Do you have a Healthy Mindset?
A little self coaching can create a healthy mindset.
When you wake up in the morning, how do you feel? Are you someone who wakes up and believes life just doesn’t get any better than this? Are you someone who wakes up believing that if something in your life was different, it would make you happier? Now ask yourself, do you have a healthy mindset?
Everything we do in our life is to feel a certain way. It is human nature to move towards pleasure and away from pain, avoiding many emotions along the way. Every emotion we experience is caused by the thought in our heads. And every thought we have in our head is something we have total control over. So it makes sense that if we control our thoughts, we also control our emotions. Right?
Our emotions determine how we are going to act or the actions we are going to take in any given situation. If you are feeling negative about yourself or about the situation, you are more likely to take very little action and this results in very little being achieved. If you are feeling positive that you will live up to your expectations, then you are more likely to take massive action and this will result in achieving success. Our results achieved in both situations have just proved that our initial thought about ourselves was correct. The more proof you acquire, the stronger the thought conditioning becomes.
So let’s explore this a little further.
Growing up I was a yoyo dieter and eventually this caused me to struggle with bulimia for a few years. I would look at myself in the mirror and all I could see was a fat girl who didn’t deserved to be loved. Somewhere along the line, I thought that if I was skinny, if I lost weight then I would be a better person and deserving of love. My thought was, “I am not good enough because I am fat”. Each day I felt unworthy. My bulimia proved my unworthiness because I wasn’t even good enough to lose weight. So instead of eating healthy and exercising, I either gorged to punish myself or make myself sick to punish myself. My actions resulted in not losing weight which only proved my thought that I was unworthy.
WOW – even today when I write it down and read it out load I feel for that beautiful young woman. She didn’t deserve to hate herself as she did. She didn’t deserve to feel that the only way she deserved to be loved was to be skinny.
Over the years, through coaching and mindset training, I wake up every day and love the reflection in the mirror. My thoughts,”I am good enough because I am me”. Most things in life cannot be controlled, especially what other people say or do. But I control my thoughts and my thoughts cause the emotions I feel and the action (or lack or actions) I take in life.
The mind loves patterns and loves to be efficient but these patterns can change, you have control of this. When we try to avoid what our bodies are feeling, we are numbing these emotions but the mind only understands to numb all emotions – good and bad. Research has shown that we numb more than ever before through addiction, self-medication and a permanent state of anxiety. So whatever we are doing, it is not working. If everybody took control over their own thoughts which caused the way they felt every day, then maybe some of the pressures in life would ease.
When it comes to making changes in life, too many people head straight to changing the actions they are taking. So for example, when I deep in my sickness of bulimia, I tried many times to ‘diet’ seriously but eating healthy foods and avoiding gorging. However, this is not sustainable because every feeling we have in our body is due to a thought in our head and I my thoughts had not changed. Ultimately, the power of my thoughts were going to win the battle. Changing my actions avoided the actual problem. To change my pattern, I needed to change the way I thought about myself so I could change the feelings I had which caused my actions and results.
Understanding thought patterns can be challenging for many people as most of us simply let our brain run around without any boundaries or supervision, completely unaware of subconscious thoughts that are controlling our every move. Discovering negative thought patterns takes practice to change and heal and being kind to yourself is essential if you really want to move forward. This is why so many women diet their entire lives – they have never faced the reality of their thoughts.
Anyone can move from a state of worthlessness, inadequacy or feeling trapped with a little self coaching of the mind to create a healthy mindset.
Love Always
Linking up with Kylie Purtell for #IBOT
I need to work a lot on how I think about myself. It is a daily challenge for me.
I am going to be opening up some spots in one on one mindset coaching in the next few weeks where I guide people through some techniques to change negative self-talk that often sits in our subconscious but plays a massive role in our life. I share it with you when the sessions are open and let me know if you are interested.
Really good post!! And well done on overcoming it.
Thanks Lydia. I am a work in progress but kicking life’s butt at the moment.
I’ve always prided myself in having a healthy mindset with lots of a self coaching (plus plenty of PD, SA and life achievement training thrown in). But I actually struggled the last 6 months. I was flat lining big time. Managing to pull myself out of it now, but it was touch and go for a while! Which just proves that even we coaches need coaching and mental health assistance from time to time …
OMG absolutely. I self-coach DAILY, research news ways all the time, read and follow lots of mentors.. I need that too so I can stay on top of things.
You are absolutely right. We DO have control over what we think and it DOES impact on what we do and feel. I still have work to do. I still believe I am not good enough. My body/figure is not good enough. My personality is not good enough. My blogging is not good enough. What I do with my time is not good enough… and more. Believe it or not, I am much better than I used to be but I still struggle. The difference is that I am aware of it … aware of my thoughts and aware I can change them.
Thanks Min for your amazing honesty. Mindset is a practice that needs to happen regularly for any conditioned thoughts to change. There is so much in life that is out of our control, that when you know what you can control – your thoughts and therefore how you feel, the actions you will then take and the results from the actions, practising deliberate thinking is so important in life.
Great post, Nat. I’m a big believer in how we think and our mindset has a big impact on every part of our life. I was living proof of that last year! I have been working hard on keeping negative self-talk to a minimum this year and it’s definitely made a big difference.
#teamIBOT
That’s amazing Kylie. With practice, the thoughts we have about ourselves can change and we can be who we have always dreamed we were. But like everything in life worth having, it takes practice.
I’ve had to train negative self-talk out of my daily routine over the past twenty years, and I’m so glad I did, because I don’t want the adolescence I had for my daughter (and it was all self inflicted).
You sound very much like me Bronwyn. Like anything worth achieving in life, it takes practice but it is worth it when you can wake up every day and say “I am enough”.
I’ve really struggled with my body image throughout my pregnancy, hating on my body for gaining weight. It culminated in my realising I did have some issues there I needed to address, because all I was doing was getting trapped in a cycle of hate followed by binge eating, rinse and repeat. I definitely need to addess my mindset.
Pregnancy can cause more than body stuff with all the hormones that are flying through us. However, when you actually sit and think about what your amazing body is doing, it’s pretty friggin awesome. Every thought you have causes an emaotion in your body – we just need to wake each day and train our thoughts to work with us, not against.
A great post! It’s amazing how closely our thinking patterns affect everything else. It’s hard to shift these patterns but it can be done.
Absolutely they can be altered – LOL that’s what I help clients do every day.