#63: The Power of Your Mind (The Power Series)
Welcome to the Power Series. We’re starting off with talking about the Power of Your Mind. Whether you realize it or not, what your thoughts are telling you informs a big part of your days which shapes your reality.
This series explores three different parts of you that make up personal transformation. Whether you’re going through a life change (marriage, divorce, health, etc) or a career shift (job loss, new job, etc), a big piece of your own personal growth is happening.
As you uncover these parts of you, discover new things about yourself, peel back the layers of your life and how your journey has unfolded, you'll start to see these different pieces of yourself come out. I really believe that all three of these together make up your nature. They really guide and inform what you are here to do and how you move through the world. How you become the leader of your own life. It's really part of your inner compass.
Tune in to this series to learn more about how you can identify where you’re at and shift to lead a life with more possibility, joy and fulfillment - in whatever way feels best to YOU.
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Episode Transcript
Hello, and welcome to change from within. I'm your host, Mary Clavieres. This podcast is here to help you uncover your unique path to living your most aligned life.
I'm really excited for this next series that I'm going to be taking you through over the next few weeks. It's all very near and dear to my heart, and something that I've been studying in various forms and having experiences around for a while, both in my corporate life and in my entrepreneurial, both in my corporate life and in my entrepreneurship journey. It's three different parts that I'll be taking you through. The first one we're going to talk about is the mind, then the body, and then the highest self, or spirit or soul, or whatever you would like to call it - this higher inner knowing that you have.
I really look at these as three different parts of you. As you can uncover them, discover new things about yourself, peel back the layers, on your life and your journey and your experiences and really look at what has happened in your life, how it has unfolded, as you get reflective on these things, you'll start to see these different pieces of yourself come out. I really believe that all three of these together make up your nature. They really guide and inform what you are here to do and how you move through the world. How you lead in your own life or lead others maybe it's at work or at home, whatever the case may be, but it's really part of your inner compass.
I wanted to go through these three in more detail because these are all part of you. As you discover them, as you go deeper with them, you will learn more about how you can live in the most alignment with yourself. And that, in turn, will open so many magical doors of being in flow with your life, having opportunities come to you in a different way, being so aware of who you are, knowing it and operating from that place, and allowing that to guide you.
I really believe that society piles so many things on top of you that you may get a little lost with all of it. You may have doubts or things may creep in. For example, look what someone's doing over there, or ‘No, I can't do this because I don't have XYZ’. All of these things can play into it.
When you really center yourself and look in these three areas, you can see and feel into how you are guiding yourself. It's so powerful. It's so, so, so powerful.
Okay, so let's get started with the first of the series. That is going to be talking about the mind. I started to kind of get to it just a moment ago. There are so many things that go on in our minds. And they are so powerful. And as I learn more about myself and I study different modalities, it's becoming ever so clear to me how much the mind wants to be in the driver's seat. And actually, you don't really want the mind to be in the driver's seat, because the mind is not really the one here to run the show.
The first piece is understanding what is going on in the mind. What is your mind telling you? How is it informing you? And how is it informing your world? That may be things like what I mentioned before, you may be concerned with what other people are doing or with what other people have, or you don't know enough about something, or who could you possibly be to have (name this opportunity that you want). And it can tell us all these things to keep us safe. Our mind wants to drive. It also wants to keep us safe, right? There's everything related to survival, and back when we really needed those instincts to survive. If you really look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and if you have those base and foundational layers around safety. For this example we’ll assume that you have the safety, you have the resources with food, etc. If you're looking to develop beyond that then your mind was doing its job, your mind was keeping you safe. And it can recognize those areas where it's keeping you safe.
But you want to move beyond that. Right? You want to move beyond that, because then you can start to recognize and see, okay, well, is this really true or not? Is this really true or not?
Actually it's an exercise that I learned in therapy that I think is so amazing. There are lots of other things I love about therapy, and I am not a therapist, okay. But this tool is a very good tool for looking at what your mind is telling you. I'll share a personal example. My mind is one that tends to go towards the negative and the pessimistic. That means I may think this thing has happened, and the world is ending, or then this is going to happen, and that's going to happen, because whatever it is (I missed out on something, I made a mistake, etc). The thing is, that it brings me like down into the trenches. When we first moved to France I had a hard time adjusting and I thought I was always going to be living in that place of having no friends and not knowing where to go and not knowing my way around or not speaking French well enough to be understood, etc. What I realized over time was that it wasn't going to stay that way forever, because I'm living here and building a life here. So over time that was going to evolve for me.
There's two parts to all of this. So the one that I wanted to say the story that I want to say about the exercises that you can look at a situation and if you're if you're feeling like you're really negative about a certain situation, you can question yourself and ask, what is the truth in this scenario? What is the truth with what's going on here?
The prompt that I use is The truth is…, and you fill in the blank. You may have different layers to that, right? The truth is, I only just moved to France. The truth is, it takes time to build new friendships. The truth is, my french is getting better every day with practice. You see, you can fill in the blanks, with things that can kind of level set you more with where you are in this moment. And the other piece of it is that if you're going to allow your mind to tell you all the very negative things, all of the bottom of the barrel options, very pessimistic options, well then you also have to tell your mind all of the very positive things, all of the extreme possibilities that could happen for a certain scenario.
You have to find that balance of the two. If you're going to choose to be dire, you have to also say the opposite of it. And then the truth really, most likely lies somewhere in between the two.
I jumped into an example and a tool right away because I think it's important to see, feel, hear and understand how it might show up and give you context so then you can start to observe for yourself. What are your thoughts telling you right now? What is your mind telling you right now? Then, when it tells you this thing, what can you do to check in and say, ‘Hey, wait, no, that's not what I want it to tell me’. Then you can reframe it to something else. I want it to tell me XYZ instead.
If I tell myself I made a mistake on something, I could look at it as a failure. I could say, ‘I made this mistake. I'm such a failure. Look how this is going, nothing is working’! Or I can tell myself, ‘Hey, I made a mistake. I'm still in the process of learning. And I'm figuring it out as I go’. Right? Two very different ways to handle it. It's something that I've been working through for quite a while now. I find it's such an important part of understanding what's really going on for us and we have to really understand that noise, we have to understand those thought patterns and what's coming to us and start to pay attention to them before we can actually change them, before we can do anything about it.
It's really about observing your thoughts. Whenever you're in the moment, when you think, ‘Hey, wait something about that is off’, you can jot down some of the thoughts.
We all have patterns, I'm sure you're familiar with some of your patterns, or some of your loops. What are your go to favorite phrases to make excuses or be negative to yourself or talk down to yourself? What are those some of those things that you go to? Do you compare to other people? Do you say that you're not worth it? Do you think that you don't really know what you're doing? If you look at those patterns, understanding them is the first step to then being able to change them.
I did an episode, it's at least a few episodes back, I don't know the number, about breaking loops and breaking patterns. This is all part of it.
It’s about going into your mind seeing what your mind is saying. What is it telling you? Then, how can you begin to course correct it.
The other piece of it is that this is not a one and done type of thing. It can keep coming back and it can show up in different ways. It's really about being aware of it and making small, incremental changes over time, that's a huge thing. One of my biggest pillars and beliefs is that none of this is an overnight change. Just like overnight successes. Yes, it can seem like that on the outside. But on the inside, it's the small, incremental, consistent times that you're showing up.
I’m not saying you have to keep a rigid schedule and otherwise it’s not going to work. I mean that over time, if you look at it, you're showing up more times than you're not showing up. So use the frequency that works for you. It's really about how can you show up and pay attention to these thoughts so that you can try to change them to something else.
There are so many more pieces of the mind - understanding what we control, what we can't control, and how we can move through our days with that type of information. There's really a lot in it and I don't want to be overwhelming in one episode.
Looking at fears, blocks, patterns, and what your mind is telling you is so powerful. As you start to understand that better, as you start to uncover it, it will all it will just unfold. You will start to reprogram. You can start to shift those beliefs and those patterns and reprogram them in ways that work for you that come from a place of empowerment, so that you can be more empowered in your day to day life.
If leading yourself and leading others is something that you do in your life, then really knowing yourself and not having your mind steer the ship or drive the car, is really important. It's not about the mind. And as we unfold these over these next weeks, you'll see more and more about that and how you can kind of get into those other phases and other states of mind and work with this in more ways.
If you'd like to take this work further, I invite you to join the 7 Days to Get Unstuck Challenge.
Also, my new program Lead from Within is launching soon. I invite you to take a look if you want to learn more. It's diving into all of these aspects in more detail along with personalized support.
This work is all about learning the tools and finding the ways that work for you along your self-transformation journey. It's by no means one size fit at all. I've tried a lot of different things. I will not tell you that you have to do things a certain way. It's about gathering all of that for you and allowing you to have your own experience, but with the shortcuts and learnings of my experiences with me as a mentor and guide. You can check out more details for the program here.
Wherever you are on your journey, I encourage you to keep paying attention. Pay attention to what your mind is telling you. Pay attention to your thought patterns. Observe for a while and see what happens. When you start to notice it, you will start to see changes and feel changes and recognize just from that first step. You really, really will. It's fascinating.
Alright, I'll leave it there for today and stay tuned next week for the next part of the series. I'm so excited to be sharing all this with you. Have a wonderful rest of your week and talk to you soon.
