You Need a Coach B*tch
In this weekly podcast, Certifed Coach Instructor Chris Hale keeps it real and sassy to help you claim your own authority and put the biggest, brightest, most unapologetic version of yourself out into the world.
You Need a Coach B*tch
How To Change
Harnessing the power of the future and the past, we delve into the process of building new beliefs for lasting change. Imagine the satisfaction of reaching a six-month goal and aligning your present actions with future success. We discuss how to cultivate new, positive thoughts about yourself by leveraging past accomplishments as evidence. Practical steps include writing down new beliefs, challenging counterproductive thoughts, and recognizing moments when you've already demonstrated the qualities you strive for. Commitment and consistent practice are key to achieving the transformation you seek. Tune in to gain insights and actionable strategies for personal growth and lasting change.
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Hey Bestie, how are you doing? It's the actual end of August and, like, how the fuck did we even get here? I feel like this summer kind of flew by in a daze. For me, it was primarily spent taking care of Ben, and that was like a full Groundhog's Day situation where every day looked like exactly the same and those days were not amazing because he was very sick at the end. I tried so hard to like cherish the time that we had left, but it was. It was filled with lots of grief and pain, so it was definitely difficult and grief is so interesting.
Speaker 1:I had all this anticipatory grief and now I I have like actual grief. I mean, I guess they're both grief, but we don't really have it nailed right. It's not something that I think that we are good at, even though we know that we're going to lose things. People opportunities, things, people opportunities all the things that there's like life is filled with lots of loss. But I feel like we spend so much time like chasing the future and simultaneously chasing youth, which is like really interesting. We're like always looking to the next best thing, but like we're also trying to not like get older as we do it. I mean that's a whole thing. Get older as we do it, I mean that's a whole thing. So it's been an interesting four weeks since his passing and the grief truly does come and go in waves and I'm just showing up for myself every day, being with myself, having self-compassion, being there for my husband when he's going through his own grief. And you know, I think that the amount of pain that we're feeling really does correlate to the amount of love that we have felt, and when you love deeply, you lose deeply, and so this is just another part of that human experience. And so this is just another part of that human experience.
Speaker 1:I will say I have been very grateful to dance. For the past three weeks I've been back in the studio and it's just been a thing that I've needed to help me move through my days. It feels good to have a purpose outside of caretaking and serving, working with kids and really digging into, like, how dance works, how their bodies work. It's been really good for me. So I've missed this kind of work as I've been primarily focused on my business for the past two years. I really like being back in this familiar space. The break I took was much needed because I was very burnt out on everything, especially dance, because it's something that I've been doing since I was like three years old, but I'm happy to have returned to it at this time. It feels like the right time Now.
Speaker 1:We've talked about having goals and not setting change-based goals, and we've talked about why that is right. When we're like trying to like change from a place of deficit or when there's negativity involved in wanting to change, that it's not like the best place to come from, but like what about the places where we do actually want to make changes and we really like our reasons, where we have done the work to examine our why and we've come to the conclusion that moving in a new direction is the way to go. So today we're answering the question how do we change? Honestly, it's fairly simple, but not always easy, because it entails changing our beliefs. And why is it so hard to change what we believe? I don't know. It's crazy to me. We're so designed in a way that has us looking to reinforce our beliefs before we're ever willing to change them, so much so that, even in the face of facts, we can refuse to be swayed away from what we desire to believe is true, and I say what we desire to believe is true, because it's not always true. Right Facts can tell us things that are concrete, that sometimes, a lot of times, we refuse to be swayed away from. I think it all comes down to feelings. We feel safe when we double down on our beliefs. They're familiar, they bring us comfort, and that makes them hard to move Whenever emotion is involved. We're going to have to do more work to disentangle our nervous systems from our thought patterns, and if you want to do that work, it's fully available to you.
Speaker 1:So what are some things that we might want to change? I know for a lot of my peer group us geriatric millennials a lot of us are interested in drinking less. I hear a lot about that. Some people are going like fully sober. Others want to be able to have alcohol in their lives but not have it be the center of so much of their socializing or having it be the only way they believe they can unwind at the end of the day. Other changes we might want to make are being more active or making more friends or creating more connection with our partners. These are all things that I help people do, and they all have their start at the same place our beliefs.
Speaker 1:We have to believe that we are capable of something different than we're currently doing. That's really it, but that is the hard part. That's really it, but that is the hard part Shifting the belief away from who you believe you are today for who you believe you can be tomorrow. And one of the reasons that the shift in belief is so difficult is that most of us are really past focused. We're getting all of our evidence for what is possible for us from our pasts, and not from the places where we've been successful, but usually from the places where we believe we have fallen short. We spend our time in hindsight, focused on our failures, hoping to avoid future failures, but all that is doing is putting attention on failure and convincing us that we will continue to fail in the future.
Speaker 1:So it starts with being willing to believe something new about ourselves. Like if I've had a drink every day the last week and I look for evidence that I can not have one tonight, all I will see is my past record and I'll be resistant to believe something new. But my willingness to believe something new is what puts a small crack in the foundation of my beliefs, and in that crack is where I start to insert new beliefs, and I have to take it one moment, one day, one week at a time. Now I might not be able to jump directly to the belief that I cannot drink for the entire week, for instance. Right If that feels like a big jump, if I've been drinking every night, right. But I can definitely start with believing that I cannot drink tonight.
Speaker 1:The same goes for like working out, like being more active. I don't have to believe that I can go to the gym every day. I just need to start with today. Do I believe that I can go today? That's the change. I have to believe that I am capable of making that change from not going at all to going this one day. And I think that's where we bring in our idea of achievable goals that we talked about a while ago. It is totally believable that I can go to the gym one day a week. So what if we start there and then we work our way up? Because one day at the gym in a week or one drinkless night in a week is better than none? We need to leave the all or nothing thinking behind and meet ourselves where we're at, and that is where we are able to start building the evidence that we can in fact do the thing that we claim we want.
Speaker 1:Once we get past that part, the next thing we need to be able to believe about ourselves is that we can handle negative emotion. So when I decide not to have a drink, I'll have an urge for one. That urge, being unanswered, will be really uncomfortable. It won't feel good in my body. If I've never been able to not answer an urge for things that I desire, then I'll need to start trying to believe that I am the kind of person that does not answer every urge. Same thing for being more active. I will experience resistance, and it might sound a little bit like I'm so tired today or missing one day won't hurt me, but the truth is that all of these things are cumulative, and so is building belief. We do it little by little every time we show up for ourselves and we do the thing we said we were going to do. So let it take the time that it's going to take.
Speaker 1:Another thing that we can do, instead of looking to our past, is we can look to our future. I was a big Anne of Green Gables fan as a child and Anne Shirley. God bless her, we love her. She would say tomorrow is a new day, with no mistakes in it. And now I don't love the perfectionistic thinking that we can fall into with this sentiment. I see it all the time where people are like I'll start my plan tomorrow or I'll start it in the new year. We've talked about that. This is definitely a recipe for disaster, because we will fall down, we will fail on our journey and we want to be able to process that, so believing that we need to start fresh right, with no mistakes, where we haven't fallen off the wagon, so to speak. What if there is no wagon? I don't know, but like, we don't want to be caught up in that. But I do love the possibility that lives in the future. So I do love this idea of like tomorrow, right, being a new day and there's so much possibility in there and there's so much possibility in there for me to believe new things about myself. So if I think about myself a month from now and I've reduced my drinking even by half, I'm going to be so proud of myself, right, and I'm not going to be focused on the days I drank when I hadn't planned. I'm going to be focused on the days where I showed up for myself and I managed my urges and I was successful in that.
Speaker 1:And this is where future self-work is so helpful. What will your future self think and feel when you reach the end of your week and you've made progress toward changing a behavior you once thought was not changeable? This is where the emotional shift also starts to happen and that's where we really get the impact is when we start to change and shift the emotional aspect of things. So, thinking about your future and your future self, you get to create the story of your life. So write the story about your life from looking back, like from one month or six months or even a year from now, and make that the self-fulfilled prophecy that you want to see.
Speaker 1:Start with having achieved the goal and thinking about how you're going to feel, really feel into that, when you're, you know, at the end of the six months and you've done something you were never able to do before. How are you going to feel in that moment and what are you going to be believing about yourself? That's making you feel that, and try to tap into that today when you start making your plan for what tomorrow looks like. That's how we use the future in our favor, and we can also use the past, like if you absolutely cannot stop looking like to the past, try to give yourself some rules for going back there, right? Like only allow yourself to focus on the things that you've accomplished.
Speaker 1:Look for all the things that you've created in your life as evidence to support the new beliefs that you're trying to build about yourself. So this is it, this is how we change and, again, it's fairly simple to process, right? Oh yeah, I need to believe new thoughts about myself, but when it actually comes down to doing it, it is a practice. So I would say start with what are the things that you want to believe about yourself. Maybe write them all down on a piece of paper or in your computer or wherever.
Speaker 1:Wherever you keep notes on things, write all the new beliefs down and then look for the beliefs that are counter to that, because they'll come up. I never follow through. It's just too hard. I'm not the kind of person that can X, y, z, right, those thoughts are going to be there. So when you write out your list, be prepared for those other thoughts to come up, maybe even seek them out and then start to challenge them. Start to look for instances where that wasn't true, start to look for times in your life when you did the opposite of that, and that's going to help you really focus yourself forward on getting to where you want to be and really making the kind of change that's going to be lasting. All right, friends, I hope that you have a beautiful week and I'll see you in September.