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There is a purging tool I use that helps me let go of negative thoughts and emotions. It helps bring perspective and makes me feel lighter when life feels heavy, hard, overwhelming or confusing. I call it: a thought download. This tool has been life-changing for me and today I will breakdown exactly when and how to use this tool so that all those negative thoughts and emotions don’t follow you around.
Topics in this episode:
What to do when life feels heavy, hard and overwhelming
How to get to the heart of what is bothering you
The importance of purging out the thoughts in your head
Your thoughts are not truth
Your thoughts are directly connected to your emotions
De-fragging your brain just like a computer
Show Notes & References:
I can teach you how to let go of the hard stuff in life so you don’t carry it around like a heavy backpack, book a free breakthrough call to start the process: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book
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Transcript
Intro
There's a purging tool I use that helps me to let go of negative thoughts and emotions. It helps bring perspective and makes me feel lighter when life feels heavy, hard, overwhelming, or confusing. I call it a thought download. This tool has been a life changer for me, and in today's episode, I break down exactly when and how to use this tool so all of those negative thoughts and emotions stop following you around. You ready? Let's get to it.
Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it.
Hey working moms. Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas. I'm actually writing this podcast just after coming back from Thanksgiving week, where I took the whole week off to spend with my kids and to cook and to prep for two Thanksgiving meals that I was cooking. And to be honest, I've never really done that before.
Usually I put my kids in some kind of camp or care for the few days that they have off leading up to Thanksgiving. In years past, we've had school, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and then they have Thursday and Friday off. But in the last couple of years, we've had the whole week off. And rather than take the whole week off with them, I have found camps or places for them to be. But not this year. This year, I decided I was going to take off and be with them for that whole week.
And this is such a fascinating part of being an entrepreneur, because I just get to decide my schedule, right? I get to decide when I work and when I don't work. I could take endless amounts of vacation if I really wanted to, but just like so many other women, I experience a lot of guilt when I do that. I feel like I should be working, that I need to be growing my business or making money or meeting people or prepping for the holidays or whatever. Even though I coach women on this all the time, and even though I have the kind of job that's super flexible, my default is to feel guilty when I take time off or when I choose to take time off to be with my kids.
“You can't always help your first thought, but you can always choose your second.”
Now, with that being said, even though my default is guilt, like, that's where my brain goes. I'm able to manage my mind and my emotions through that. Because one of the things I like to tell my clients is that you can't always help your first thought, but you can always choose your second. I have an ambitious brain just like you that is always thinking about doing more and thinking that I should be doing more and I need to be checking one more thing off the list. So, of course, when I am making decisions to be home with my kids for a week, instead of putting them in some kind of care, my brain is going to offer to me that I shouldn't be doing that, that is not productive. I have simply learned how to not indulge in that thought.
And that's what I want to talk to you about today on this podcast. I want to talk to you about one of the tools that I use that helps me manage my thoughts and my emotions when they're sort of running amok. Just like when this happened - I mean, ultimately, I made this decision to take off the Thanksgiving week quite some time ago. But as it has been approaching, my brain has been sort of running amok and making me feel bad and offering all of these thoughts like I'm doing it wrong and I should really be working and so forth.
Before I jump into talking about the tool, there are two things that you really need to know, because we're going to be talking a lot about our thoughts. And although I talk a lot about our thoughts and our mindsets on this podcast, I always think it's important to come back to some of the basics. And that starts with the way we're thinking about our thoughts.
Thoughts are simply words that are going through your head.
Because I know for some of you, this podcast is your first introduction to the idea of changing thoughts or changing your mindset or mindset coaching. Because I know that for me, before I was a coach, I had no idea what any of this stuff meant. I had no clue how impactful our thoughts truly are in our life, how intertwined they are with our emotions. So here's how I want you to think about your thoughts. They are simply the words that are going through your head. They are not truth. They are not real. They are just words.
Now, this is imperative for you to understand if you want to end negative thinking, negative self-talk, indulging in emotions like guilt and overwhelm. In other words, if you want to be more in control of your mind and your emotions, if you want to worry less, if you want to be less consumed by tasks or what other people think, if you want to learn how to be more present and get more done in a shorter period of time, you need to know that your thoughts that control all those things, those thoughts are just words.
And unless you have a highly trained brain, you likely cannot control the initial words that go through your brain. It's why my brain's initial response to me taking a week off to be with my kids at Thanksgiving and have a staycation with them is to tell me that I'm doing it wrong and that I should be more productive and I should be making some time to work. It's my brain's default way of thinking.
How default thinking happens.
Now let's take a moment and talk about how default thinking happens. Because a lot of research has been done in studying the brain and the way we think. And one of the things that it's discovered, and roughly in the last 20 years or so, is that our brain thinks around 60,000 thoughts a day. And 95% of them are exactly the same thoughts that you thought yesterday.
It's like this - you know how when you sit in a chair, unless you're injured in some way, like you have a back pain or something like that, you don't consciously think about sitting right? It just sort of happens on default. And the reason for that is your brain is always trying to operate at its optimal level. It would be overwhelming to your brain to have to consciously think about every muscle movement, every step, every task in a highly conscious way. So most of those kinds of things happen on default. In fact, your brain can really only consciously think four to six things at any given time. Which means everything else is kind of running in the background, running on default.
And that is what happens with your thoughts and your feelings as well. They're mostly happening at a subconscious level, meaning they're not at the forefront of your mind. And you don't think consciously about the fork going to your mouth. You don't think consciously about brushing your teeth, or driving a car, or typing each letter on your computer. These things just happen without conscious thought. They happen on default. So what brain science has shown us is that 95% of your thoughts are happening in the background. You're not consciously aware or thinking about them.
So my default thoughts telling me that I should really be working and that I was wrong for taking all this time off, those are default thoughts that have been patterned into me because I have been telling myself those things over and over and over again - which under normal circumstances, reminding me to work every single day is probably a good thing. But when it comes to taking a vacation, it's not.
So most of the things that you think, most of the things that are patterned into your brain, those default thoughts are just the same thoughts that you've been thinking over and over and over again. They are not truth. Just because you think them doesn't mean they're true. And this concept, I just really want it to sink in for you. So I'm going to give you a couple of examples because we like to believe all of our thoughts, every single one of them, we like to believe them.
I told you earlier that I felt a lot of guilt for taking time off to be with my kids. And my brain offered to me that I should be working and that I was doing something wrong and that's not true. Of course I'm not doing something wrong by taking a week off to be with my kids. I'm not doing something wrong when I prioritize my family over work. But my brain's default thought is to think the opposite. And if I believe that I'm doing something wrong for taking the week off and that I really should be working at least part of the time, then I start feeling guilty and I feel like I'm doing something wrong and I'm bad and I'm letting people down, I'm letting my clients down.
Your default thoughts are not necessarily true.
Let me give you another example. Have you ever had your boss schedule a meeting with you but not tell you what it's about? Likely the first thought that you have is, oh my gosh, I did something wrong. And then you start feeling really nervous and anxious about what you did wrong and what they might bring up in the meeting. And then you may be all consumed in your brain like you're really trying to figure out what is going to happen and you get really nervous, right? And then, of course, when the meeting happens, they just wanted to talk about a project coming up or they just wanted to do a quick little check in. But your default is to think something went wrong, which causes a whole lot of stress and anxiety. But of course, it's not actually true, because your default thoughts are not necessarily true. Your thoughts are not true. You ultimately get to decide what's true.
Let me give you another example, just because it's so important that you understand this. I just want to give you as many ways to think about it as possible. There's a lot of differences between having my first kid and my second. I remember struggling with my first when she would cry because I thought, or my default thought was she shouldn't be crying, I'm doing something wrong. And then I would stress and I would worry and I would research and I would question and I would cry.
All because, generally speaking, I was believing that my daughter shouldn't be crying as much as she was crying. It was my default thought, right, that something's wrong when she cries and I didn't know how to fix it. Then of course, when my second came along, I had a completely different perspective because I learned that babies just cry. It doesn't mean that I'm a bad mom. It doesn't mean that I've done something wrong. Babies cry. It's just a communication tool that I can use to try to help figure out what they need.
So when my second one would cry, I was so much more empathetic with him and his needs. I would soothe him, I would feed him, I would rock him. I would just do all of these things with so much more love and compassion and calmness. Because I wasn't worried and stressed that I was doing something wrong. Because my default thought the second time around was it's normal for kids to cry. It doesn't mean I've done something wrong.
Today, my son is going back to school after a week of being off and he was just throwing himself around the house and running for me and crying and telling me that he wasn't going to school today, hiding under his covers. And at first, my default thought was to think, he shouldn't be resisting. This is going to be a really big fight. And when I was thinking those things, I was having all of this resistance and frustration that would rise up within me.
But as soon as I was able to pause and think, oh, right, my kid just gets really anxious with transitions. Nothing's wrong with him, he's just overwhelmed at the thought of going back to school. When I was thinking that everything softened within me, I was able to approach him with much more love and patience.
I know everyone has had this experience where they are thinking one thing and they believe it, and then a new perspective hits them because maybe they got some new information or they learned a little something, or they grew up from one kid to the other, or they just start thinking about something a little bit differently. Something gives them a different perspective and then their default thoughts change.
The only way that's possible to have so many different perspectives that then change the way we feel about our life, the way we feel about situations, that changes the whole paradigm for us is that our thoughts are not truth. It's the only way that's possible.
So I want to share with you this tool that I use to help shift intentionally out of my default thoughts, my pattern thoughts, the things that I think 95% of the time that oftentimes are not very useful to me, and how I move into something more intentional.
Just because you think it, it doesn't mean that you have to believe it.
But it's only going to work if you believe that your thoughts are not in and of themselves truth, that you ultimately just get to decide what's true. Just because you think it, it doesn't mean that you have to believe it.
Thoughts have a direct correlation to your emotions.
But before I get into that, the second thing that is really important for you to understand before we talk about this tool is that one, thoughts are not truth, but thoughts have a direct correlation to your emotions. Sometimes I don't even realize that I have a whole bunch of thoughts going on. Instead, I realize that I'm feeling really guilty or I'm feeling really overwhelmed or I'm feeling really confused, or I'm just feeling really exhausted, or life just feels heavy and hard. Kind of this more strange, nebulous area where life is just kind of bluff. And all of those emotions I know are coming from the way I'm thinking about my life or about something or a particular circumstance in some way. Because there's a direct correlation between your thoughts and your emotions.
Judging yourself for the way you feel.
I see a lot of women judging themselves for their feelings. They judge themselves for feeling really angry or frustrated at their kids. They judge themselves for feeling behind and overwhelmed at work. They judge themselves for feeling guilty when they want to prioritize themselves. They judge themselves as if they are not supposed to be feeling any of these emotions. They're all bad, and they're all assigned that something's gone wrong and that they're doing something wrong because they're feeling them.
No, every emotion is okay. Every emotion is acceptable. It's okay for you to feel whatever it is you want to feel. True acceptance. And a lot of the time, those emotions that you don't really want to be feeling, those emotions are coming from your default thoughts because there's a direct correlation between the way you're thinking the words going through your head and the emotions that you're experiencing in your body.
How to do a thought download.
So the tool I'm going to be sharing with you is one that I use when I have a whole lot of feelings going on or I have a whole lot of thoughts going on in my head. All right, here we are. We're finally ready to talk about this tool. You ready? Here it is. I call it a thought download. It's as if somebody took a USB drive and inserted it into your head and downloaded all of the thoughts and words that were inside you just the way they were. It's a thought download. I love this tool. I just have the biggest smile on my face as I share it. Here's how it works;
Take a pencil and a pen or take your note on your phone. Or open up a document type on your computer. It's not really important the way you do it, but it is important that you document your thoughts. You can't just think your thought download because then you're just adding more thoughts to your head. You're actually getting your thoughts out of your head. You're downloading them out into the universe somehow.
So for me, I usually take a pencil and a pen and you bullet point out everything that is in your head right now without editing it. That is really important. You cannot edit yourself when you're doing a thought download. I don't want you to soften the language at all. And the reason for that is there is a direct correlation between your thoughts and emotions like we've talked about. So if you soften the words that are going through your head so that they don't feel so harsh or so ugly, then you'll also be softening the emotion rather than airing it out and getting to the heart of it.
This morning, I did a thought download on how I was feeling because there was this anxiety and heaviness that I could feel in my body after I dropped my kids off at school. And so I just started writing about what was coming up and some of the things about the Thanksgiving week, some of the time I had with my kids and the work coming up from this week and some of the evaluation of the past month and things like that.
I know that my thoughts are not truth.
But some of the things that were coming up were things like, I'm so lazy for taking this time off or I didn't deserve this time off. They were really harsh things that my brain was telling me and those were the exact words that were in my head. And so I wrote them down and they were causing some really strong emotions. But one of the reasons I am able to write them down in that way, in the harshness of them, is because I know that my thoughts are not truth. Just because I think it, just because I write it doesn't mean it's true. I know I'm not actually lazy and I know that I'm not undeserving of time off.
Now, when you're first doing this exercise, I want you to start by setting a timer and writing the entire time. I would start with five minutes, but ten minutes would be even better. Just set a timer and just clear out all of the exact thoughts or words that are running through your head right now. And the goal of this exercise is to literally purge the words, the thoughts that are in your head that will then surface the emotion and clear it all out.
There are a lot of things that you can do right after a thought download to help you cultivate some more intentional, more positive ways of thinking and feeling. But for now, I just want you to focus on this one tool, this exercise of purging, because it is so important. You can't really start to focus on intentionally thinking positive things or intentionally thinking anything until you know what you your default thoughts are.
Normalizing your thoughts and emotions.
This is going to be one of the tools that's going to help you get to that intentional space is seeing what the unintentional space looks like and not judging it. Because I know that for so many of you, you're afraid to be honest with yourself. You're afraid that if you say something or you admit something that you're going to make it true. And one of the magical things that this exercise does is it normalizes all of your thoughts and your emotions.
If you were to start doing this thought download every single day, you will start noticing patterns of thought. You will start noticing that you think and you feel the same things every single day. It's going to start to feel a little less scary, a little bit more normal. You're going to notice patterns and perspectives that you didn't have before. And some of the things that you find yourself writing down, you're going to notice will feel totally outlandish to you, that might even make you laugh.
And that's also sort of the point. When I wrote down this morning that I was undeserving of the week long break that I took, I sort of smiled and chuckled at that thought because, I know with 100% certainty that that is not true. And yet I was carrying it around in my head, and it felt really heavy, and I was feeling inadequate and undeserving because that was kind of deep down inside of me. So I surfaced it out, I aired it out, and then I looked at it, and I kind of laughed. It brought perspective.
Lightning the load of your thoughts and emotions.
So this tool is going to help you see patterns. It's going to help you gain perspective. You're going to start feeling lighter because you're going to stop carrying around the backpack of negative thoughts and emotions. You're going to start airing that all out. I want you to imagine that every time you do this thought download, you are emptying your emotion and thought backpack, and you are lightening the load.
One of the images that comes to mind when I think about doing this thought download exercise is defragging. Did you ever have to do that on your computer? I remember defragging my computer. I actually really liked to watch the defragging process happen. This was, like, back in the 1990s, like, maybe early 1990s. I'm pretty sure all computers kind of just do this on their own, like it's some kind of process or program that runs naturally in the background. But I remember when you actually had to physically push the button that said defrag. And what you were doing when you were defragging a computer is you were essentially reorganizing its memory so that it would run more efficiently, right?
Because every time you're on the Internet, all of those cookies from Internet sites, all of the different programs that you would like to run on your computer because your computer was designed to run fast, it would remember all of those cookies and those programs so that it could recall them faster and it would load faster. But then over time, your computer would start to have too many things it needed to hold onto for you, and it would slow your computer's memory down and its efficiency down. And so when you defragged a computer, it would sort of kind of reorient things back in order. It would put things back in their proper place so that the memory of your computer would run a lot more efficient and faster.
And that's essentially what you're doing here in this exercise. You are defragging your brain. You're purging all the thoughts and all of the emotions that you've been carrying around with you. You're getting them out into the open so that the more sophisticated part of your brain can see them for what they are and let go of some of the thoughts that just simply aren't useful to you, that you just know with 100% certainty are not true. You could pick back up the ones that you want to keep. Some of the thoughts that I wrote down today in my thought download were memories that I created with my kids this past week. I want to hold on to those. I want to treasure those thoughts. I want to pick those thoughts back up.
Let go of the un-useful thoughts.
Now, if you've never done an exercise like this before, I want to challenge you over the next week to do it once a day. Just commit for one week, doing this for ten minutes every day and see what happens. I would suggest picking the same time every single day. Maybe that's the start of your work day, or it's the end of the day, or right before you go to sleep or during your lunch break. Just pick one time, set it in your calendar with a reminder, and do a ten minute thought download. Purge of all of those un-useful thoughts and emotions that you're carrying around with you. Air them out. Let them go. Defrag them so that you can actually move past all of the default thoughts that are weighing you down, holding you back that aren't true, and you could move forward with a lot more efficiency and lightness.
Adopting a more positive mindset is one of the three essential things that we work on in coaching together. So if you have an overactive brain, or you have a brain that just can't seem to shut down or shut off, or you find it to be overly negative, or you have a lot of negative self talk, I know I can help.
Reach out and schedule your free breakthrough call. I would love to chat with you how coaching can help. All right, working moms, have a great week, and let's get to it.
