Welcome Series - EP #1 - Where to start

In this episode I talk about the first step of mind management. Life presents us with neutral circumstances, but our brains interpret and respond to these events, thereby creating our emotions. Your feelings, which stem from your thoughts, guide your actions, and the results you're experiencing depends on these actions.

I talk about the power of thoughts in shaping your perceptions and emotions using the example of rain and sunny weather to illustrate how different people can have different reactions to the same circumstances. Your thoughts, rather than the external environment, determine your emotions and behaviors. 

Understanding this can help you manage and improve your emotional resilience. 

I discuss the workings of the human brain, emphasizing the role of the primal brain which is designed for survival and often negative, and the higher brain or prefrontal cortex which provides the best advice for achieving personal goals. I explain that negative thoughts are a normal part of the human experience and should be treated as opinions, not facts. 

They're some practices that I would encourage you start doing - starting with recognizing and questioning negative thoughts and to actively listen to others' conversations as a way to manage their own negative thoughts. 

 

You can also watch this episode on YouTube with Captions - https://www.youtube.com/@TheWorkingMumsLifeCoach

If you'd like to have a chat about how I can help you further, please don't hesitate to click here & book a time with me, I'd love to meet you.

You can also follow me on IG @NickyBevan_LifeCoach

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:09

Hello and welcome, welcome, welcome to my very first podcast episode. How exciting is this? So I have actually been doing, I think you would call it a vlog, a video kind of lesson for quite a while now. So actually, if you're a bit of a YouTube fan and you want to be able to see my face while I'm recording these, you can just hop on over to YouTube and look me up. But I really wanted to find a way of reaching more people to be able to help them manage their mind and manage their emotions. I get very passionate, especially when it comes to mums, helping them to actually enjoy their kids, enjoy their job and enjoy themselves without all this shitty mum guilt. So, I'm so glad you're with me. And at some point over these episodes, at some point I will tell you a little bit more about myself and about my background and a bit more about what brought me into this work. But I really want to hit the ground running with giving you some really amazing tools to help you get started on your journey. Now, I did my coach certification with the Life Coach School in America. That's an amazing podcast, by the way, the Life Coach School podcast by Brooke Castillo. That podcast literally changed my life. And I was always the type of person that knew it wasn't the rain that made me miserable. I could just put on my raincoat, put on some wellies and splashing puddles, or as long as I had somewhere dry to go to, I knew the rain wasn't a problem. But it wasn't until Brooke Castillo taught me the model, which is the method I now coach, on, that I actually thought, oh my gosh, this is actually a thing. Other people in the world agree. So this is the way that life works, right? This is like gravity. It is working whether you want to take any notice of it or not. And I have to say, when my husband first heard this, he's like, what are you talking about? That sounds like a load of bollocks. He is now a life coach as well, by the way. He also has his own podcast, The Police Stress and Burnout Coach. I think his podcast is called The Job. So if you know of any policemen, send them over to that podcast because it would really help them. So this is the way that life works, only we have not been taught, we have never been taught this. Up until this moment in your life, you have probably thought, like most of us and exactly like I did, The weather makes us feel miserable. The other, like something that someone said made us feel bad or we need sugar to feel good or think basically something outside of us. So I used to say, oh, did they make you feel bad? They make you feel bad. Or, well, don't say that because you might upset them. As if as humans, we are able to push an emotion into somebody else's body. That is not how it works. We cannot actually push our emotions into someone else's body. Now, I'm going to do a whole episode all around emotions, so I'm not going to go into that this time. But what I really want to focus on this week is the difference between a circumstance or what I like to call a fact and then your brain's drama. So life gives us situations. Life gives us circumstances, situations and events that we have no control over. They could be things like the weather, equipment breaking down, somebody else's behavior, your teenage children's huffing. It could be technology. It could be your laptop. It could be your phone. It's certainly the food and the drink. It could be money, the amount of money that you do or don't have in your bank account. It could be your to-do list. These are things that the universe give us. If the universe doesn't resonate, please feel free to change the universe to God. Sometimes I will say God. But basically, the world gives us, life gives us events, illnesses, bereavement, trauma. Life gives us things to deal with. It could be someone beeping their horn. It could be someone jumping a queue. It could be someone wanting to give you a compliment. These circumstances are always neutral. Now, what I mean by that is there are circumstances An event might happen and you have two humans experiencing or witnessing exactly the same event, but would have very different emotions about it. You think, well, how is that possible? If it's the situation that makes me feel the emotion, then all the humans would feel the same way. But that's not the case. All the humans don't feel the same way. And the reason that happens is because it's not until your brain gets involved and your brain has a thought, It gives you an opinion that you then feel an emotion. You have an emotional response to the opinion your brain is giving you. So life gives us circumstances, completely neutral until our brain gets involved and gives us a thought. Our thoughts create our feelings. I'm going to say this again. Your thoughts create your feelings. And then how you feel drives all of the actions that you take in your life. And then depending on what you do or don't do gives you a result. Now, these steps I'm going to go into in more detail later in the next episodes. But for today, I really want to focus on the facts. When you're looking out your window and you see the rain falling, It's miserable is not a fact. And now, especially if you're in England, you might have just heard that and gone, Nikki, what the fuck are you talking about? Like, of course, the rain is miserable. And you go into the shop and the shopkeeper will go, oh, isn't it miserable today? Oh, yes. Then everyone goes, oh, yes, terrible, isn't it terrible, isn't it miserable? The rain is not miserable. A fact is something that every single person in the world could agree with. If you took the rain to a court of law, you took the weather to a court of law, not everybody in the world is going to agree with you that the rain is miserable. There will be people that rejoice about it raining. Okay. Another example, and I'm going to use the weather just because I think it's a really beautiful way of starting to open up your mind as to quite how powerful your thoughts can be. Another example would be, let's imagine it's bright, clear blue skies and the temperature is 26 degrees. So we could go to a court of law and we could prove in a court of law that 26 degrees was the fact because the weather station has recorded it, the thermometers have recorded it. There is no question that it's 26 degrees. Now, when it's 26 degrees and the clear blue sky is out, my brain thinks, oh my gosh, this is amazing. I love it. I love the heat. I love the warmth. I love the clear blue sky. So when I think, oh, my God, I love it, I feel good. And then when I feel good, what do I do? Well, I'm going to go about my way in a very lighthearted manner. I'm probably humming. Maybe I'm singing. If you're lucky enough for my window to be wide open and you're one of my neighbors, you hear me howling my favorite tune. You know, I'm seeing all the positives in life. Life is good. So when I'm kind of going about that behavior, I really enjoy my day. But that's not because it's 26 degrees. It's because I'm thinking, oh my gosh, this is amazing. I have a friend called Janet. I love her so much. Maybe she'll even listen to this podcast. Who knows? She does not like the heat. So when it's 26 degrees outside, she is not happy because she is thinking, Oh, this is too hot. It's too hot. And when she thinks it's too hot, how's she going to feel? Miserable. And then what's she going to do? Huff, puff, mope about, complain a bit sweaty. You make an emotional heat then as well as a physical. And so it can't, coming back to the circumstance, it can't then possibly be the circumstance that makes you humans feel because we could all experience 26 degrees and clear blue sky but we would have very different opinions so this is really key this is like one of the this is like the starting point of learning how to manage your mind because your part of your human brain is old So I'm not going to go into the neuroscience of it. There's loads of books out there. Dr. Joe Dispenza does loads around neuroscience. So if you like reading, he's amazing to either listen to on audio or one of his books. But I simplify it right down. So I separate out the primal brain, the primitive part of our brain to our higher brain and the prefrontal cortex. Now, you will hear me talking lots about this. over the coming episodes. But just simply, your primal brain is really old and every single human has this part of your brain. The fact that you're listening to me, you're a fully functioning adult, means that you have a primitive part of your brain. And that part of our brain is really designed to keep us safe. It's designed to look for danger. You imagine hundreds of thousands of years ago when we lived in caves, anything new, anything different surely meant death. We needed food. We needed to have sex. We needed to hunt and gather in order to survive. We needed to stay in the warmth of a cave. Now, That part of your brain, by design, because it's looking out for danger and it really wants to do a good job of keeping you safe, is going to be negative. It's going to be negative. So I promise you that the first thoughts that you have about any given situation is probably going to be negative. Mine is. Most people's are. Not because there's something different or unique about you, but because you're human. And you have that human primitive brain. Luckily for you, though, however, you've also got your higher brain, your prefrontal cortex. And this is amazing. This is what makes you you. This is what, you know, creates your personality, separates you. You know, this is your uniqueness. And This part of your brain has the absolute best advice for you. It knows exactly what you need to do in order to get what you want to get. But because your primitive brain is so loud, we listen and then just believe that that voice is true. So in the next episode, I'm going to be talking all about thoughts. So make sure you tune in next week. But Just for this week, understanding that nothing has gone wrong when you have a negative sentence in your brain. When your brain naturally goes to negative. That's normal. It's normal. But just because your brain offers you an opinion, just like anybody else offering you an opinion, opinions aren't right and opinions aren't wrong. So, Just notice, oh, look at my brain giving me opinion and then sort of ask yourself, is that a fact? Like if I if we were actually there in person and I was very lovingly coaching you right now, I would be asking you, is that true? Is it a fact? Would every single person in the world agree that it's too hot or it's miserable? If we use the weather analogy. Now, this might be tricky to do in your own head, which is why it's always really lovely if you do have someone that is going to very lovingly call you out on your brain's negative bullshit. But what you will notice is you will notice other people's lies so much easier. So I'm going to give you like a little takeaway that I want you to just practice in between these episodes, because listening to me is lovely. You know, hopefully you enjoy it. Hopefully you find it quite funny, a little bit lighthearted. But if you don't action the lessons that you learn, you won't actually build the strength of like increasing your emotional resilience or increasing your control or increasing your mind management skills. So over the course of this week, just listen to other people's conversations with fascination. This is not a judgment exercise. This is not a reason to beat yourself up or to beat another human up. We all have this negative part to our brain. But once you become aware of it with just fascination, then you get to control it. And that's when the fun starts to begin. So just listen to what other people have to say. And just ask yourself, could you prove that in a court of law? Oh, isn't that interesting? Look at the story that they're telling themselves. Look at the opinion that their brain is giving them as if they have no choice. And listen, it feels like you don't have a choice when you first start this work, right? It feels like all the thoughts that your brain gives you are facts, but they're not. A fact is something you can prove in a court of law. So this week, I just want you to start there. I just want you to start by noticing, right, okay, I've come across this event or I've come across this situation or this scenario. what are the facts of this situation? You could even write it down, write down like, right. What is a really good exercise actually is if you write down all your brain's thoughts, like just get it all out on a piece of paper again without judgment, and then go back and circle the facts. And you'll notice that very little of what you've written down is actually factual, which is brilliant. Because now you get to decide. Now you actually get to choose what am I going to think? And I'm going to talk about more about your thoughts in next week's episode. I really hope you've enjoyed my first podcast. I've loved speaking with you. And I will be back next week where we will dive deeper into the thoughts that you're probably having about yourself. And more tips on how to manage them. Have an amazing week. Thanks for listening. Bye.