Latest / Good Morning From The Chicken Coop! / Season 3 - Episode 39 - Wandering thoughts are part of who we are

Transcript

Season 3 - Episode 39 - Wandering thoughts are part of who we are · Good Morning From The Chicken Coop!

• 0:01
  Welcome to the Good Morning From the Chicken Coop Podcast with
• 0:04
  Kim Johnson, your creative strategist and mastermind set
• 0:08
  coach. Filled with inspiration,
• 0:10
  distinctions, perspectives, and possibilities, we help you to
• 0:13
  cultivate a mindset that leads you to create the best version
• 0:16
  of yourself you could ever imagine.
• 0:18
  Join Kim every morning from one of her favorite happy places,
• 0:21
  her chicken coop along with all her chickens.
• 0:28
  Hey, everybody. Good morning from the chicken
• 0:30
  coop. We're talking about wandering
• 0:32
  thoughts today and how they kill us little by little.
• 0:36
  Our thoughts. Oh, gosh, it's the it's the
• 0:40
  thing that I make my life purpose around.
• 0:43
  It's the thing that I focus on. Thoughts, feelings, emotions,
• 0:47
  all of it. And practical, reasonable
• 0:49
  solutions in the moment. And I can tell you that even
• 0:53
  though this is my work's purpose, even though this is
• 0:56
  something that I have written books on, I study all the time,
• 0:59
  I am constantly cultivating it. If you asked me can you control
• 1:04
  your thoughts, I would. The first thing I would say is,
• 1:07
  well, for how long. Because thoughts are random,
• 1:11
  thoughts wander. Thoughts are like so hard to
• 1:16
  catch and to make entertain them.
• 1:20
  They. It's.
• 1:21
  It's why you know, monks go and sit and meditate for hours to
• 1:26
  learn how to cultivate their thoughts and to quiet their
• 1:28
  minds. Because our minds are not quiet
• 1:32
  by nature. They are voracious learners.
• 1:36
  They are fast as lightning in in their processing.
• 1:41
  They are all over the place and someone said like a pinball
• 1:44
  machine to me once and I was like worse.
• 1:47
  It it it's, it's like if you've ever played any of those first
• 1:51
  video games, when you played Pong, it's like Ding Ding, Ding,
• 1:54
  Ding, Ding, Ding Ding. It's all over the place.
• 1:56
  It is extremely difficult to control thoughts.
• 2:00
  It is something that is so much a part of us.
• 2:04
  We don't even recognize how difficult it is because we just
• 2:07
  accept the fact that it's chaos in our heads and we and we
• 2:12
  muddle through the chaos. That's why we love going to
• 2:15
  movies where we can lose ourselves in the story of the
• 2:19
  movies. Like, So what is so intoxicating
• 2:21
  about going to a movie? Well, when you're sitting in a
• 2:23
  movie, if the movie's good, you're 100% in the story.
• 2:26
  You're not thinking anything else.
• 2:28
  You're in the story. But even in the story, my
• 2:32
  friends, you're thinking what's going to happen next?
• 2:34
  Oh, I hope he doesn't go in there.
• 2:36
  Don't go down that way. You know you're having your own
• 2:38
  thoughts predicated on the trail of the movie.
• 2:42
  However, they're still random and they're all over the place.
• 2:45
  So point is, wandering thoughts kill us.
• 2:48
  They kill the fact that we are not going in the directions that
• 2:51
  we want to go because they're they're literally moving at the
• 2:56
  at the pace speed of light in our head and we're just along
• 3:00
  for the ride most of the time. So what do we do about this?
• 3:03
  Like answer is really like, you know, the, I mean the question
• 3:06
  is what do we do about this? How do we manage our random
• 3:09
  thoughts? Well, the first thing is you got
• 3:10
  to recognize where they spend most of their time, where are
• 3:14
  your thoughts going, where are your emotions going and where
• 3:19
  are they sucking you down and where are they lifting you up.
• 3:21
  It's not just a exercise about like you know the bad stuff,
• 3:24
  it's about the good stuff too. So when you track them, that's
• 3:27
  why when I wrote the book Who's driving Your bus?
• 3:30
  And there's an exercise at the end, the 72 hour challenge.
• 3:34
  And in that 72 hour challenge, we are supposed to be taking on
• 3:38
  that outcome of having a very clear 72 hours, three different
• 3:44
  types of days, if you can do it where maybe it's two days during
• 3:48
  the week and one weekend day or vice versa and you're tracking
• 3:52
  what are my thoughts, what are my emotions, what's showing up,
• 3:55
  how much am I up, how much am I down?
• 3:57
  Now this is a very big exercise because it's it's somewhat
• 4:01
  generalized because you're never going to catch it all.
• 4:03
  But we usually do a really good job in that net, even though the
• 4:06
  holes are pretty big in that net.
• 4:07
  We catch enough that we understand who's driving the bus
• 4:11
  for emotions and we can then figure out how to course correct
• 4:14
  them. Now at the same time, those
• 4:16
  moment to moment small thoughts, those things that are just, let
• 4:21
  me give you an example. It's probably the better way to
• 4:23
  do it. So if I'm out here and I'm
• 4:25
  recording in the chicken coop and I'm talking to you guys, I'm
• 4:28
  on a thought path and I'm totally entrenched in talking to
• 4:32
  you, does that mean that my thoughts have absolutely gone
• 4:35
  away? No, because I'm standing here,
• 4:38
  they're having, they're going in, they're doing their thing
• 4:40
  with eggs, they're eating breakfast.
• 4:41
  Some of them, some of them have already left.
• 4:43
  And for those of you who follow, you know, I have a golden Polish
• 4:47
  with puffy feathers on the top of her head, and she doesn't see
• 4:50
  very well because of those, even though that's how they've been
• 4:54
  bred. And she walked off in a
• 4:57
  direction that I know is far for her to go by herself.
• 5:01
  And she's not hanging out with the rooster and her typical hen
• 5:04
  today. So I her friend, that's a hen.
• 5:07
  So they're always together. And I see that she went off.
• 5:10
  Now while I'm talking to you, my thought immediately went to, oh
• 5:15
  gosh, why is Buffy going that way?
• 5:17
  I'm going to have to go over there and grab her back as soon
• 5:19
  as I finish this. Now I'm still talking.
• 5:22
  I'm still talking, but my thoughts are doing that, and we
• 5:25
  do this all the time. Then I turn around and I look
• 5:28
  and I'm like, oh, great, OK, I didn't realize that the waters
• 5:32
  needed to be changed this early. OK, I've got to do that.
• 5:34
  As soon as I finish doing this, I've got to do that.
• 5:37
  So I'm actually adding to my freaking To Do List while I'm
• 5:40
  sitting here talking to you, having this conversation and
• 5:45
  this is how the brain works. This is what happens.
• 5:48
  So wandering thoughts kill us because they take away from the
• 5:52
  moment and being completely present in the moment and having
• 5:56
  the joy and they constantly load onto us.
• 6:00
  So controlling that is important.
• 6:02
  Now, will you ever get it 100% down?
• 6:05
  I mean, if you do, please let me know because I've never been
• 6:08
  able to manage it. I'm better at it than I ever was
• 6:11
  in my life and I continue to get better at it.
• 6:13
  But it is a work in progress, my friends.
• 6:16
  And when I say that, I really do mean it.
• 6:17
  It is a work in progress. You have to allow yourself to be
• 6:22
  gracious because it's hard. So I've learned that, you know,
• 6:27
  if I said that I was off track when I was in my 20s a 100% of
• 6:31
  the time, now I'm probably off track 30% of the time.
• 6:35
  And that's better than it was. And it's not consistent because
• 6:38
  some days I might be off 100% of the time.
• 6:40
  Who knows because it's working in your head, working in your
• 6:43
  space. That's just you.
• 6:45
  So hopefully this is helpful. Hopefully you'll start asking
• 6:48
  the right questions and you'll control those thoughts.
• 6:51
  All right, my friends. And as I said that, guess what's
• 6:53
  funny? She walked back through the
• 6:55
  gate. She came around, she walked back
• 6:56
  through the gate. And now I don't have to go look
• 6:58
  for her. Have a blessed day, everybody.
• 7:01
  Bye.