Latest / No Shrinking Violets Podcast for Women / The One-Word Shift That Changes Everything

Transcript

The One-Word Shift That Changes Everything · No Shrinking Violets Podcast for Women

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: Hi, Welcome to a mini episode of no Shrinking Violets.
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: So last week on my mini episode, I talked about a little mind shift from asking yourself the question why do these things always happen to me?
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: To what can I learn from this?
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: And I'm going to go up a level higher on this type of thinking and take a little bit more of a meta view of that type of negative thinking.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: And I'll clarify because what I said last time, the word negative has gotten even a worse connotation.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: So when I say negative thinking, it isn't necessarily your kind of thinking or oh my God, this is like the worst thing.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: It's not technically that it can be that to that degree, but sometimes it's what we don't recognize in our mind is making us feel worse.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: So something happens.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: We can generalize, because it's much easier to see the negative than it is to see the small positive things that happen, unless we intentionally focus on those things.
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: So we can find ourselves saying internally why does this stuff always happen to me?
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: So what I talked about is shifting that to what is this trying to teach me?
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: There's always a lesson.
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: But let's go up a couple rungs of the ladder and think about the concept of life happening.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: And this is a tiny shift, it's a one-word shift, but we often think life happens to us, Things happen to us.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: I'm stuck in traffic again.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: I keep meeting the wrong people.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: I have friends that take advantage of me, meeting the wrong people, I have friends that take advantage of me.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: There's always space in there to look at what your choices are.
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: But shifting also to the idea of life happens through you, it doesn't happen to you, yes, there are always things that we cannot control.
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: Any sense of control is an illusion.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: So it's sort of like expecting that things are not going to go smoothly all the time.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: But that's how we learn and in nature, when things are stressed in the right way, they actually grow stronger.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: They grow in a different direction.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: So, if you can think of in terms of your life as happening through you, so when things happen, instead of sort of feeling that inner resistance, that inner negativity, the eye rolling, the sighing like oh my God, here we go again, the eye rolling, the sighing like oh my God, here we go again.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: Something else has happened to me.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: Try to take a second and that might mean you take a break from what is ever happening or what's happening at that point and just say I'm going to go grab a coffee, I'm going to go sit outside for 10 minutes, Whatever you can do to give yourself a break, take some breaths and think, okay, these things are happening, but the way I think about it is in my control.
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: It's really the only thing we can control is how we think about it.
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: But when you think of in terms of life happening through you, that you're a participant in life, and when there tend to be patterns that are negative or even patterns that are unhealthy or just issues where you recognize, I keep tending to end up in these same sorts of situations.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: That's life kind of pointing out that you need to look at that from a different angle, turn it around and say what's happening here?
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: What do I have control over?
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: What's it trying to teach me and coming at life each day from the sense of, okay, it's happening through me.
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: I'm a participant in my life, Designing it to have moments in the day that are just.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: It can be a flicker of true joy.
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: It can be that you choose to send a text to somebody just because you're thinking of them.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: That can happen a lot, that we think of somebody and we just think of them but reach out and say, hey, I was just thinking of you, send an emoji.
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: You don't know what you're gonna get back.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: You might not get anything back and that is probably because they were busy or they meant to send something back, whatever.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: But we create things in life that feel good, sometimes, often intentionally.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there are great surprises, but if life happens through you and you sort of take that stance as you start each day, you are so much more a participant in your life and it empowers you that when there are situations that don't feel good or you don't want to continue repeating in your life, it gives you a much better starting point to figure out what changes do I need to create to make life feel more like I want it to feel?
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: So that's your thought for today.
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: Life doesn't happen to you.
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: It happens through you.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: Go out into the world and be the amazing, resilient, vibrant violet that you are.