15: What You Give "Airtime" To Matters

Welcome to the Women's Success Coach Podcast. A podcast created to inspire growth and to help you learn, achieve, and evolve in your life ongoing regardless of your age. I'm your host, certified coach, and licensed therapist Karen Vincent, and I'm here to guide you and provide you with concrete tips and strategies you can implement in your life. I'm also here to inspire you, challenge you, and cheer you on so that you can create the life of your dreams and beyond. In today's episode of the Women's Success Coach Podcast, I'm talking about what you give airtime to. Our brains are fascinating, and we have the ability to rewire them on an ongoing basis based on what we think about the most, and based on the thoughts that carry the deepest emotions. This can be a really good thing, or it can be a really problematic thing. Your brain will follow what it thinks you want it to do, and it will show you more of what it thinks you think is important. And this is based on where you place your focus the most. So, if you think about worst case scenarios and worry a lot, your brain will help you find more worst case scenarios and will help you find more things to worry about. And by the way, these could be real things or made up things that will never actually happen. On the other hand, if you place the majority of your focus on positive things, opportunities, and things to celebrate, guess whatIt'll help you find more of? You guessed it, positive things, opportunities, and things to celebrate. This is so important to understand because when you understand it, you can manage it. So let's get to it. Well, hello my friend. Have you ever heard the Tony Robbins quote"where focus goes, energy flows"? That is what we're talking about in today's episode. I have so many clients who focus on what is not going well, who rehash negative things from weeks, months, and even years past, and as the result miss out on all the good things happening, as well as the potential to create more good things. What you give airtime to matters, and this is because it shapes the way you see yourself, the things happening around you, and your world overall. It also impacts the results you get in your life. If you've been following me, you've likely heard me say your thoughts create your feelings, your feelings impact your actions, and your actions create the results you get in your life. If you have crappy thoughts, you'll have crappy feelings, take crappy actions, and get crappy results. Well, it's not quite as black and white as that, but you get the point. How can you create an amazing future if all you do is think about a terrible past or present situation? You can't. You'll just create more of what you were thinking about. And this is not because of some magical thing happening. What is actually happening is when you are focusing on something, you're telling your brain that it's important. And when your brain thinks something's important to you, it will scan to find more of what it thinks is important, which will promote additional thoughts that are similar. These thoughts will carve out a neural pathway in your brain that makes it easier for your brain to find similar thoughts and show them to you. So, negative thinking will encourage your brain to find more things that fit a negative narrative, which will make it easier for your brain to think negative thoughts. And, because we can only see a small fraction of what is happening around us every day, due to the sheer volume of it, our brains are forced to filter out things that are not in alignment with what it thinks is important to you. Kind of crazy, right? So, for example, if you spend a lot of time thinking about how hard something is, your brain will help you find more evidence that something is hard. It will remind you of past times when things were hard and did not go well. It will try to get you to avoid expending energy related to the hard thing because it'll feel like it'll be a waste of time and energy. And the result is that you continue to feel overwhelmed, bad, fearful, or frustrated, you don't take resourceful action to figure it out, and this then reinforces your idea that the thing is hard. What if instead, you saw the hard task as a challenge that would promote growth for you? What if you saw it as a way of taking something to the next level? With this mindset, your brain will think that growth and finding solutions are important to you. And guess what? It will help you find solutions. Instead of reinforcing a pathway in the brain that includes failure, overwhelm, or helplessness, it will reinforce or even create a pathway in the brain that looks for solutions. Your brain will scan for potential solutions, for evidence that you can do hard things, and it will filter out things that reinforce doubt or hopelessness. In addition to putting your brain to work for you, if you consider the same situation that is presented to you that feels hard, how might you feel differently if you see it as a challenge and a way of taking your life to the next level, versus is feeling like it's something that you cannot deal with. When you only focus on the problem, you can actually create more of the problem. Let's consider a couple of examples here. First, let's talk about weight loss. If you feel that it's impossible for you to lose weight, your brain will go to work for you. It will offer you lots of evidence that losing weight is hard. It will remind you of all the times in the past that you've tried to lose weight without success, and it will encourage you to not expend energy on losing weight because, why would you spend energy on something that's impossible anyway? In addition to this, your brain wants to help you feel safe, comfortable, and to get a little dopamine hit when possible. So, instead of just having you not take action to lose weight, it may also encourage you to take action to self-soothe with food, which could then result in additional weight gain. Not good, right? For the next example, let's talk about finances. If you feel overwhelmed by your debt or lack of disposable income and focus only on this, your brain will find lots of things that reinforce that you will never have financial security or financial freedom. It will look for evidence that you are not someone who's good with money, or who has enough to live the life you want to be living. When it does this, it will filter out potential solutions to your money problems. And as with the example about weight loss, it may then encourage you to spend money in an effort to soothe your challenging emotions about your financial situation, instead of problem solve and come up with the steps that would actually improve your financial situation. Hopefully this is making sense, but I want to give you one final example just in case. Now, imagine you are not satisfied with your job, and all you do is think about and talk about how awful your job is. When you finish work at the end of the day, you replay all the things you disliked, you think about all the things that don't feel fair, and you think about all the people you work with that you don't like. Maybe you even vent about these things to a partner, a family member, or a friend who wants to support you and reinforces how awful things are for you at work when they hear your stories. When this happens, your brain will be alerted to this being important to you, and it will get to work to find out even more bad things happening at work. It will further reinforce a neural pathway about work being a very negative situation, and it will filter out or gloss over anything related to your work that seems positive. What do you think the feelings would be if this is what is happening in your brain? Pretty awful, right? These feelings could include frustration, sadness, anger, resentment, or hopelessness. And, if you are waking up each day to go to work, feeling frustrated, sad, angry, resentful, and or hopeless, what do you think your work output and interactions will look like? They will probably not support you in improving your situation or feeling confident to take action to find a better job. And as a side note, when you do this, not only are you not happy when at work, but you allow work to steal your personal time as well. Now that you hopefully understand this, know that what you consume has a significant influence on this process. The more you consume something, the more your brain will go to work for you finding more of that thing. So let's go through some of the ways that we all consume, so that you can do a self-audit and determine if what you're consuming is helpful to you and moving you in the direction you want to go, or if it's working against you.#1: What you say to yourself on a regular basis. This is what I was referring to and the examples I just shared. You consume your own thoughts. What thoughts you have on repeat will create more similar thoughts because your brain will look for evidence to support what it thinks is important. Let me ask you this. Are you your worst critic? Are you harder on yourself than anyone else is? So many of us are in this category and we say negative things to ourselves, about ourselves, which signals our brains that finding and highlighting negative things about ourselves is important, so it then goes to work and finds more and more of them. If you notice yourself doing this, which can take some effort at first, instead of talking to yourself the way you're used to, consider talking to yourself like you would talk to a good friend. If she was in your same situation, what would you say to her versus what are you saying to yourself? A good way to start to speak to yourself in a more positive way is to have a positive affirmation or mantra. There's so many out there, and for some inspiration and suggestions, I highly encourage you to check out my Instagram stories daily for ideas of positive affirmations that might work for you. 2: How you set up your day. Do you start your day consuming information from others? I can't tell you how many stressed out and anxious clients that I work with who start their day by immediately checking their work email and starting to worry about work two or more hours before they are even expected to start their day. Or maybe, you start your day on social media or consuming all of the negativity in the news. Now, I'm not saying any of this is right or wrong necessarily. What I am saying is that you should be aware of how it impacts you, and if what you're consuming on a regular basis is where you want your brain to focus and spend energy. Remember, your brain will find more of what it thinks is important to you. So I want you to consider how you want to feel at the beginning of your day. Is it peaceful? Energized, focused, excited, or confident? Again, there is no right or wrong way because this is very specific to you. However, I would encourage you to think about how you want to feel and then decide what morning activities will help you generate thoughts that create those feelings. It could be 10 minutes of quiet time while drinking your tea or coffee. It could be journaling, prayer, or practicing gratitude. It could be reading. It could be exercising, stretching, listening to your favorite music or podcast. It could be 10 minutes of playing with your children or talking to your partner. Whatever it is, I think this makes a big difference because you're taking control of your day as it's starting, and deciding what you're giving airtime to based on what you want to be thinking about and how you want to feel. You'll be directing your brain at the very beginning of the day by telling it what's important to you. 3: What you consume. Now, I mentioned this in number two, but consider what you're consuming on a regular basis. Is it social media that inspires and motivates you? Or is it social media that makes you feel bad about yourself and your life? Is it news that keeps you informed about what is happening in the world, or is it news that makes you focus only on the negative things happening, which can create fear and anxiety? I encourage you to ask yourself if what you're consuming on a regular basis is what you want your brain to be focusing on finding more of and having you think about more. If it is, keep doing what you're doing, but if it isn't, you have the control to change it and consume things that create the thoughts and feelings that you want more of in your life. 4: Who you keep company with and listen to. Finally, I want you to consider who you spend the most time with, who you engage with the most, and who are you listening to the most? Is it people who support you, encourage you, talk about what's going well in their lives, or what they're hoping to do in the future. Or is it your negative coworker who spends all day talking about how bad your place of employment is? Do you listen to a relative who only presents the worst case scenario, or who tells you all the things you're doing wrong each time you speak with them? If you are allowing a lot of negativity from others into your life, guess what will happen? Hopefully you guessed it by now, but your brain will think it's important to you. It will help you find more of it, and it will filter out more of the positive things happening. And listen, I know this can be challenging if you're thinking about changing a current interpersonal dynamic, however., consider how you can slowly make changes so that interacting with certain people may feel better for you. Perhaps, if you no longer want to listen to a negative coworker, you could say something like,"Well, we're here for 40 hours per week until we decide to do something different, so how about we try to make the most of it and enjoy that we have each other every day". Or something like that. If it's a situation with a friend or relative who calls you regularly to complain about their life, maybe you say something like,"You know, I'm really working to be happy and appreciate what's going well, even when things are hard. So it would be really helpful if at the beginning of each call, we could check in about something that's going well in our lives". Neither of these things will likely completely change your interactions with someone. However, they could make them feel a little better. The other thing that sometimes has to happen is that a firm boundary needs to be set where you tell the other person that you're happy to engage with them, but not when they focus the conversation on certain things that are counterproductive to how you want to think and feel in your life. And if you struggle with having people in your personal life who are positive and uplifting, go out and find some new people. There are tons of online communities, meetups and other forums you can research to meet like-minded people instead of just accepting those who are already in your circle. My goal is always for you to get the most out of these podcast episodes, so let's put this into action. What I would suggest is that for the next week, at the end of the day, you ask yourself the following questions to evaluate what you were saying to yourself on a regular basis, what you were doing to set up your day, what you are consuming, and who you are surrounding yourself with. So for the next week, I want you to take a piece of paper or set up a note on your phone and write the following four headings.#1: What did I say to myself on a regular basis today?#2: How did I set up my day? What did I do for the first hour or so I was awake?#3: What did I consume from books, social media, podcasts, television, etc.?#4: Who did I keep company with and listen to today? Now, don't worry, all this information is in the show notes, so you can go check that if you weren't able to write it down. And again, I want you to answer these four questions each day and after you answer each question, go back and put a plus next to the things that reinforced what you want to give airtime to in your life, and put a minus next to those who are shifting your focus to a place where you don't want it going. If you notice that there are things that you are saying, doing, or people who you're spending time with who are not in alignment with how you want to think and feel, start to determine how you can make changes. What's one little adjustment you can make this week to create more of what you want in your life and to eliminate what you want less of in your life? This can make a significant difference, my friend. So I really encourage you to go through this process and feel free to reach out and let me know what you thought. That's a wrap. You should be proud of yourself for investing time in you, which is so critical for success and for overall life fulfillment. I look forward to having you join me for my next episode. And in the meantime, go click that subscribe button so you'll know when it's released, and you can also follow me on Instagram at Best Boss Lady Life that's at Best Boss Lady Life on Instagram. Also, remember that whatever it is that you're working on, you've got this and I'm here cheering you on.