The Happiest Lives Podcast

E49: Power Of Your Thought Life

• Jill M. Lillard, MA LPC • Season 2024 • Episode 49

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This begins a brand new series, Thinking About What You Are Thinking About. You can let your mind run on default or you can take your brain out of the box and consider what thoughts are running your life. When you take your thoughts captive, beginning with awareness, you change your life.  In this episode, I walk you through the process of living your life with intention, whether it's managing your time better, improving your relationships, or reaching a personal goal. It all starts with a thought. 

Join me for three days of LIVE coaching (1 hour each day) and leave with a plan of How To Stop Being Disappointed In Your Marriage & Igntite Joy.  The best part? It's FREE. Sign up for details at www.myhappyvault.com . 

If you are ready to become the woman God says you already are, you have to join me in Clarity+Courage, my cost-effective coaching group for Christian women. Learn more and enroll at www.myhappyvault.com/clarityandcourage

Questions? Email Jill directly at Jill@thehappiestlives.com

Speaker 1:

You are listening to the Happiest Lives podcast with Jill Lillard, episode number 49. Welcome to the Happiest Lives podcast, where you'll learn to think better, feel better and become the woman God says you already are. Here's your host, jill Lillard. Hello, hello, hello everyone. Welcome back to the Happiest Lives podcast. Today we begin a brand new series Thinking about what you're thinking about, and so I think it's always a fun, exciting starting something brand new, a clean slate, and so we're going to fill that slate, we're gonna fill that notebook with a bunch of new ideas and thoughts.

Speaker 1:

So I hope you are ready. So this topic I don't know if it sounds interesting to you. It sounds interesting to me otherwise I probably wouldn't be talking about it and it means exactly what it says that we think things, and how often do we think about what we're thinking about. Do you ever do that? Do you ever look at your brain? Take your brain out of the box and look at what's going on inside. If you don't, then you're missing out and your life is probably just being lived on autopilot.

Speaker 1:

Sometimes we think our thinking is just like our breathing, that it's just happening to us and we can't control it. Well, just like you can learn to breathe differently. You can learn to slow down your breathing. You can learn to do some Rhythmatic breathing. You can do the same thing for your thought life. So, yes, it is just kind of happening without your awareness, but you can have a say in the matter, and the only way to have a say in the matter is to get curious, to pause, to become more aware and see what it is that you are thinking. Now. Why does this matter? Why would you even want to do this? Well, the alternative is not thinking about what you're thinking about and just going on default.

Speaker 1:

The problem with that is sometimes we feel very powerless. We are just subject to the thoughts that we are thinking, and so sometimes we are reacting to those thoughts. We are living as though some of our thoughts are reality. When they are completely optional, we don't have to think those things, we don't have to get those thoughts any power, and when we think life is happening to us, we aren't going to learn, grow or change and don't we all want to change? We're always looking for something new, we're always looking to be better, hopefully. I mean, if someone came along, if there was such thing as a magic fairy that asked what your three wishes were, then there would probably be three things, three wishes that you would like granted. So there would be three things that you would like to change.

Speaker 1:

Now, sometimes we're looking for our circumstances to change, but you can be happier, you can feel better, you can experience a certain feeling without changing your circumstance, simply by changing what you are thinking about the situation. So the results that we are Experiencing in our life, they are advertising what we are thinking. So if you feel lonely, if you feel disconnected, if you don't really trust people or respect a lot of people, that is telling me that you probably think people are untrustworthy, that you Feel like people maybe don't respect you, maybe you're believing that you are all alone. Whatever it is you're thinking, you're gonna find the evidence of it, and if you're gonna start showing up in your life in a certain way and then you're just gonna prove that result or some version of that result. So, to grow, you have to be willing to let some thoughts go, thoughts that are no longer serving you, that aren't getting you the results that you want, so that you can make room for new thoughts, thoughts that actually help you live in Abundance, thoughts that help you feel better, thoughts that help you create better results.

Speaker 1:

Now your results can be the way you experience relationships. It can be about how you manage your time, how you get things done, could be about regulating your emotions, feeling better, and it can be about getting over the past. The past is a perfect example of this. The past no longer exists. So something might have happened to you when you are ten years old and you made it mean something, so you had a thought about it. And so, even though you're not ten years old anymore and that thing isn't happening, you may be holding on to the conclusion that you made and you may continue to find evidence that that thing is true, that thing that you've been believing. And so when we change our thoughts, when we recognize the past isn't happening and what we've been thinking about, it is Optional that we can think something else. We can find ourselves Set free in a way, set free from the bondage of certain thoughts that have been running our life on the back burner.

Speaker 1:

So how your brain is interpreting events or other people's words or actions that is going to determine your experience of the world. What you make things mean is how you see the world. If you're thinking that Somebody does not care about your thoughts and feelings, then you're going to see the world that way that nobody cares about your thoughts or feelings. You'll find the evidence or you'll stop caring about other people's thoughts and feelings. So today we're gonna talk more specifically about the power of your thought life, and so an overview.

Speaker 1:

Know that you have 60,000 thoughts a day. I've read other places that you have like 50,000 thoughts a day, so maybe there's a range, but you have tens of thousands of thoughts every day, and those thoughts Create feelings. When you have a certain thought, when you meditate on a certain thought, it is going to create a feeling in your body. Your brain is going to release a chemical cascade and so you will feel a certain emotion, and that emotion is going to fuel actions, things that you do, things that you don't do, and, based on how you're showing up in life, the behaviors that you're engaging in, the things you're doing, the things you're not doing, you're going to create some sort of result. Now, the good news is, your thoughts are optional. So if you look at a thought, you're thinking and you realize that it makes you feel a certain way, and when you feel that way, you show up a certain way and that gets you a result which proves what you're thinking.

Speaker 1:

The good news is that thought is optional. You don't have to keep it. You can change the way you're thinking about a circumstance. So if you have at least 60,000 thoughts a day, don't you want to know what they are? So you can choose your life. You can choose the identity that you are living in Because you have a certain identity. God has given you a certain identity, but you may not be living in that identity because your brain is stuck in these other truths about yourself that aren't even true. You can impact your relationships in a purposeful way when you consciously look at your thoughts, choose them and manage them. So how do we examine and renew our thoughts? Well, I'm going to show you that today. I'm going to give you a process that I use with all of my coaching clients that helps us look at our thought life and what thoughts we'd like to create instead.

Speaker 1:

So I want to start with just a little story about a client that I was working with and she was trying to lose 20 pounds, and every time she tried something, she would find evidence that it was not working, and when she believed it wasn't working, she would feel very discouraged. And when she felt discouraged she would give up. She would justify eating whatever it is that she wanted and she would stop exercising. She would go back to all the old habits that were familiar to her and the result was nothing was ever working. She quit working.

Speaker 1:

So I helped her look at what it is that she was thinking about the number she saw on the scale as she considered the actions that she had taken that week, and the thought this is not working was simply an optional thought. She was making an assessment of what that number on the scale meant and it was entirely optional. Not everybody would look at that number in the same way that she was looking at it. Whatever she was making it mean, she was making it mean that things weren't working. It did not have an upside for her Because, even if it was true that thought wasn't serving her, it just led to this result that she was no longer working. So I helped her look at some optional thoughts. Now she could keep the thought this is not working if she wanted to, but she realized she had held onto that thought long enough and she did not like the results that it created in her. She recognized that it just brought her back to old habits that didn't get her results, to prove that it wasn't working and she was no longer working.

Speaker 1:

So one thought was I said, what if it's possible that this is working? Because she considered that thought, the thought that she thought couldn't possibly be true at all. She's like, yeah, it actually is, I could see where it's possible that maybe it's working, that I tried it for a week and I wasn't getting the results that I wanted, and or maybe she could see that she did it for five days and then two days she didn't follow her plan and so then the scale didn't move, and so it's possible that what she was doing was working. But maybe she wasn't always honoring the plan or maybe she wasn't giving it enough time, and so she could see that when she was thinking it wasn't working, she became more hasty in her judgments and in her actions and would just justify eating off plan. So to offer her brain the thought it's possible that it is working, shifted her energy right away to where she felt a little bit more hopeful to consider that maybe it actually was working. She also considered an optional thought I will figure this out.

Speaker 1:

Making a hypothesis and testing our hypothesis is how we figure things out. So we don't always know exactly how we're going to get a new results, but we just research a little bit. Maybe we find something that someone else tried. We try a way of doing things which becomes our hypothesis. I think if I do A, b and C, then I'm going to get D. So then you do ABC and you test it and see if it is giving you the results, and if it doesn't, you figure out maybe one thing to tweak. And so, when she was in a state of mind, I'll figure this out. The result was she was constantly trying to figure out in a scientific way.

Speaker 1:

Ultimately, she realized that impatience was driving a lot of her efforts to lose weight. When she was feeling impatient, she would give up easily and she would find evidence that things weren't working, and so she wanted to cultivate more patience in her life and more patience in this endeavor. She realized if she felt patient she wouldn't try to rush, she would commit to actions. She would create a plan. She would actually stick to her plan longer than five days and she would set up times to evaluate if it was working, maybe in two weeks instead of at the end of one week, and then she could make a new plan if she wanted her. She would continue with the plan, but when she felt patient, that would be easy to do, and so she had to change what she was thinking about the number on the scale. That made her feel more patient. And so what she chose to think was I'm willing to take the time to change my habits. But she realized when she was focused on that I'm willing to take time to change my habits, then she would be more consistent with how she showed up. That made her feel more patient and consistent, rather than thinking this isn't working or this might not be working. So that is just kind of an example of how we can look at the thoughts that we're thinking and how they impact how we show up in the results that we're getting. And so if you have 60,000 thoughts a day going through your brain and these thoughts are creating feelings and these feelings are fueling actions and the actions are creating results, if you want to change your behavior or relationship with someone without considering your thoughts, you're only going to end up frustrated. You will not be able to sustain the change and it's not going to feel genuine.

Speaker 1:

A friend called me up recently and she was talking about how she should respond to a text message that another friend had sent her. There had been some conflict between the two of them and so she felt like she was walking on eggshells a little bit, but mostly I think she just wanted to feel very authentic in her text, and so I told her she was asking the wrong question. She was wondering what should I say, what should my words be? Back to her and I said the real question is what do you want to think about that text that she sent you? Do you want to think that she is making a bid to connect with you, that she wants to have a relationship with you? Do you want to think the best of her, or are you going to have thoughts that make you feel self-protective and cautious? What do you want to think? How do you want to feel Then? When you figure that out, then you're going to know how you respond to her, whether you respond to her or don't respond to her. And if you want a relationship with her and you want to create healing in that relationship, then I think you'll respond to her in a way that doesn't have to feel exuberant or fake or artificial, but can feel very authentic for you.

Speaker 1:

So the thoughts that we have are optional and I think a good evidence of this is two people can experience one person in two different ways. In fact, 40 people can experience one person in different ways. So if I think about my daughter, I think she is the most amazing teenager in the world. She's the most amazing human being. I love her so very much. I think she's beautiful and creative and smart and sensitive and I just see so many positive things in her. So even when she is not perfect because none of us are we all have our ways that we can act out of our sinful, fleshly nature. And when I see that I can still see the best in her, that maybe she's not perfect, but I see how God perfectly made her and I see her good intentions and I see her good heart.

Speaker 1:

Now she could be in a classroom of 29 other students and they may not feel the same love and compassion and endearing, they may not have the same endearing thoughts about her that I have and they may not always see the best in her and they may not even notice her or have any thought about her, but, based on what we're thinking, we're going to have different feelings about her. You're going to have different feelings about different people in your life. You're going to feel differently about your daughter than you feel about my daughter, and so this is evidence that it's our thoughts that are creating our experience of someone. It's not just that person, it's not who that person is that is creating our experience. It's what we are believing and thinking about that person that's going to impact how we feel and how we show up in the relationship.

Speaker 1:

So if you're having lots of thoughts going on in your brain by default, don't you want to become more aware of what those are and especially aware of the thoughts that are fueling the actions that you're taking? If you're showing up in your life in a certain way and you want to quit showing up in your life in that way, then don't you want to see what is driving that? Why are you doing the thing you're doing? What is the feeling that's fueling that behavior and what is the thought that's creating that feeling? Looking at thoughts is really important if not only if we want to reach our goals or manage our time better or change some aspect of our life but in our relationships. If you want to have relationships that are fiery, fresh, alive, then you want to look at what thoughts are driving that relationship and really, if you want better relationships with people, you have to have a better relationship with yourself. You need to appreciate yourself. You need to know, kind of, what you are thinking and feeling and how you're showing up. That's a relationship that your thoughts, feelings and actions are having within you. And then you want to know what you believe about yourself, your identity, and we can't know that.

Speaker 1:

I don't think we can really appreciate the fullness of who we are without having a relationship with God, who created us and loves us and is full of so much grace and compassion. When we have a relationship with Him and we can see ourselves the way that he sees us, we don't inflate our sense of worth and we don't deflate our sense of worth. We see ourselves perfectly as we should. We see all the attributes and the security that he has given us and so we can operate in the world in a different way. It's so interesting to me to think that our relationship with God, when you step into a relationship with God through Jesus, you are doing that with your brain. You're doing it with your will and with your mind.

Speaker 1:

So when Christ extends the invitation to us, comes to me, all ye who are weary and have a laden, and I will give you rest. You have to choose Him with your mind. He says he who believes in me, as the scripture has said, will have rivers of living water flowing through him, and he's talking about the Holy Spirit. If we want to have the Holy Spirit living in us, we come to him by believing believing he is who he says he is. So we get to enter into this relationship with God with our mind, and God gives us free will. We are all free. Each and every person. He is created has free will, so he doesn't make us think a certain thing. He gives us the choice to believe or not believe, to choose or not to choose, and so we get to decide what we do with our mind, will and our emotions.

Speaker 1:

When you step into belief that God is who he says he is, that Jesus is the Son of God, then you're also stepping into all his promises, all the things he promises to you, and you are stepping into this new identity. And so when you really believe, god is who he says he is and you believe that the Bible is his word to us, then you're going to be hungry to know what he says, you're going to want to get his word inside of you and you want to step into all of those truths. So we have a thought which creates a feeling and we have actions. So when we believe Jesus is the Son of God, maybe we feel hopeful, inspired, encouraged, and the actions are. We step into new ways of being and doing. If we believe that Jesus is who he says he is and will do what he says he will do, then we're going to study God's word so that we know who he is, who he says that I am. We're going to surrender our will to him because we completely trust him. We will put our faith and our trust in his character that he is good, faithful and just.

Speaker 1:

We are stepping into a whole new belief system that's going to impact our relationship with God ourselves and it's going to help us love others better, and that is based on our internal security. So don't be confused. I'm not saying our eternal security, although we do get that. That's part of our belief as Christians that we are eternally secure when we put our confidence in the Lord and step into a relationship with him. But I think we are also internally secure inside of ourselves. We have a firm foundation, we have a solid identity, a sense of security of having that really can just lead to us showing up in our life in a way that's very powerful and loving and peaceful.

Speaker 1:

I think there are a lot of us Christians who may just have grown up in church and so we may be Christian in name. We may go to church because it's the thing to do, but maybe we haven't really wrestled with what we believe or who God is. We may not even bring our deepest questions. We may just try to show up and be a nice Christian woman, do the right things without really wrestling with God and engaging with him, having that relationship with him. And the problem with this is when we don't take a deeper look at those questions that we're having, at the hurts that we're feeling, at the hardships we've experienced in our life and turn toward the Lord with those things, then we really don't experience the depths of God's grace and his love and his provision to us and our relationship with God. Because it is disconnected from our thought, life will become flat, it will lack passion, it will lack aliveness.

Speaker 1:

So if you are a believer and yet you're going through the motions, you're feeling disconnected from God and you're not really wanting much from him. You're not asking for much from him because you've experienced some hurts in your life and maybe because you've tried to power your way to be a good Christian, then I encourage you to honestly examine what is going on in your heart. What are you really thinking? What are you really feeling? Now, those thoughts don't have to define how you are showing up, but when you become into awareness of those thoughts, you can ask yourself are these thoughts true? Because I am operating from these thoughts, do I really believe them? And what do I really believe about God? Because if you really believe God is who he says he is, it will change everything and your life will be spirit-filled, your passion and your aliveness will be great, as opposed to just being kind of dead and potato-like right. So you want to engage, you want to look at your mind, look at what you're thinking, what you're believing. Do you believe that God is good and kind and faithful? Or, if you're honest with yourself, are you thinking that God is kind of selfish, that he's unkind, that he's not trustworthy. Sometimes we don't want to ask these hard questions, but when you start engaging with him, just like Jacob wrestled with God, god gave him a new name. He left with a limp, but he left completely changed by God.

Speaker 1:

So how do we change life? We start to change our life by examining our thought life. And so how do we examine our thought life? The first thing that we want to do is be able to turn on the lights. So I call this exposing, and this is the process of doing a heart scan, which I use inside all of my coaching programs. So the first thing is we expose, just like we turn on the lights in a dark room, everything that was in that room before we turn on the lights was already there Before you stepped on the scale. You already weighed a certain amount. Just because you came into awareness of it didn't change the fact right. Just because you turn the lights on the room, it didn't create the dust or the mess or the cobwebs. And so we have to be willing to turn on the lights so we can expose what is there.

Speaker 1:

If we don't expose what is there, then we'll never create change. We can never change the room if we can't see what it is that we're working with. And we can't make decisions about what is in the room if we can't see it. So God wants us to take all of our thoughts captive. And if you're going to take your thoughts captive, you have to see and know what is there.

Speaker 1:

And so when we do coaching as part of this process of exposing, I will just have people just show up. You can show up a mess, right? You don't have to have your solutions or answers. That's why you're coming. You want some help. And so you might just start talking and might say, hey, what's going on? Have you been feeling? What are you even thinking? What's going on, what are you experiencing in your life? And you'll just kind of start talking.

Speaker 1:

And the benefit of having a coach is you have someone who can listen to you, and so they aren't in the middle of feeling everything that you're feeling. And they can show up as an observer. They can observe all the sentences that you're saying, they can notice what things are facts, what are thoughts, what are feelings you're having, and they can help turn on the lights so you can come into greater awareness of one, what it is that you're thinking how that thought creates a feeling, how you show up when you feel that way so that you can see and take ownership of your actions and behaviors and what results that ends up creating for you. And so that is the part of exposing, and you could do that at home by doing a thought capture, just free, riding, journaling, writing down your thoughts and seeing what comes up, but then kind of pulling one thought at a time. I show you how to use the self-coaching model so you can break down by taking one thought out of that thought capture and writing that one sentence down and separate what is the fact and then what is my thought about it. And then how do I feel? What is one feeling I have when I think that thought, when I feel that way, how do I show up? Do I disconnect from with other? Do I disconnect from other people? Do I go and eat a bag of chips? Do I check out for hours on social media? Do I get short and snappy? And then what result does that create? And that result is probably going to prove what it is that you are thinking.

Speaker 1:

So the next part of heart scanning is we renew. We renew our mind, we renew our thoughts. And so, to renew our thoughts, we're not simply forcing a new thought there. We're not trying to fight our way out of an unwanted thought. We don't simply say, ok, that thought's not serving me, I'm going to force this new thought. We want to be able to actually believe the thought on some level, even if you're just believing it for 30 seconds, and we're not just making an affirmation that we feel disconnected from emotionally. You want to be able to feel that thought that you're saying and take actions. And so I always call this taking, declare actions. But to renew your mind, you want to see what other thoughts are possible. You want to see what is a truth in God's word. If you truly believe God is who he says he is, then there may be a truth from his word that that is going to give you a new way to look at it. If you have a relationship, there may be a way to think about that person that's going to serve you more, that's going to maybe make you feel more loving rather than focusing on the hurt that you're experiencing.

Speaker 1:

The third part is we engage, and so, as I was saying, when we renew our mind, we're not just trying to force new thoughts and at the expense of dismissing our own emotions. That never works. It's really hard to sustain change in your life and implement new actions and even hold on to new thoughts if you feel like you're having to suppress your own hurt. So if there is hurt there, if there is anxiety, worry, anger, like whatever unwanted feeling you may be experiencing that you know isn't serving you and that it is caused by a thought, if we are able to hit pause on that feeling and actually feel it in our body as an observer and look at what we are thinking about the feelings we're having, if we're saying I shouldn't feel that way, we're beating ourselves up, maybe we're dismissing our feelings a little bit, we're trying to power our way to a new thought just to get out of the old feeling, then we are kind of missing the point of our emotions. Our emotions are there to help us engage with God, to experience His presence, and that is a vital part of even renewing our mind. We can't renew our mind and push into the new thought and really feel it and live by it if we're not willing to feel the unwanted emotions without reacting from it to actually feel it and experience the Lord's presence there, and so that is an important part of creating change in our life. And then the last part is pressing on despite unwanted emotions. This is taking actions, even when you don't completely feel like it. Those old thoughts will offer themselves to you because they're familiar. They become habitual ways of thinking, habitual ways of feeling, and we want to allow them to be there and still be able to take action from our new models, from our renewed mind, so that we can move into those new results.

Speaker 1:

So I wanted to give you, leave you with an example that I think kind of illustrates this whole concept of how powerful our thought life is. And I was reflecting on this as I was hearing some young adults talking about their relationships and just being reminded of, sometimes, the challenges of our relationships, as I was hearing these high school and young adult kids talk about this, and so I remembered back to my 20s, so 30 years ago, and I had a friend that I was close to. We spent a lot of time together, but she just seems like she was just making some choices which weren't the choices I would be making with my life, and she was just kind of disconnecting from me a little bit and I was making it mean that she didn't value me. I thought if she valued me, if she valued our friendship, she would be sharing with me more what she was going through emotionally and she would also show up in my life in a certain way. She would share her thoughts and feelings more, she'd be more interested in my thoughts and feelings and she would just in general, maybe communicate better and she might not be making these other decisions that she was making with other guys and stuff in her life.

Speaker 1:

And so, at 20 years old, I was not aware of the fact that my thoughts created my feelings, which fueled my actions, which created results in my life, and I didn't even know how to maybe even consider all that. I thought I was just making an observation, an observation of her, and that's what we do so often. Sometimes our thoughts they're optional, they are just our assessments, but we think they are reality, like we're just making an observation of somebody. They are so, they are so rude, they are being vindictive, like those are just our assessments and they're optional. When I thought my friend wasn't valuing me, I felt hurt and so I kind of started mirroring her behavior. I withdrew a little bit, I didn't share my thoughts and feelings, I found fault with her rather than expressing my vulnerable feelings, and I really just kind of quit pursuing her as a friend and the result that that created was I didn't value her and I also proved that she didn't value me because she kind of quit pursuing me because of her own thoughts and feelings that she was having, maybe about my actions. I was making her actions all about me, which affected how I showed up, and then I really wasn't valuing her or the friendship.

Speaker 1:

So at some point, years down the road, we did rekindle our friendship. It never was what it what it had been back then. But we were also in different seasons of our life and I have learned not only in that friendship but in all the friendships in my entire life, all my relationships, every single person will disappoint you and they will let you down. So if you want to have friends, if you want to have relationships with other people who are imperfect, then you have to make space for humanness, because other people are human just like you.

Speaker 1:

You disappoint people, you let people down, you do things that may not have the intention that someone assigns to it, but they may make it mean something that it didn't mean Okay, that is just the messiness of relationships. So if you want to have relationships, then you have to find ways to think about the people in your world that is actually going to serve you. Everybody is not going to think the way you think. They're not going to do the things that you do, but you get to choose what that means. Now I'm not saying that you need to be best friends with every single person that you were ever a best friend with. Everyone doesn't have to be your bestie for life. There may be people you just share a season of life with, but just know that you get to decide who you want your life, why you want them in your life and who you want to be in that relationship. And you have to accept the reality that all of these people have the potential to disappoint you, because you will feel disappointed at times because of what you're making their behaviors mean.

Speaker 1:

So that friend she's in my life now. Our lives aren't engaged on a daily basis like they were way back when, but we do keep in touch and I don't expect her to be the person who listens quietly as I process through my deepest thoughts and feelings. I don't expect her to be interested in the same things that I could spend all day talking about and studying. But I love her for who she is and I recognize that she doesn't have to experience life the same way I do, and I think that's so beautiful. I'm glad that God made us so different. We have different callings and giftings in ways that we show up in the world. There are some wants in our life that we share and there are other wants that we don't share. It's totally okay. I love that. She's always up for an adventure, she's willing to try new things. I love that we have all these memories together. There was some of my most fun times I spent with her and I'm really thankful for that.

Speaker 1:

She's very excitable and she's very passionate about people and I love that. She can walk into a room not know a stranger, just relax and be herself and talk to everybody. She doesn't have to be as melancholy as I can be. I'm not a depressed person, but I could be more reflective and deep and sometimes, if you think about things in a very reflective way, you feel a little melancholy. She doesn't have to be as introspective as I am.

Speaker 1:

Right as a coach, as a therapist, it's probably helpful that I'm introspective, because I can relate to people, maybe in a different way than she can, but she can relate to people in a way that I can't, and I just don't have to make any of that mean I don't have to make those differences mean that I'm not valued. It just means God made us different and I love that. I love her for who she is, not for who I want her to be. She doesn't have to be any different for me to enjoy her, and so I hope that you can recognize that and see in your life that your thoughts about other people, your thoughts about situations, are optional. If your thoughts aren't serving you, you can find a way to think about things that is going to help you be the person that God says you already are. So if you want to do any of those things, any of this work, this is what we do inside Clarity and Courage. I help you think about what you're thinking about, to see the impact of your thoughts on your emotional world, which then in turn will affect the way that you're showing up, and I help people create new results.

Speaker 1:

So, just in summary, I want to recap the main points from today's episode. You have 60,000 thoughts a day. Those thoughts are creating feelings, those feelings are fueling actions and those actions are creating results in your life. All of your thoughts are optional. That's very good news. You get to choose what it is that you think. If you're having tens of thousands of thoughts a day, don't you want to know what they are? So you can choose your life, your identity and your relationships on purpose. And there is a process. There's a process available for you that can help you examine your thoughts and change your life. So thank you guys for showing up today. I'm looking forward to our talk next week. We're going to talk more about this idea that thoughts create our feelings, so you won't want to miss it and I'll catch you then.