person in my entire orbit who had gone through anything like this ever. I didn't even have a single friend who was divorced at that point, you know, I was in my early 30s. So I truly felt like, oh my God, this is the worst thing in the whole world, and no one's ever been through it with me. And how do I live? Like, literally, like, how do I survive? And in that kind of darkest moment, I had this just kind of crazy realization, and and you can call it like anything that resonates with you, gut, instinct, God, universe, whatever. But it was almost like it kind of spoke back and it was like, what if you can? I can't. I was like, what if you can? And I and there was something about that that just kind of unjarred me, if you will, and helped me start looking for, well, if I could, what would I do? So what would I do tomorrow? And that just became this very first moment of now what has become the personal development that is my whole life. But back then I didn't know anything about it. And it was that first thing that just started helping me find a way out and kind of clock my way out of that darkness because I thought, well, if I could, what are these next steps? And then along with that, those early couple months were really dark. I'll be honest. It was not a good time. I had to go on food stamps, had to sell everything I owned. And in order to kind of like cope with that on a daily basis, I started imagining a better life. And that was really the birth of the future boards because it just started kind of building it in my head. And then part two was that I started noticing what I was thinking, and that's really what has got us here, because I thought, wow, I think my thoughts in the past might have really been unhelpful.

SPEAKER_01 10:05

Talk about that a little bit. When you say your thoughts were unhelpful, what do you mean?

SPEAKER_00 10:10

I think when I first kind of started paying attention to anything kind of in the personal growth realm, and it for me, it was just trying to figure out my life, to be quite honest. And one of the first things I started trying to sort out was this idea of thoughts create reality. And that was from an Oprah show I had heard a couple of years before. It was just like this random thought that in passing probably meant nothing when I watched the show. But because I needed it, for whatever reason, it came back. And so I really started thinking like, okay, well, thoughts do create reality. Let me look back over the last five years and what was I stress-wise, what was I obsessed about? What was I worried about? And then I could see almost a one-to-one ratio of exactly what I was afraid of happened, or exactly like my worst fear happened, or just all these correlations. And my brain is like, well, if that worked, I wonder if it works on you know, I wonder if the formula can work upside down, essentially. And so that began all of this as me just really trying to figure some of this stuff out in a practical day-to-day way. And I just started with little things. I just started talking different to myself about myself. And that's kind of where it started is I thought, I'm tired of being horrible to myself. I'm tired of cutting myself down all day. Nice things. What if I told myself I could do this? What if I told myself I was strong? Stuff like that.

SPEAKER_01 11:32

What's interesting, I was just listening to somebody talk about a famous basketball player, but they were talking about how when he goes and he shoots and he misses, he doesn't say, I didn't get it in. He says, Oh, that one didn't go in. Right. And when he shoots and he gets it in, he doesn't say, I got it in. He says, Oh, I guess that one went in. And it's interesting just thinking about that way of thinking about it, that it's almost like we sometimes focus so much both on the positive side, but also on the negative side, right? When it doesn't work out.

SPEAKER_00 12:11

Or a lot of times we're like creating that as an identity piece, right? Where so if I'm saying, I didn't make the shot, I didn't make the shot, then that's immediately going to go to I never make the shot, I suck, my shots suck, I'm terrible at this. And then what happens? Then all of that becomes self-fulfilling. I get this mental block that I can't overcome. And so I think that was what I was starting to put together a little bit. And and there were two main categories of my life that I knew my natural thinking was super negative. And one was about myself, bulimic diet pill era of you could only be a Kate Moss to be beautiful type. And so that internal dialogue from the time I was 12 years old was just wretched, to be honest. And I just started with little things. I instead of all day long telling myself how horrible I looked or whatever, I just started saying, You're beautiful, you're strong, you're capable, I love my body. Just all these things that I would have never said. And I started honestly doing it just as a test. I'm like, I bet this won't work. Let me just see if this works, you know? So I didn't have a whole lot of necessarily like hope that it was gonna do anything, but it made me feel better in the moment. And I thought, well, that's enough. I feel better when I talk like that to myself than when I'm horrible. That's a win. But the crazy thing was is it really did start to change me from the inside out. And it did start to work. And I was like, oh, like I wonder what else this works for.

Mental Fitness And Brain Rewiring

SPEAKER_01 13:30

So just so we're clear, then giving yourself positive reinforcements about yourself, not being so hard on yourself and kind of that internal dialogue being a more positive internal dialogue. By virtue of doing that, you were able to actually see a positive outcome. Well, tell us a little bit about what you saw that showed you that there was a positive outcome by doing.

SPEAKER_00 13:58

Yeah. So to me, the big difference is that mental fitness is the ability to notice a thought that you're having and take just a split second to say, I don't like that. I don't want to be that. If I think of thoughts as being predictors, then I can ask myself really quick, like, well, I don't want to feel that way. So I don't want to say it, right? So you're almost that's part one. But then part two is I have to then replace it with what I do want. So that was what I was doing without even understanding much. When though that negative thought would come in, oh, you're those genes look terrible on you, you gain weight, you look terrible, whatever. I would immediately be like, wait a second, I don't want to feel like that anymore. So instead, I'm saying, I look great in these genes. So really I just started with very simple opposites. I was like, I need to keep it simple. I have three little kids, my life is hard enough. So I was like, what's the opposite of this? And so I'd be like, Well, if I'm telling myself I'm ugly, I'm beautiful. If I'm telling myself I'm fat, I'm fit. So it was just like I'm swapping one out for the other. And now I know that that really is the key. That is mental fitness. It's being able to like make that quick shuffle and replace a thought that is sabotaging, that is truly not serving you, and put in the thought that is the outcome that you want. And when you do that, it changes the whole trajectory.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

As you're talking, I'm thinking to myself, I might legitimately have gained some weight. So me telling myself I'm thin when I know that that's maybe not the case or not as thin as I used to be, I don't want to be delusional. Right. But what you're saying is it's a process, mental fitness. One is you recognize that you're having a thought that is pretty negative or whatever, yeah, and not useful, right? So it's understanding that it's negative and not useful. And then the second thing is, okay, then I want to replace that thought, but it's not replacing the thought to say, I am this thing that maybe I'm not, because you know, that I won't actually believe it. Like I need to actually believe it, right? Or I need to feel like I can believe it. So you're saying it's aspirational. It's like what I want to be, what I want to say.

SPEAKER_00 16:10

Yeah. So the crazy part is from a neuroplasticity standpoint, our brain is actually very easily reprogrammed. And I think a lot of people don't kind of understand how your brain works. It the best analogy I would say is that it's like the this is gonna date me terribly, but it's like the old tape decks we grew up with, where you could hit record and it would record over the song that was on it before, right? So your brain is the exact same way. So the interesting thing is most people do think you have to believe it first, otherwise you'll feel disconnected from it or whatever, but you actually don't. It's just about repetition. So you can rewire your brain just through repetition and very quickly, I'm talking a week, two weeks, your brain starts picking up on the new programming, if you will. And it then it starts to believe on its own. So it actually, you don't actually have to start out believing. In fact, I always tell all my clients, what you are initially saying, so the opposite of the negative thought, is to your logical brain a complete lie, right? Because my brain is like, I know I'm a size 12 genes, I'm fat, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So if I'm just telling myself I'm fit, I look great, my brain is immediately like, that's a lie. It's okay. It just needs the repetition. So with the repetition, then everything else starts to follow. Then I start to feel a little better because I'm not tearing myself down all day. Then the second thing that starts to happen is if I'm telling myself all the time I'm fit, then I'm like, oh, maybe I'll go take a walk at lunch today. Right. So it starts to impact your decision making, to impact your actions, and it starts to shift the world around you to match the new outcome.

SPEAKER_01 17:45

So it almost becomes our brain starts to wrap its head around this, and that actually impacts our actions. And then it becomes when I wasn't exercising before, but I'm saying I'm fit that I actually start taking the actions to go before. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 18:02

So the perfect example is what happens when you tell yourself I don't want to go to like bobcha class or spin class, right? And all that morning you wake up, you know it's on your calendar, you're like, I don't want to go. I feel terrible today. I have no energy, I don't want to do this class. You're gonna be so less motivated to actually get on the bike and be in the class, right? Just naturally, your brain will have literally talked you out of doing the action. Everyone knows that example because we've all been there a million times, right? So if you flip the example on its head and say, what if I'm doing the opposite? I'm telling myself I'm strong, I'm fit, I feel fantastic, my body reacts quickly, all of those things. Now, when I come to a decision point, should I go to class or not? I'm already like out the door before I even have the decision. So it starts influencing your actions, your decisions, and then ultimately the outcome and the thought will match.

SPEAKER_01 18:54

I don't think I've ever heard this before. It's I'm telling you, it's crazy. Can you give us some examples of this coming to life either for you or for a client that we can continue to grasp what you're saying? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 19:07

So when I very first started this process and started with your beautiful da-da-da, it was probably about two or three months after doing that as a regular practice and just very being very committed to it. I would look at myself in the mirror when I would do it. I would really talk to myself. I had this moment when I finally got a job, got dressed up, was wearing my heels, my little suit, going out for a client meeting, and I caught my reflection in the store window. And I remember stopping because I didn't think it was me. Because I was like, wait, who's that girl? Like, she looks great. And I remember stopping and looking and doing a double take and be like, oh, damn, girl. And I'm not kidding you. In 33 years, I'd never have that thought about myself ever. I would have never seen myself in that light. So that was kind of that first realization where I was like, I actually feel it now. Like, and when I noticed that it had changed that kind of internal belief and I wasn't actually thinking negative, because what will happen? It'll rewrite the story, right? So the old prompts that used to come up all the time, you're terrible, they start receding because they're being replaced.

SPEAKER_01 20:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:11

So I stopped actually feeling the way I'd felt my whole life. So then I just started doing it in money, and you can plug it into any category, and the same exact process will happen. So you think about abundance or your finances or your career. I do a lot of corporate coaching now. So I work with executives a lot. And simple ones, if you're telling yourself I'm not good at speaking in meetings, or I might not be a good podcast guest or whatever the case is, what happens? We might freeze on stage. I do the opposite, and what happens? I start to build the confidence.

SPEAKER_01 20:48

You know, I'm thinking too for anybody who's listening who maybe works as a professional in the business world.

SPEAKER_00 20:54

If you're thinking too, well, if I'm not hard on myself, and I get that if that has been your driving force up to now, there could be a little bit of resistance in letting that go. But if you instead create a vision for your future that is so exciting that you cannot wait to get to, I always say that my future boards or my vision for the future is what gets me out of bed. Like it autopilots me in a much more productive, honestly, and healthy way than negative self-talk does. Yeah. So negative self-talk, I have to be 10 times stronger to just overcome the internal conversation to then do the thing, right? So I am intentionally or unintentionally, because most of it's subconscious, making that whole process a hundred times harder than it ever had to be.

SPEAKER_01 21:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:45

So I always say if you can line up your mindset with your outcome, for a lot of us, that's the first time in your life you're actually all effort is going in one direction because the opposite is happening.

Visioning The Future You Want

SPEAKER_01 21:56

Yeah. And I think too, what's interesting about that, and I think this does go back to your other book, Future Boarding. Just the most of us don't really think too deeply about what we want to have happen in the future. 100%. So focused on the here and the now, or even more importantly, in the rearview, looking back at the past, that we don't spend enough time thinking about what we want to have happen. And what you're saying is we have an enormous amount of more than we think of impact on the future if we just take the steps to recognize it, to actually do the work to say, all right, what do I want to have happen? What is what is it that I want? In order to give yourself a good thought, you kind of have to know what you want that state to be.

SPEAKER_00 22:57

Absolutely. And you're right. Most people don't. I always think of it like this. If you ask the average person on the street, what do you want? They might say a million dollars, right? They're just coming up with something generic that they heard somewhere. They don't have a real sense of what does my future look like? I mean, we all stopped asking ourselves that question when we graduated high school. Let's be real. Like for most adults, that's the last time someone asked you what you wanted in your life or who you want to be, right? But for me, I'm asking myself that annually, usually more than that, but definitely the first of the year every single year. Scoping out what does my next five years look like? Where am I going? What life am I building? What does this look like? What is the best case scenario of the business I'm launching or the endeavor that I'm doing so that I always know where I'm going and what I'm working towards? And then I start telling myself again those lies to get me there. Like this has already happened. I'm so excited that this happened. I am successful. I am a best-selling author. I am whatever the thing. So that now every day, it's almost like I've kicked in the auto processing. My life is a whole lot easier.

SPEAKER_01 24:02

What if you don't know what you want?

SPEAKER_00 24:06

And like I said, a lot of people don't. So I have a process, nine-step process that I teach. But the first one, I call it Dream It. And it is designed to help you break out of your normal way of thinking. We all have this box that we live in, like you said, that's honestly mostly about today, maybe about this year, but for most people, it's honestly about today in the next couple months. And it's about daily schedule. So if you can sit down and just ask yourself, hey, best case scenario in the next five years, what are some moments and experiences I want to live? What are some highlights in this business? If I got where I wanted to go, what would some of those highlights look like? So I'm like pulling moments, I'm kind of picking moments. If I met the love of my life, what would that, what would we do together that feels so great? Or so you're going through these different categories of your life. If I felt the best that I felt, what would I be doing on that day? How would I look? How would I feel? So I'm building out almost a virtual reality in my mind using visualization to create these moments and these best case scenarios in all these categories of my life that answer that question for me. Right. So if I do it one at a time and say, in my career, what do some of the big moments look like? Okay, now I have something to go off of in my, you know what I mean? So you're doing in this strategic, I call it a life plan, and we're just building out this strategic life plan. And then once I have that, the natural thing that will happen is your brain's starting to build a movie. Just in the thought process of when I meet my love, I want to go to Paris. Immediately your mind builds the Eiffel Tower, your mind builds the dinner, your mind builds the romantic moments, right? So that's visualization. I mean, that's the baseline of visualization, which is as everyone knows, I think one of the most powerful mind tools we have. I think that's pretty common. Everyone knows that now. But a lot of people don't know how to do it. And that's literally how you do it. And I call it daydreaming. So once you've kind of built your strategic pieces, then just test yourself. Hey, can I daydream about it while I'm doing the dishes? Can I daydream about it while I'm walking the dog?

SPEAKER_01 26:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:11

And the more you do that, the more you call it into existence, and the more you're lining everything up with the future. So then your socks come behind it. So it all works together like this just beautiful little machine.

The Power Of Pause For Anxiety

SPEAKER_01 26:22

Yeah, I love that. All right. So if we think about one of the things that people, you know, one of the tools that you use, it's a core tool called power of pause. Yeah. Can you just walk us through how someone can use that during a high pressure kind of emotional charged moment?

SPEAKER_00 26:41

So power pause is one of my favorite ones to stop and definitely reduce stress and anxiety. So stress and anxiety are typically triggered by common things we think about every single day. Maybe finances, maybe a relationship. Honestly, the list is pretty small. It's probably about three things that are just recycled to the point where you're thinking about them all day, every day. And the more that you think about them, the more they cause fear, doubt, all the things, which then can lead to, in some cases, super severe anxiety, right? It's this whole spectrum. But here's the crazy thing. Most of the time, that entire thought process is all out of your control, right? You can't do a single thing about probably any of that. Hence the reason why you're spinning and you're just spinning out and you're feeling more out of control and you're getting more upset about it, and maybe you're lashing out at your family about it, or you whatever. So I want to immediately, as soon as I notice that, and these are typically thoughts that your body will respond to. You might get a headache, you might get a stomach ache. Your body's like, yo, I'm over this.

SPEAKER_02 27:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:50

And so if you notice it, you're like, hey, I'm thinking about my finances again, and that's really not feeling good. And I'm starting to feel terrible today, and I'm starting to think worst case. What if it all just blows up and how am I going to live? I want to immediately recognize that. And then I want to ask myself a very important question. Is there anything I can do right now to solve this problem? Very important question. It's almost a slap in the face, like, whoa, girl, hang on. So if the answer to that is no, which it always will be, because you can't solve your finances while you're driving in the car or walking your dog, right? Then step two to that is then I say, all right, I will not think about it because I don't want this to manifest in my real life. So if I understand that correlation, then I know that me stressing out about it throughout the rest of the day is actually going to bring it into my life, which I do not want. So my immediate response then has to be, I need to think about anything I do want. And this is where it's so important to scope out the strategic dream we just talked about. Because now, for the first time, I have something to daydream on. In other words, to play a little mental game. So if I'm stressing out about finances, this sounds crazy, I know, but it works like insane. So if I'm stressing out about finances and I'm in traffic, and normally I would wreck my day, and I said, I can't fix it right now, so I'm not gonna do that. Then I start daydreaming about me and the love of my life in Paris. What are we doing here? But that is mental fitness. It is replacing something that is creating a negative outcome in your life with anything that you actually have already decided you want that is gonna create a positive brand new outcome. So that is literally when you think about mental fitness and think about it in physical fitness form. If you're super fit, you could do a crossfit, right? You could do jumps, you could do this, you could do that, because you're agile and you're ready. If mental fitness, you could make that jump and be like, nope, that doesn't work for me, this does. That doesn't work for me, this does. And you get better at it.

SPEAKER_01 29:48

This thought doesn't serve me. And I think that's the heart of it is that we all have to recognize that what we think is who we are.

SPEAKER_00 29:59

What we're bringing in into that's our reality.

Influence Outcomes With New Navigation

SPEAKER_01 30:01

It is our reality, it becomes who we are, and we can absolutely impact and influence the outcome of that by feeding ourselves different thoughts, even if it's just to say, you know what, this negative thought is not gonna serve me, I'm gonna replace it with something else. So let's talk a little bit about the the influence part of this, because that the show is, of course, called Women of Influence, and we like to think about how this way of thinking can influence us and influence our lives and influence outcomes. If you were thinking about it from that perspective, how would you go about talking about how we can influence our outcomes? Like, what do we need to know about what we can do to influence outcomes?

SPEAKER_00 30:55

So, first and foremost, I want to say you a thousand percent influence your outcomes. Like I've been teaching this now for 15 years. I've been living it, I've had thousands of clients do it. It's proven. Um, and if you want to get neuroscience, if anyone, you know, is questioning this, go down that rabbit hole. There's a ton of neuroscience that backs up all everything that I've said from that standpoint. So factually, we absolutely influence our future completely. And whether you think that's true or not, you already have. And so the life that you're living right now is the result of what you were thinking five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago. So once we understand that this is a mathematical equation, it is what it is, then what I want to do is I want to put in my equation, right? I want to put in my numbers so I start getting an output that is what I want. So if we think of it from just a super simplistic way, what I think about is what I'm gonna is gonna eventually be my future. I always think of it like if you get in a car, you're I love international travel, I always rent a car when I go, have no idea ever where I'm going. So I rely on my GPS on my phone, right? So you put in your address and you're like, great, I can take 900 roads, turns, whatever. I know I'm gonna end up where I want to go because I put in the navigation. If I try to go take that road without any navigation, I'm gonna be screwed, right? I'm just gonna be stuck and around about forever and never go anywhere. So that is what our thoughts are. They are the navigation. So they are literally paving the road ahead so that I can get in that car and hit it 60 miles an hour. Without that, I'm going round and round. And most people are honestly living a groundhog day life. And that is because what they spent all day today thinking about was today, the schedule of this week, what's going on right now. So then what happens? That just repeats and repeats until you've literally had a midlife crisis. So this is how when you are intentional about plugging in the thoughts that you want instead, how you live a new day all the time, because you're creating brand new outcomes all the time. And there are ones you already know you want. That's the coolest part. Like, I already know I want that because I did the work. So when I'm bringing it in, it's exciting because it's like, oh my gosh, that used to be a thought and now it's a thing. And to your point about influence, we influence everyone around us when we do this. I raised my kids this way. I taught them how to talk to themselves like this, how to scope a vision. And my son is a great example. He used these tools to live his ultimate dream. He played football at Oregon for the last four years. Oh, wow. They're the number one team in the country. Something that no one thought that he could do except for him and I. He used all of these tools to achieve that, to win three rings at Oregon. And then beyond that, to go to the college football playoffs where he just helped play in the national championship game. So you 100% influence your outcomes, but you can also literally teach it to your kids or your spouse or to your team at work. And you start to see, and that's true influence, right? When I'm teaching something that actually changes someone's life, that to me is a definition of influence.

SPEAKER_01 34:07

100%. And I do think that there are a couple of things that you're talking about that I truly believe we do have such a huge opportunity to impact how things, yeah, how things turn out. And I think what's really important about that for people is understanding that we do have personal agency, that we do have the ability to, and I think that's where people get into a lot of that negativity, the negative feedback loop is well, I don't really have an opportunity to influence this. But we do, and I love that that's what you're teaching people, and also recognizing that we absolutely can teach our brains to think in the more positive realm. And once like, but even just thinking like, all right, instead of focusing on all the stuff that's going wrong, I'm gonna start thinking about stuff that's going right. Right, yeah. And if you focus on that, there is something about the more things start going right. Yeah. The more things right, you build momentum in that direction. And even if it's small momentum, momentum is such an powerful thing in totally.

SPEAKER_00 35:25

So the crazy thing about everything that I teach is that if you initially just do the work and at first it feels weird and it feels kind of dumb. Like, why am I thinking about things I can't have right now? And but if you just say, whatever, I'm gonna try it, I'm gonna do it, it will start to autopilot the entire system. And so it starts to rewrite the story, it starts to rewrite opportunities, it starts to literally shift everything around you to match that. And a perfect example is if you went and bought, let's say, a red Toyota, what do you see everywhere the second you drive a freaking car home? Toyota everywhere. That's a piece of your brain that is searching for the match.

SPEAKER_01 36:07

A hundred percent.

SPEAKER_00 36:08

Right? So I can use that exact same technique that already exists in every single one of our brains, but I can hack it to get what I want. So if I am starting to think about, hey, this is what I want, then boom. If I'm thinking about a trip to Paris, all of a sudden I walk into Costco and all the TVs are showing a trip to Paris, right? So you're starting to see it everywhere. And none of this is woo-woo. You guys, every single thing I'm talking about here, every person listening to this has done a version of this multiple times in their life. They just didn't know they could do it for anything. They didn't know it was a copy and paste formula that you could plug into anything you want and get it. It's not crazy. It's all stuff you've already done. It's it's how you've gotten success in any area. If you've ever been married, it's how you thought about a wedding, planned a wedding, visualized a wedding, walk down an aisle. It's all the stuff we know how to do. It's just how do I get it to work for me every day to continue creating outcomes that don't exist right now.

Where To Follow Sarah

SPEAKER_01 37:00

I love that. Well, Sarah, thank you so much for spending this time with us. If people want to follow you, learn more about your books and ways that they can maybe bring some of this into their lives. What is the best way for them to do that?

SPEAKER_00 37:16

Absolutely. So SarahCentrala.com has all the things. You can get the workbook for my new book, Think It for Free, on my website in the shop. Just use the code reader all caps and you'll get that for free. And all the books are available on Amazon or wherever books are sold, and of course, Instagram at Sarah Centrala.

SPEAKER_01 37:34

Thank you so much. I appreciate enlightening us with this different way to think about it. I love it. Thank you. Thank you.