This season’s theme song is “Training Day,” by Infraction. Used with Permission.

This season’s theme song is “Training Day,” by Infraction. Used with Permission.

#110: Slow Down.

This is our last episode of season 2! We've enjoyed the inspiring, upbeat music of Danny Gokey as our theme song this year. Our license gave us one year of podcasts on which we were able to enjoy this special theme song. I hope you have loved it as much as I did!

For today's episode, we're looking at just slowing down. Enjoy the listen!

New Day, performed by Danny Gokey, (P) 2021 Danny Gokey, under exclusive license to Capitol Christian Music Group, Inc., was written by Ethan Hulse, Coby Wedgeworth, and Danny Gokey. Copyright © 2019 Better Than I Found It (BMI) (adm. at CapitolCMGPublishing.com) All rights reserved. Used by permission; and EGH Music Publishing (BMI) / Be Essential Songs (BMI) / Colby Wedgeworth Music (ASCAP) / Fair Trade Music Publishing (ASCAP) / (admin at EssentialMusicPublishing.com). All rights reserved. Used by permission.

This is episode number 108. It's all in your head.

Welcome to the mindset for life podcast, I'm so glad you're here talking about mindset. Things that we think. And the way that our brain controls literally everything we do. There's so much out there that tells us that our thoughts about something create the future. Whatever we're thinking we are capable of doing, or what is possible for us, becomes our reality. Ultimately.

Now, if you think about it, that really does have a lot of truth. I'm going to give you just a little bit of an example from my own life. And this will have to do with my trumpet playing in band. I don't know if I've mentioned this here on the podcast, but I chose to graduate high school one year early. So, I completed high school with all the necessary credits,  a little summer school in there, and some zero period classes. And because of meeting the requirements in a shorter time, I just, I was a freshman, a sophomore, and then a senior, and I graduated. And when I went to college, my high school band director told me that I was missing an entire year of performance experience.

So he was cautioning me. He was a little worried for me that when I went to college, and I wanted to play music (I was going to be a music major), that I would be behind. Less developed than my peers. And I would really struggle. And he was right.

I got there, and I really did need a little bit more musical maturity. So I was in the lowest band, the lowest jazz band, the last chair in the ensemble. And I started to develop this thinking about myself that maybe I just wasn't good enough in music generally. And perhaps I should just not be doing that. And by the second year of college, I actually dropped out of the music degree and decided not to major in music, and I turned my efforts to a different subject matter.

Now, that's kind of a funny story. Because in the end, I did end up turning back to music. I did graduate, I became a band director and a music teacher. And I went on to get a doctoral degree in music later. I had a 21 year career in music. And I've been pretty successful as a musician and a music teacher. Even though that's the case, there was an experience I had in there that kind of builds off of that first experience, where I went to college thinking, Oh, I'm behind, I'm less-than. I might not measure up, maybe I should quit.

So this other experience was that eventually, when I returned to major in music as a trumpet player, I had to take trumpet lessons. And I would watch these other people who I highly respected--other students in the music degree--and I would see them performing with the Philharmonic at the university, or with the Wind Symphony, or taking solos in the Synthesis jazz band, which at Brigham Young University is a really high, well-performing jazz band. I would watch all of these things happening.

And I would think to myself, "I would really love to be that person one day, I would love to have a chair in one of those ensembles, first of all, but I'd like it to be first chair. I would like to play the fun parts that have the melodies to them. And I want to be really good at playing those screaming high notes." And one day, it just dawned on me that I was never going to get the opportunity to do any of that until I was already qualified as if I was in those ensembles.

And at that moment, I just realized I had better start putting in the effort, as if I was first chair in this synthesis jazz band, or putting in the effort, as if I was first chair in the Wind Symphony. And I started practicing literally three and a half hours a day. And I would space that out. So it did not exhaust me and did not destroy my emboucher, which is the setting of your lips on the trumpet mouthpiece. And I would go in the practice room for the hour that I had scheduled.

#107: Do You Say No Enough?

Welcome to the Mindset for Life podcast. This is Bethanie, your coach from Dr. B coach.com. Coaching with power, purpose and practical tools to help you show up with confidence.

Welcome to the podcast. So excited to have you with us. Today we're going to talk about saying no, in fact, the question today is, do you say no enough? Do you need to say no more often? Do you feel like your time is sucked away and you have no control over your opportunities or your time? If that's you, it's definitely time to think about saying no much more often.

There was an episode some time ago about you saying no too much. And that episode was about saying no to yourself, saying no to the things that you care most about saying no to your priorities. But today's episode number 107, we're talking about saying no much more often. So if you don't say no to other people, you are in fact saying no to yourself.

And you might be saying yes to things that you really want to do. These are great opportunities, great things that you want to go participate in people you want to be with. But in the end, it's not really what you want long term. So you get caught up in this whole time suck.

There's no time left, you're exhausted, you're overcommitted, you're overwhelmed. And you're wondering where to draw the line, how you can really stop the madness. And now it's time to start saying, No.

Today we're going to talk about this, gonna give you a couple of tips to help you say no to the things that you want to say no to give you a little courage on that. And we might as well dive right in.

Our time and commitments change as we age.

I just want to give you a little bit of background about myself as a person. I grew up with many, many options and opportunities. I was very blessed, very fortunate in my young life. I was in music, I learned piano from third grade onward. And I was in band, I got to play the trumpet, the flute, the tenor saxophone, and a bunch of other instruments too, when I was still in public school, so I had a lot of opportunities. As a result, I wrote music. So I composed music when I was a young person. And when I was a senior in high school, I wrote a musical. This musical had a lot of songs and a lot of speaking parts. And I wrote all the songs. And I recruited all my friends to be in the musical. Lots of people at my church came and made a nice, big audience. And I played the piano for all of those songs.

So I accompanied all of those songs too. I was pretty involved. I just did a lot of stuff. And I was also a science kid. So I took chemistry and physics and all the things that I loved. Early in high school, I took biology, in junior high, and there's just a lot that I was doing. I was not into sports, I was not a sports person. And that probably would have really made my time crazy and out of control. Because as you know, music activities take a lot. But I can speak from a place of knowing when I say it's easy to sign on for the next thing and the next thing until pretty soon, you want to do everything. You just want to do it all.

And when you're in that space, you don't know what you should choose and what you shouldn't. You're just going to say yes to all those activities. And in my young life, I felt that was okay, because there were very few actual responsibilities. But as an adult, that's dangerous.

We can't say yes to every single thing. If we take on every work project, if we take on every presentation opportunity, if we take on every chance for advancement or something new and special, we're going to be exhausted.

The other side of that coin is that if we say yes to everything,

#106: How to Set Priorities for Your Time

Welcome to the Mindset for Life podcast. This is Bethanie, your coach from Dr. B coach.com. Coaching with power, purpose and practical tools to help you show up with confidence.

We're gonna talk about a mindset to set priorities around your time.

What if there were these road signs in your life? Like you're driving around and you see a stop sign or a green light. What if in your life, these signs just sort of popped up in the corner of your view? What if you could just see exactly what the right choices were? And you didn't have to think so much about it? Wouldn't that be amazing.

And of course, that's not going to happen, because life doesn't work that way. In fact, if we had signs popping up all the time, telling us exactly what priorities to set, and how to manage our time, it would drive us crazy. Most of us would be super frustrated that we didn't have any choices at all. And of course, life is all about choices.

Choices about what we do with our time, who we spend our time with, what we make important to us in our lives, and about the priorities we decide are most important for us. Well, I have news for you today. What you are spending your time on right now in your life in this season tells the whole world including you what your true priorities are.

That's right, whatever you are spending all of your time doing, that tells us what your priorities might be.

I used to think that I was just too busy all the time, I would be studying, reading, doing some kind of learning activity. And I would also be doing something like working full time, maybe I was taking care of my family trying to raise my kids. Pretending and trying very hard to have a clean house, but failing miserably. And telling the story that I just didn't have enough time for all of this. And I could never quite measure up.

In fact, I think I lived in sort of this fight or flight constant state of overwhelm, thinking, I couldn't control all these things in my life, because they were all important. I needed to do all of these things.

Fast forward several years, many years, and I'm a lot older, and I have a lot more life experience. But I've learned a lot too. Perhaps you know what I'm talking about when I think about my priorities. So when I think about the way I spend my time, and I decide what I want to do with my time, if I look over the day, I can honestly say what my priorities are. If I want to sit and watch YouTube videos all day long, then leisure and loafing and relaxing and watching crazy stuff, that's going to be my priority.

But if I want to get up really early, and I go for a walk, do a little bit of stretching, take care of my physical exercise first, and then I get the dishes done. And then I run upstairs and do some of my work, make a few phone calls, connect with some people, and take care of my dog. And also spend time with my husband on the phone at lunchtime. All those things tell me that I have a lot of priorities. But I'm gonna do them in a way that helps me to touch those people that matter. Have that face time that I care so much about as an extroverted person. I'm also I'm going to break it up.

So I have a lot of energy and I can really manage my energy. One of the best things I could possibly do for myself is to exercise or walk first thing in the morning. Then get it done so I can check that box. But also it sets the tone for my whole day gives me a ton of energy makes me feel amazing.

What are your top priorities?

What you think about how you want to get up in the morning? What do you want those first 15 or 20 minutes to look like for you? Do you want to relax and leisurely get up out of the bed and calmly kind of ease into the day? Or do you want to leap out of bed and have your guns blazing (metaphorically speaki...

#105: A Mindset to Know that You Matter

This is episode number 105, A mindset to know that you matter. This is the mindset for life podcast. This is Bethanie, your coach from Dr. B coach.com. Coaching with power, purpose and practical tools, to help you show up with confidence.

Welcome to the Mindset for Life podcast, I'm very excited to share with you today the topic, which is about how much you matter. This is about a mindset for knowing that you matter. And how can you do this? That's pretty crazy, right? Because don't other people help us to know that we matter or make an impact or make a difference in the world?

I'm going to challenge that notion today. In fact, I think it's our job to decide that we matter and to know that we matter. It's not other people's job to tell us or to convince us of how much we matter. And when we decide that we matter as much as other people, we can show up more authentically and better than we ever could before.

So today we're going to talk about how you matter and how to develop a mindset to know that you matter. We're just going to jump right in.

We all want to be seen, known, and loved.

I was talking with someone earlier today who wanted to be seen just wanted to be noticed, acknowledged and appreciated at work. And when I was talking to this man, it was pretty obvious that he did not feel like his work made much of a difference. In fact, he wanted to know that he mattered. He started looking for other jobs a few months back and toyed with the idea of leaving his position to go to a new role. And he also kind of had his fingers in way too many situations happening in his life, because he wanted to feel like he mattered.

After we discussed it a few times, that's what came out in the conversation. I could not have known that unless we explored it. And he didn't realize it until he hit on an either. Really all those things he was doing were just ways to try to get some feedback, try to get some knowledge about himself.

Don't we all do that? Sometimes, we just look for ways to know that we exist. That we belong, that we make a difference. That somebody sees us, that they care about us. It's the greatest feeling in the whole world to be truly seen, known and loved for who you really are. And in the roles that we play, there are so many opportunities to get this kind of feedback. The question is, how can we develop it for ourselves so we're not just people pleasing all the time, looking for affirmation and feedback?

Notice where you influence, and take note.

The first thing I'd like to suggest today is to look at all of the ways that you influence. There are so many things that you do in your daily life that influence situations, people. If you have a pet, even. You can think about the family dog. We have one.

He's about what a year and a half old. Before that we had a dog that was 13 years old, when he finally finally passed away. They overlapped a little bit. So we still had our older dog when we got the younger dog, and with any of those animals, they cared. They wanted to follow us around the house. Sure, they thought we were going to give them treats and play with them. Yes, that's true. But they also really just wanted to love us.

The older dog that I'm talking about was our Golden Retriever named Buddy. He was the sweetest dog ever. And he would just go under my desk when I was working and put his head on my shoe. And just love me while I was just doing my work ignoring him. He was so full of love, and he never really seemed to ask for anything. And if you're not familiar with this, I just want to say that golden retrievers have this shape to their mouth. That sort of looks like a perpetual smile. It's so delightful. When you look at a golden retriever you think they're just smiling at you, even though that's just the way their face looks.

This is episode number 104: Three ways to lift your mood (instantly).

Welcome to the mindset for life podcast. This is Bethanie Hansen, your coach. And I'm here to talk about three ways to lift your mood. Why would you want to lift your mood?

Well, there might be a reason; maybe you're going into a difficult meeting or conversation. Or maybe you're just trying to get through the work day and you can tell that your mood is low. Whatever the reason, lifting your mood is going to help you to perform better, and the things you do in work and in life. It'll help you show up in your relationships positively. And it will even help you feel great about yourself.

Whatever is happening in your life, in your work or in the world at large. Lifting your mood can have beneficial outcomes for you.

Strike a "Power Pose"

So the first way to lift your mood is simply to stand tall, raise your arms in the air, like you're making a Superman shape, or even the why and the YMCA song and breathe deeply. You can stretch your body out in this way. And you can feel all your muscles stretching, and you can get some oxygen flowing to your brain.

And that will help you to just move things along in your body and your mind. Breathing deeply stretching your arms out is an instant mood elevator. In fact, I believe it was Amy Cuddy, who did some research on this. And it's called a power pose.

When you put your arms in this large Y shape or V shape, like putting them out in their full extended strength, it makes you larger, it also helps you to feel power. Physically, it tells your brain that you're in charge.

And it can lift your mood instantly. If you're going into a job interview, or a difficult meeting, and you have a restroom or a bathroom, you could go into if there are people around, you could do this in private.

And you could just breathe deeply while you have that going with your arms. And you've already taken it up a level. So you've lifted your mood with just one simple action called a power pose.

Now, if you want a variation for that, one way I like to do this is to put my hands up in the air, my arms are straight, and I'm walking through a doorway. Because I'm five foot seven, I can touch that doorway easily. And I will just push my arms backwards just a tiny bit to even stretch them more. And it makes me feel alive and amazing. It's invigorating. And it also elevates my mood a little bit more. So there's your tip number one, lift your mood by stretching your arms all the way out and breathing deeply.

Listen to Energetic Music

The second way to lift your mood is probably my favorite number one way is music. Music can lift your mood and weighs almost nothing else can. Unless you choose not to listen to music, right again, do that because it's not reaching you anywhere. The the best kind of music, in my opinion, is 1980s Pop. And that just tells you what your I love.

So certain 1980s pop songs I can put on and they bring energy to me no matter where I am or what I'm doing because of the beat. And because of the message in the music, so they're happy. And even if they're breaking up with someone or they're singing about a negative subject 1980s Pop generally has a positive vibe to it. So the beat is a certain tempo that enlivens your soul and just brings energy to you. You know, the beat of the music really does have something to do with the energy that you get from that music.

You have a heartbeat that might be around 80 or 90 beats per minute during low activity levels or something like that. And if you start to exercise, maybe your heart, heart rates gonna go up to 120 Beats Per Minute 130. If you get music in that zone, and you just start listening to it, pretty soon you're moving faster, because it's pushing you to increase your physical activity.