IS IT TRUE?

“A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It’s not our thoughts, but our attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it’s true, without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we’ve been attaching to, often for years.”
 ― Byron Katie

How do you convey your experiences to yourself and others? How do you interpret events and relay that information? You use words. You tell your story. The language you choose and how you describe your life and make sense of your experiences reveals your beliefs (your repetitive thoughts) and your emotional landscape determining the energy you are sending out, thus predicting your results. As a Life Coach much of my time with a client is spent listening for their interpretation of events and experiences. Is the prose of their life sprinkled with irrational or exaggerated thoughts, all or nothing thinking, overgeneralizations, jumping to conclusions, discounting the positive and blaming and persecuting? Is there a focus on the problem? In order to make a change in your life, Dr. Joe Dispenza says, “You must think, feel and act greater than your environment.” At a basic level this means you cannot continue to think and talk and feel in the same way and expect different results. You must be able to transcend the past, create awareness around your current reality and dare to vision a different future. Who do you want to be? What would that person feel like and how they would behave? Would that person continue to speak for their limitations, defend circumstances and justify that they are a lost cause? Would they talk about the problem over and over? Would they look outside of themselves for a source? This requires being uncomfortable because you must take full responsibility and begin to undo the habits, re-wire the brain, challenge faulty thinking and change the emotional landscape. You must re-write your narrative: stop leaning on the familiar and embark on a journey to find yourself beyond the current identity and beyond the addiction to the story.

I NEED MY STORY

Many people are addicted, literally physiologically addicted to their story. Years of thinking, feeling, behaving and experiencing create brain patterns and feeling chemicals that are by-products of telling and re-telling and subsequently living in the same type of environment, first internally and then externally. Over time, as you have replayed events of being wronged, taken for granted and overlooked you have bathed your cells in the emotional response to these thoughts. Hurt, sad, angry and resentful are released as chemicals known as neuropeptides. When you think and speak in familiar ways your brain releases familiar chemicals which attach to your cell walls. Essentially you are bathing in the very thoughts and feelings you repetitively experience. Think of your beliefs as a known road that you can drive down on auto pilot on your way to work, but change the route - change the thought - and what was once familiar is new and requires focus and diligence to get where you are going. The same is true of your thought and your feelings, when you take away the angry, resentful chemical, that you have trained your cells to accept; they rebel and send messages to the subconscious. They want what they are used to, so old beliefs and all the reasons you are justified to feel the way you always have are stirred up and you begin to remember that you are worthless and never get what you want and so on. As you return to the comfortable story, the feeling chemicals are let loose and the whole system is relieved. Change has been thwarted for another day. You are now transmitting the “truth” of your past experiences, aka thoughts and feelings, into now, essentially destined to repeat the same experience in the future, thereby ensuring that you can drive down the same road, no need to un-learn and re-wire and your cells are fed for another day.

"Placing the blame or judgment on someone else leaves you powerless to change your experience; taking responsibility for your beliefs and judgments gives you the power to change them” ― Byron Katie

DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU THINK

This is why change can be difficult for some. This is why many people start and stop. This is why embracing the uncomfortable is so important. In order to change you must be able to think greater than you feel. You do this by challenging the accuracy and truth of your thoughts and feelings. Stop and listen to the responses. What if you chose a different view? What if you chose a different thought? Be comfortable with the uncomfortable long enough to change your internal environment. Be comfortable with the notion that if you are feeling pain or resistance, then you are choosing to believe a thought or feeling that is not true.

WHAT STORY ARE YOU LIVING?

So what does your language reveal about your internal state? What do your feelings reveal about your story? Is it serving you? Allowing you to grow and change? Encouraging you to experience and bath your cells in happiness, joy and love chemicals? Your story is not the facts of your experience. For example, maybe you did experience abuse, poverty and/or bullying. Maybe you have been betrayed or hurt or abandoned. This is a fact. Your story is the judgment you make and the feelings you attach to this experience that shapes your view now. Your story is your personal interpretation such as: I must be bad, people always leave, I have no choice etc. If you are always facing a drama, a crisis and starting sentences with, “you know what the problem is?” It may be an indication that it is time to pen a different page. You may be personalizing the story instead of learning, growing the story instead of growing you and using it instead of losing it. As Byron Katie said, “Who would you be without your story?” You can choose a victim story or an empowering story. And which choice you make is dependent only on you.

Life coaching at is foundation is about inquiry. It is about shining a light on the thoughts and feelings you have adopted as true. At its heart Life Coaching is about shifting a perspective through thoughtful exploration. What would you explore? Please contact me at, onpurposelifecoaching@hotmail.com