Hello and Welcome to the Love your Life Podcast - This is episode 6- Feelings

I hope you are having a great day and have taken some time to notice the 50/50 negative/ positive ratio in your life that we talked about last week. There has certainly been an opportunity in the USA to notice both sides with the presidential election.

Today we are going to be talking about feelings - so no matter what your ratio was this past week you are going to leave today understanding more about them than you ever have before. First let's clarify the difference between a sensation in the body vs. a trauma response vs. a feeling.

Sensations are physical feelings that start in the body from one of our five senses - sight, hearing, taste, touch, or smell. They go from body to brain. Example is I touch the hot stove and my hand immediately jerks away with the sensation of heat before I can think about it.

Trauma response or stress response is the name for what we do when we are in Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Faun -These are automatic, instinctual reactions triggered by the sympathetic nervous system when we perceive a threat or feel unsafe. These responses evolved as survival mechanisms and are deeply rooted in our biology. They are often automatic and out of our conscious control, kicking in before we can logically assess a situation. A classic example of a stress response is a person experiencing intense anxiety and sweating when they unexpectedly encounter a dog after having been bitten in the past.

So sensations and stress responses start in our bodies, are automated and out of our conscious control - But A feeling which I will sometimes refer to as an emotion - starts in the brain with a thought and then moves through the body as a vibration. Remember, the Latin root for emotion - means energy in motion. Each feeling’s vibration is a different frequency than another - and we learn with experience to tell the difference between them all. When I am talking about feelings today and going forward I am talking about this definition of feeling.

I mentioned that there is a domino effect that happens when we think a thought about a circumstance in episode 3. The thought creates a feeling. The feeling becomes fuel for our actions - and the sum of our actions creates the results of our lives. This is happening over and over again daily with each thought we think. Thoughts are the catalyst for our results, but the feelings those thoughts create are big players in how it all happens.

Let’s talk about two jobs that feelings do for us.

#1 - Feelings are fuel for our actions and our inactions. The thought starts the energy into motion that is a specific feeling. I like to picture a sound wave going from my brain throughout my body. The specific frequency of that wave is a specific feeling. That wave of energy is the signal to my body of how we are going to act.

Whether it is something I do or that I don’t do. If I am creating the energy of excitement by thinking a thought like, I can’t wait to see what Santa brought! You are going to see different actions come out of me than if I was thinking - I never get anything I want. Which would produce an energy or feeling of disappointment and resistance as I come down the stairs on the same morning. One set of actions would be light and quick whereas the second set would be heavy and slow. It’s super helpful to think of your feelings as fuel.

One way to tie it into your physical experiences is to Think about how much differently you feel when you drink a cup full of caffeine vs. when you drink a cup of water. Each helps create a result in your body, but it’s a different result. Water doesn’t energize me, like a cup of coffee or coke does - and coffee doesn’t quench my thirst like water does after working out in the sun.

I choose the drink depending on the result I want.

When you think of feelings like this - you start to see that you can choose them instead of having them choose you. So many of us walk around experiencing feelings as foreign entities that keep tagging along with us with no choice or control of our own because we notice that we feel certain ways when certain things happen to us. But to move forward in our emotional growth and health we have to start seeing the connection of the feelings to the thoughts.

It is clarifying when you see a common circumstance like the presidential election this week producing so many different and polar opposite emotions in people. It is the exact same circumstance but there is not a universal feeling that emanates from its center. That is because there are millions of different people experiencing the circumstance and each one is thinking a thought about it that produces different feelings.

We don’t have to think of the feelings as right or wrong - they just are - But let’s give them credit for what they produce in us. Here is an example of how different thoughts about the election could produce different feelings that fuel different actions.

If you think thoughts like my neighbors are horrible people for supporting fill in the blank. You are not going to experience a feeling of love and compassion that drives you to bake cookies and sit down and have a conversation with them with curiosity. You are more likely to feel anger, mistrust, or disdain for them.

This will fuel actions like glaring at them from behind your blinds, staying inside when they are outside, not speaking to them, and possibly taking their yard sign and throwing it away when they are not looking! 

Whereas if you think something like What am I not understanding about the neighbor, sister, or friend’s viewpoint? You might muster up some curiosity and a feeling of openness that would fuel opposite actions from my first example - you might actually bake them cookies, sit down to get to know them, wave at them when they drive into the street, and open your windows and yourself up to go meet people where they are.

Different feelings fuel different actions. You might have heard the saying "It's hard to hate up close."? This idea suggests that the more we get to know someone personally, the harder it becomes to dislike or judge them harshly because we begin to see their humanity, struggles, and unique perspectives. I think it is a code for - I think different thoughts about people when I know and understand them vs. when I don’t.

Good ole Abe Lincoln said, "I don't like that man. I must get to know him better." His life forced him to figure out how to understand the thinking of good people north to south that felt completely different feelings and to then find a way through to middle ground.

The thoughts we think, and the feelings those thoughts create, will fuel the actions we take. It is a cautionary tale for us all because if we remain unaware of the power of these thoughts and feelings we will unintentionally end up hiding behind blinds and never getting to know people who have different perspectives than we do - and the divisions will only get bigger and bigger in our world.

Feelings are also constantly fueling the actions and inactions we take in regards to our health, our finances, our relationships, our education, and our work. It’s also a hopeful tale - because once we accept responsibility that our thoughts create our feelings and not the circumstances or people around us - we can decide what we really want to create in our lives and start to choose feelings that fuel the intentional results instead of the unintentional results-

The second job feelings have is to be messengers.  Each thought we think creates a feeling, and that feeling delivers the message of the thought to us. Since we think many of the same thoughts day after day, we often stop noticing them. But when we remember that each feeling is tied to a specific thought, we can use the sensations in our body as clues to uncover what we're thinking. Becoming aware of your feelings can help you identify your thoughts, offering another pathway to greater awareness.

An example is that you might not notice the thought that whispers to you over and over that your children don’t love you or they wouldn’t throw clean clothes on the laundry room floor for you to pick up - but you do notice that you feel blind rage when you walk into the laundry room and see the clean clothes you just folded thrown around and blended in with the dirty ones.

That rage has a message to deliver - it wants you to know that your children don’t love and respect you. When you slow down and pay attention to this feeling and receive the message you now have the opportunity to decide if you believe the message or not.

I spent years losing my mind when I walked into the laundry room - it was a game changer when I realized what I was making it mean every time I saw my efforts dismantled. Thank you feelings for the message! Turns out my children did love me the whole time - but we all needed a better process - which I was able to think up once I was not fueled by rage.

If you are like me, you never had a class as a child that taught you what feelings are, what they do, and how they help you. As a girl of the 70’s and 80’s I mostly only ever got the memo to control my feelings and not have negative ones. Ie - ignore - distract - and hide them - and get on with life -

I have now learned that feelings have an important role that helps me create beautiful things in my life. I use them to fuel the things I want to do - especially the ones that are scary, hard, and new- and I negotiate with them when they are fueling inaction and hiding that stops me from progressing. They also help me understand what my unintentional perspectives are which give me the opportunity to interface with thoughts and processes I have absorbed that I never had decided as a grown up if

I am excited to be with you today! I have so many things that I want to share with you! Each week I am practicing constraint by dishing out only 15 minutes or less of the golden nuggets that have transformed my life. Today, I am going to introduce a new theory to you which I will call the 50/50. I learned this concept from Brooke Castillo, the creator and owner of The Life Coach School. The 50/50 is simply that life is not supposed to be, nor will it be more than 50% positive or 50% percent negative. I love the idea but I have some clients that push against this. They insist that their life is more positive than negative or another person might insist that their own life is more negative than positive - I am here to tell you that the exact breakdown has much to do with your perspective. Whichever way you want to slice it, the good news is that if you are noticing there are negative or unfavorable things in your life that nothing has gone wrong! Welcome to earth! Really hard things happen here like death and divorce and natural disasters…… and so do breathtakingly beautiful things like a baby's first smiles, and love's first kiss. The list can go on, but if you are truly out there living there are going to be good and bad things that happen consistently. The thing is that when we focus on the negative and think about how bad it is we make the experience of it worse than it has to be - just like my hero Viktor Frankle taught. To accept that negative things are part of life is to normalize them - Accepting and normalizing difficult things is a way to stop fighting against them and in the resistance make the bad things bigger. If you think about it, to live a full life, you will actually want to experience negative emotions. Who wants to be happy when someone you love dies? Mourning the people, stages, and sometimes things we lose in this life is a way of honoring what we have had - to me it is one of the highest forms of love and gratitude. I know that when I go through difficult things, I experience all kinds of emotions of, doubt, judgment, fear, and sometimes even shifts into physical pain - like when I prepared to run a half marathon last week after not having run for over 10 years, The fact that I did experience all of those emotions and physical pain made the accomplishing of the goal that much more triumphant. There was more confidence where there was once doubt. There was more gratitude for my body’s capacity where there was once judgment for its limitations. There was joy in the movement where there was once fear that I couldn't do it anymore. What I am saying is that If it had been easy = the reward would have been less. If there was no negative - how would we know when something was positive? We would be living in such a small bandwidth of life that we would miss out on the goodness that is possible in this life. Let me share with you a time that the 50/50 has helped me personally to stay more neutral during trying times. When my 3rd daughter was graduating from highschool, and the graduation was over and the party was done we were going to be preparing for my oldest daughter’s wedding a month or so later, and it was my birthday to boot on the day the phone call came that told me my dad was having heart attack symptoms and needed to be on his way to the hospital. I hung up the phone with that feeling of fear and dread that sits hard and heavy in your stomach. I had so many good things happening that already felt like a little more than my emotions could handle, and this health situation felt like a threat to all of them. Would I have to miss some of them, what was the right thing to do, what did I need to do right then, why was this happening to me right now? And when I got to that question, I had an answer - of course it is happening to you - and even now - because life is 50/50- Of course it is happening - this is earth life and you are no different than anyone else - How do you want to handle it today? When I asked and continue to ask myself this question - The golden question I gave you in Episode 2 - How do I want to handle it today - or what am I going to do about it - I put myself in the driver's seat of my own life controlling what I can control with the best of my abilities. The awareness that things are not only going to go wrong, but are actually supposed to, is a gift you give yourself because it brings peace by clearing the fight out of you and gets you to the baseline of acceptance - You will know you are not accepting the fifty/fifty of life if you think thoughts like these: Why is this happening to me? Why does this always happen to me? This is not fair. I never get ahead. I always get knocked down. Nobody else gets hit as much as we do. I shouldn’t have to deal with this. Do you ever think thoughts like this or something similar? T hese thoughts are the kind of thoughts that keeps us stuck focusing on being a victim of circumstances instead of accepting them and then deciding what to choose to do that is in our control. It leads us to think of life like it is a bully that only picks on us which is an isolating and scary feeling. The concept of 50/50 immediately levels the playing field. All people will experience 50% negative and 50% positive throughout the course of their lives and sometimes in the same day or same hour, your brain can not be trusted when it tries to tell you that others have way more of the positive than you do. It is more correct to notice that you just are not privy to their negative 50. Hang with me while I tell you a story from a Chinese parable that dates back to the 2nd century B.C- This story is an example of how taoism, considered one of the world's major religions, views fortune and misfortune, and is a perfect flow into navigating our lives with the concept of the 50/50 and accepting what is. Son - has a horse Horse runs away-Who Knows if this is good or bad - Comes back with a bunch more –Who Knows if this is good or bad - Gets bucked off and hurt-Who Knows if this is good or bad - Spared from going to war -Who Knows if this is good or bad - I LOVE this parable! It highlights that in the good things there are seeds of bad things and in the bad there are seeds of the good. In other words it is an even 50/50 split. So let me end by inviting you to do a quick scan of your life. Where do you think you are on the scale of 50% negative and 50% positive? Does your brain believe you are more or less one of them? Do you think it is supposed to be different than that? Do you ever catch yourself being mad when negative things happen to you? Like the universe is out to get you? Or like negative things must be a judgment from God? What would it be like for you if you made peace with the plus and minuses of your life and called the balance sheet neutral? IF you were not fighting against what is currently the reality of your life, kids that are needy of your attention and resources, a job you don’t love, a family member you think should be different than they are, a rough fiscal year, a marriage that is not all roses all the time, physical ailments that have to be dealt with, questions that don’t have answers, or a new stage in your life that feels confusing, just to name a few - If you were not fighting against these kinds of crunchy things and wishing they were different - how much space would you free up in your mind and heart by simply accepting them and then asking yourself what do you want to do about them? You could also borrow a thought from our Chinese parable’s father - and tell yourself that you don’t know if what is going on is good or bad - time will tell - so chill out for a bit and let time do its work for you. In that simple analysis and question to self - you could neutralize a chunk of your negative 50% of life , and when you get to neutral - you have a chance to start looking around at what is working for you and what is good today. Start a list right now on the notes app on your phone of what is working, what is the part of life that is 50% great right now. Let’s keep this list running and growing through Thanksgiving - I can tell you that with a list like that in your mind and in your heart - you can’t help but love the life you are creating daily a little more than you did yesterday. That’s all I got today, friends! Thanks for spending your time with me. I hope I went on a good walk with you, rode in your car to somewhere you wanted to go, stood by you while you cooked dinner or folded the laundry, or maybe even shared in a moment with someone you love. No matter how I got to tag along, I am honored to be included and hope it was counted in the positive side of your day! Don’t forget to follow, leave a rating or a review, and share with your friends and family! You might not know where someone is in the flow of their negative/positive ratio today, but there is a 50% chance of hard things at some point - so help me get this information to them sooner rather than later!

We covered some good ground on thoughts in the last episode, but I am not ready to move forward to a different space until I give you a little more information about thoughts and where they come from and how we interface with them. Today we are going to talk about separating thoughts that are not the most emotionally mature or in your best interest from thoughts that are more mature and in alignment with your greater desires and belief systems. Let’s take a minute and learn a little about the brain. There was a school of thought in the 1960’s led by a neuroscientist named Paul Mclean that divided the brain into three categories and gave it names according to evolution. I borrow the name reptilian brain from that school of thought. - it is composed of the brainstem, which includes the cerebellum. Scientists are always learning and adding more information to our knowledge bank, but I want to keep it simple here and for my purposes we can think of the reptilian brain as the area of our brain that stays focused on self preservation and preservation of family, gives desires for basic physical needs, and helps us with fight, flight, freeze, and fawn when we are in danger. As the brain stem area is the oldest part of our brain I often also refer to it as my inner caveman, It is a professional scanner for danger and it wants to keep us and those we love safe. In the old days, it did so by noticing the danger in time to send us to our caves where we would stay out of danger and live to eventually reproduce and keep the species going another day. The second level of the brain is the limbic system - it is located deep within the brain and above the brainstem - It is small in size but does the big job of regulating emotions, behaviors, motivation, and memories. The third and top level of the brain is the cerebral cortex and I’ll be referring to the front part of the cortex in the frontal lobe that we call prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex helps to regulate emotions, controls impulses, and it plans for the future.. It is involved in our ability to pay attention, predicts consequences of behavior and helps people consider many streams of information at once. I frequently label the Prefrontal Cortex my thinking brain, and think of it as the best version of myself. When my thoughts are organized, mature, forward thinking, able to forgo pleasure in the moment for something better in the future, it is most likely coming from my prefrontal cortex. Whereas when I am reactive, impulsive, and immature, and or impatient - I will most likely be thinking with my reptilian or lower brain. As you start to become aware of your thoughts and consider where they might be originating in your brain you will become more familiar with their tone, patterns, and opinions. The Lizard that speaks from the lowest level is a lot like a tyrant toddler. It wants what it wants, it doesn’t really care what the consequences are, it is negative, likes to call names, and is quick to escalate emotions. I have found that the words of my small children best give voice and understanding of the reptilian brain. One of my favorite quotes from my littles was when I would say something like stop being mean to your sister. They would always say, but I wasn’t trying to be mean. I would always respond, you don’t have to try to be mean. You have to try NOT to be mean. And so it is with lizard land thinking - you don’t have to try to be worried, scared, nervous, angry, anxious, or trapped, you have to TRY NOT to! You have to learn how to shift your thinking to your prefrontal cortex upstairs! It is a valuable exercise to see this voice in your head as a less evolved and less mature version of yourself, even as someone other than yourself. One way to start seeing the lizard brain and the thoughts it shouts at you as separate from self is to give it a name. I call mine my little sweetie because I have found that being mad and arguing with what it says doesn’t really get me anywhere, but when I think of it like a funny little toddler I am nicer and talk in a more soothing way to it. I have had clients name their lower brain some pretty fun and unique names. One of my favorites was the one named after her coworker that was always complaining and stirring up problems in the workplace. When she caught herself thinking in a similar way she called it by the coworker's name and disempowered those thoughts. ANother favorite is the client who calls hers Crood - from the movie the croods - she notices that hers sounds alot like the dad who is always trying to keep people safe. Have fun with naming your lizard brain. Name it something that is easy to remember, feels funny or friendly, and has the power to separate it from you. Calling it by a name also gives us the awareness to remember that we don’t have to believe everything it has to tell us. When I remember that these thoughts don’t represent myself the best, I catch on quicker to being curious, doubtful, and even critical of them instead of just following orders without questioning them. Calling out where my thoughts come from by name is also a way for me to remember who exactly I am talking to. That old brain wants to protect me from anything dangerous or uncomfortable at all costs. It would prefer that I go hide in a cave and stay safe, but it doesn’t care that the cave is dark, lonely, cold, and uncomfortable too. So when I remember where the thought originates, I can remember what it’s intended result will be, and I can shift my thinking up to my prefrontal cortex to process up there and consider what it is that I want in the long term. If you have ever felt the feeling of being stuck, trapped, or not progressing, you can know it is coming from lizard land and your brain is trying to keep you safe in a cave. It will be up to you to shift your thinking upward to decide if you want to stay in the cave or face the elements outside that might be difficult, but can be gotten through to do the things you want to do in this world. The practices of Mindfulness and meditation are wonderful roads into becoming aware of what you are thinking. It is the practice of becoming a watcher of the mind. There are so many teachers out there that have much expertise to share. There are even apps to be purchased to put on your phone that will lead you in meditation. All of it leads to slowing down the mind and letting go of attachment to what the thoughts are telling us. I had my first touch with mindfulness in Yoga 18 years ago. I swear that my favorite Yoga instructor was my first life coach. Thank you, Lisa. I will love you forever! Her invitation to be present at the end of each class and to lead us into noticing what our thoughts had to tell us were some of my first touches with being still and watching my mind. I have been continually learning and growing in this area ever since. Last episode I taught about a thought download - I am going to keep reminding you of it because it is the most beneficial thing you can do to isolate your thoughts. When you see them in black and white you can start to categorize them based on how you know the reptilian brain vs. your thinking brain communicate. If the thought is coming from your reptilian brain, you need to immediately get curious and will want to doubt what it is telling you. Doubting the thoughts will be like pushing the pause button. It will give you a space between the thought and the reaction and this space is where you climb up the stairs through your brain to get to the top floor and use better reasoning skills to decide what you want to think and eventually what you want to do about the thought. It does require effort to shift the balance of more thinking upstairs than downstairs - but it feels so much better to be living in the sunshine upstairs, than the cave downstairs. Thank you for spending your time with me today. I hope you have found something new to spark some curiosity and get you inspired to increase your practice of noticing your thoughts. Since thoughts have the power to create results in our lives, we want to be careful and more intentional with deciding which thoughts we choose to keep thinking. I have chosen to think about you as I have compiled my thoughts for the podcast today. If it has been something that adds value to your life, I invite you to follow, like, and share. This will help me fulfill my mission to help as many people as possible have the tools to be more intentional and have more control in their lives. If you have ever felt trapped in your life’s circumstances, you know what I mean when I say it is dark and lonely in the cave our lizard brain sends us to. Use this podcast to help break some fellow lizards out of the dark! Talk to you soon!

Last episode we introduced the idea of circumstances not controlling our lives. I hope you have taken some time to think about how this can be true in your own life and are ready to learn more! Because today we are talking about how powerful our thoughts are and how they create the results of our lives. Thoughts are how we describe the circumstances around us and how we make sense of our worlds in the form of a running commentary/story in our own mind. Thoughts tend to have plenty of adjectives in them that are describing what is happening around us - Thoughts don’t just contain themselves to describing the present - I have found that thoughts love to jump forward to the future and make lots of predictions about what can and will go wrong - Unmonitored thoughts are more likely to be negative than positive. I like to remember that the people who survived the calamities of the past with all of the dangers, famines, wars, plagues, and just regular old problems were the ones who were good at noticing danger and then avoided it. They were the ones who lived to reproduce - according to Darwin’s theory of evolution their offspring would receive the benefits of their adaptations which in this case are the negative awarenesses that the survivors had. In today's world there are not many lions, tigers or bears to watch out for , but that does not stop our brains from combing through every situation and possibility to warn us from danger - These warnings come to us in the form of our thoughts. Thoughts are also good about going back into the past and assigning all kinds of stories and explanations about past events to make us feel all kinds of feelings in the present. Your brain has something to say about most anything you notice - as we go through this podcast today pay attention to what you are thinking about this information. It will have a story for you. Something else that is fascinating to me about thoughts is that We tend to believe most every thought we think. Partly because we have thought our own thoughts so many times that we don’t question them, and partly because our brains are wired with a confirmation bias. I could talk about thoughts all day long because they are so fascinating and we learn so much about ourselves and others when we get curious about what our thoughts are and why we think them. I don’t have to believe every thought I think, or every thought I hear spoken, but I can almost always learn something from every thought about myself or about the person speaking it. Once we think a thought - we set off a chain of events that will eventually create a result in our life. The thoughts we think manifest in our bodies as literal vibrations of energy, like you ring a bell and sound waves emanate from it- that is what a thought is like in your body - this vibration of energy is what we call a feeling or an emotion. I was delighted to learn that the latin word for emotion which is “emotere” literally translates to "energy in motion" AS the energy or emotion vibrates through our bodies, we have effectively created a fuel for our actions. Specific emotions create a specific fuel which creates specific actions. This means that we don’t do happy actions when we are sad, and we don’t do angry actions when we are peaceful. When we think thoughts that create the energy of anger - we do actions that are angry like stomping, cursing, yelling, hitting, or growling.. When we think thoughts that create the feeling of hope we do things that are hopeful. Hope filled actions are gentle, kind, consistent, calm, and measured they are typically small and simple things that add up over time. The sum of our actions that we do or do not do based on the energy of how we feel that are created by the thoughts we think, create the results of our lives. This domino effect of thought - to emotion - to action- to result is happening over and over in our lives with every single thought we think - it is rare that we catch the thought before the feeling , action , or result when we are first catching onto this - but you can probably tell me results in your life you are not happy with today - or feelings that you feel frequently that you don’t like, or things that you do that you have been trying to stop or things that you don’t do that you have been trying to start. The diet industry makes millions telling you the things to do and not to do to create the result of weight loss - the problem with this is that we can recite correct actions until the cows come home - but until we change the thoughts we think and create new emotions - the actions will only change for small bits of time - this is what happens when we write knuckle anything - we control actions but fail to recognize that the real power lies in changing our thoughts. As I shared with you the story of Viktor Frankle in the concentration camp - you will remember that he noticed that all of the people living the same horrible circumstance thought different thoughts about it? The thoughts they dwelt on even had the power to make the difference between life and death in that circumstance. Thoughts are no less powerful in our lives today. If circumstances where in charge of what we think - then all of us would have the same result to every circumstance that we have in common - this is just not the way it works - This is why becoming aware of what we think about on the daily is a game changer! If we want to create different health, financial, or relationship results in our lives we need to change our thoughts and then the actions will fall into place with much more ease than before. If we want to have more peace in our life - it’s the thoughts. More or less of any feeling in our life - it’s the thoughts. Change your thoughts and you will change your life! Most of us walk around believing that the results of our lives are created by the circumstances which is why we get so focused on trying to change the people and things around us. If we are unhappy with anything in our life, it must be the circumstance that is creating that - so we must change circumstances to change the things we are unhappy with. The problem with this - is that most circumstances are out of our control because they involve other people or entities - and when we try to control other people we are in a losing battle. We will never be in charge of what other people do or how the universe operates around us - never - to accept this is the beginning of peace - and to understand that we can control what we think about it is the beginning of power. If you have areas in your life that you are not happy with, this is your call to start asking yourself what you are thinking in regards to these spaces? A great way to become aware is to start a thought download practice at the end of each day. Set the time for 10 minutes and ask yourself what you were most worried or bothered about that day? See what your brain has to say by writing out every thing that crosses your mind . Do not edit yourself - just write!. Ask yourself what went right that day before you finish and tuck yourself into bed with a reminder that things are going well. The next morning you can glance over what you didn’t like about the day before and decide to pay attention to those same thoughts creeping into your day. Researchers believe that we think 60k thoughts a day and 90 percent of them are repeats from the days and weeks before - if you are stuck on something negative that is not serving you, chances are it’s going to tell you the same thing over and over again until you notice it and challenge it. Your job is to catch whatever the negative thoughts are - and ask yourself if this is a fact or thought? If it is a thought - do you want to keep thinking that thought, or is there something that is more true, that feels better? Catching one negative thought today and challenging it today and tomorrow and the day after that is a sure fire way to lighten the negative load you carry. When I drop the negative thoughts that weigh me down, I feel so much better. I really do love my life more when I choose to think about it with optimism and hope. Today, I hope that you can see you have more of a choice in this regard than you might have known before you listened. This information about thoughts has been around for a very long time - Marcus Aeurelis is quoted as saying “ The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly.” Hopefully today you learned something new or remembered something that you already knew but needed a good reminder. Maybe there is someone else in your circle of friends that also could use a reminder about the power of their thoughts. It would be awesome if you would share this episode with them and let them know you are thinking about them. Thanks for spending your time with me today. I know there are so many ways you could be spending it. I am honored you took some time to be with me. I would be even more honored if you liked this enough to subscribe to my future podcasts and find out next week how to think a new thought. A like a share and a comment would be awesome too! Talk to you soon!

So let’s jump right into our topic for today which is the school of thought that the circumstances of our lives do not define us. What do I even mean by a circumstance - This is important to get straight because you will hear me refer to circumstances frequently. When I say circumstance - I am always referring to the facts of your life. Circumstances are the events around us- the exact words people say to us - the things people do around us or towards us -the state of the world around us - the things in our worlds - are you catching my drift? The closer we get to having a circumstance - be a statement of fact - without adjectives attached to it - the better we will be at detaching ourselves from the circumstances we experience. We start shifting out of circumstance and into the world of thought when we notice adjectives and emotions floating around our telling of an event or circumstance around us. The fact is that we are all born into a specific set of circumstances. Many are more favorable than others - but all have negatives and positives- The most inspirational stories are those who were able to rise from difficult circumstances and do something unexpected or out of the ordinary for their set of circumstances.. The story of Helen Keller comes to mind - A virus took her sight and her hearing from her at 18 months old - her story of overcoming and that of her teacher Anne Sullivan to persevere even when the outcome seems distant is a perfect example of overcoming difficult circumstances - Did you see the movie of Madame CJ Walker on Netflix called self made ? Wow that’s a great story! She is recorded as the first female self made millionaire in the guinness book of world records - Born a black girl in 1867 in Louisiana - orphaned at age 10- started working as a child - and made it through a world where women had few rights and opportunities for money - and a black woman in the south on top of that! Well before the civil rights movement - Every circumstance she had looks like a dead end on paper - but she did not let those circumstances define her and she kept at it and produced extraordinary results- I spent a decade of my life reading about the horrors of WWII- i even arranged to travel to Germany when i was 20 and visited the Dachau concentration camp - - I couldn’t believe the things they went through - I tried to wrap my brain around how the German people were led down the path of behavior that created the horrors. There are thousands of stories of ordinary, courageous people stepping up to save lives while endangering their own - The world was trapped in a giant unfavorable circumstance but people kept pushing past their human limits and frailties to come out the other side. When I read the book “ man’s search for meaning” by Viktor Frankl - which he wrote 9 days after being released from a concentration camp -by the way - - I started to have insight into why I was so attracted to all of the WW II stories- I was trying to understand how people made it through - Viktor spent three years in four different concentration camps - one of them being Aushwitz where his mother and brother were murdered - while imprisoned he noticed that the people who focused on all that they lost and all that they didn’t have died - faster - He also noted that those who remembered that their humanity could not be taken from them even when everything else was - had a better chance of surviving - they chose to still help others, even when it increased their chances of punishment/death. They chose to share - to speak kind words - to watch out for each other - to remember the beautiful things from their past lives - and to have faith in a higher power - In short - they chose - to not be defined by their circumstances - This is the most appalling circumstance I can remember - yet out of it came people who chose to double down on their humanity - their beliefs in goodness and the control that they did have - Listen to these quotes from him - Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.” ― Victor Frankl he one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.” ― Viktor E. Frankl Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.” ― Victor Frankl The freedom to choose how you will respond to any of your life’s situations is the place that you have control - The control to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance is the one thing everybody on this earth has and nobody can take it - And in the space of creating a life that we love - the very first and most important thing we can do is to start to separate our circumstances from the results of our lives- The more we believe that the things we don’t want or don’t like about our lives are controlled by our circumstances ( people places and things outside of us ) The less power we have - and the more trapped and stuck we feel - But when you start to wake up and see that no matter what the circumstance is - you are still the acting free agent that gets to choose what you will do about it. The more time we spend focusing on what we don’t like about things and how sad it is that those things are in our lives - the less energy and power we have to actually do something about it - We lose our ability to choose - because we forget that there is ALWAYS a choice - In this podcast space - I will be coming weekly to help you find more power in your life - by reminding you that your circumstances do not define you - Listen to what they post in the museum at dachau : In the museum at Dachau it says - Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," George Santana Let’s comb through the past looking for those who chose to not be defined by their circumstances - who overcame - let’s not repeat the mistakes of the past - let’s choose to learn from the successes of the past - You won’t have to look far - most likely your own mother and father had to overcome circumstances that were not favorable- for sure your grandparents and their parents did to - The teacher with a smile on her face greeting your small child as they walk into school tomorrow morning - probably had to get through some of her own stuff just to be there that day - You most likely have circumstances that have made it difficult to do the things you want to do and be the person you want to be in this day or in this lifetime - Hear me now - You have a choice - choose today to identify the things that you wish were different in your life - and decide today to stop focusing your energy on how sad it is that these things are in your life- and ask yourself the golden question - Ok - so what am I going to do about that today? This one question will give your amazingly wise and brilliant brain the opportunity to start showing you the path forward - Join me in getting curious about all of this - and come back next week - to find out how your thoughts about your circumstances are the key to making the changes you are yearning for and how they are directly related to how you feel on a daily basis - If you will ask yourself my golden question from today each day this week what am I going to do about that today? - I will make a promise to you that you will find more power in your life than you did yesterday - And I don’t know about you - but when I feel powerful - I like my life more than when I don’t. You might be able to join me and notice that you like your life better than you did the day before. And that my friend, is how you are going to take a step towards loving your life - because after all - it’s a pretty good one - it just needs a little attention.

Hello and Welcome to the Love YOUR LIFE Podcast- This is Episode 1 - Who and Why - 

I am Ronda Loveridge and I am thrilled to be here with you today!

I have listened to podcasts like it is my job the last 5 years, but this is my first time doing the talking. I Love, Love, Love the podcasting world with our exchange of ideas and access to them any time we want them. What I have to say isn’t new information but it is packaged in a down to earth way that is straight forward, no nonsense, and at times very personal. You will have the chance to really get to know me the more time we spend together, but today I will give you a short introduction.

I am a midwest girl who was born and raised in the Kansas City, Missouri area. I got everything good you can imagine from living in a small town and was surrounded by more love and support than I could ever describe. When the time came to launch, I was hungry to see the big wide world and spent the better part of a decade all over acquiring an education, traveling and growing. While I was out and about, I met the most incredible man. It didn’t take us long to see that we wanted to build a life together, and that is what we have done these last 26 years.

 I threw my all into raising our four beautiful daughters and before we were done, we added one son to wrap things up nicely. He has kept me on my toes as we have sent all of the girls off to college, travels, and eventually marriage for the two oldest. I graduated to the title of grandma thanks to the most darling little granddaughter this last year, and can not believe I am here, but so it goes. My world, like yours, is ever expanding. 

While the girls were little I worked in the language education field. I taught English to non native speakers from many different countries and Spanish to English speakers. I loved giving people the help they needed to express themselves in the foreign spaces they placed themselves in and took great satisfaction in watching people of all ages get the confidence they needed to navigate their worlds with their words.

The funny thing is that there came a time as the girls started to leave for college that I no longer had all the words I needed to talk myself through the transition of our family dynamics, and As life would have it, I was hit with multiple fronts of change at the same time. It knocked me out of my regular emotional orbit for a good while, and it became apparent that I needed new tools to navigate the changing landscape of my life. 

When I went looking for help, I found life coaching. The way the information was presented and the power it gave me to improve any area of my life that I focused on felt like magic to me. In fairly short order, I was back to myself and then some. 

I came out the other side with new insights and perspectives that have not only helped me embrace all the things that life has thrown at me since then, but I have grown immensely in my abilities to be responsible for my own thoughts and feelings, my relationships across the board have improved, my health has improved, and the amount of love I feel for my life and all of the people and things in it has overwhelmed me with gratitude. 

This gratitude I felt for coaching inspired me to get certified and start my own coaching practice. 

I have been at that for the last 4 years and the evidence that I have that all of us ordinary people can pull ourselves out of our darkest places and take control over our lives with curiosity, responsibility, forgiveness, and grace has multiplied exponentially. I am yet to meet a person who cannot be helped by learning the principles that life coaching teaches. It doesn't matter how wonderful your life is already - Coaching can make it better. Likewise- It doesn’t matter how hard it is right now - Coaching will help you make it better.

Because of this, I am on a mission to help everyone I can possibly reach to become aware of how powerful you are in the creation of a life you love to be in. 

In our modern world, we tend to chase after changing the things, the circumstances, and the people in our lives so that we can be happier. If you stick with me, I will teach you how to change your mind about the things, circumstances, and people in your life. Once you catch on to how this is possible, and start to believe that you are capable of it, you will never look back. Even when things happen to us that we did not choose, there is a way through when we remember that we still get to choose how we will respond. 

Viktor Frankle - was a holocaust survivor who we will talk about next week. For now, listen to what he said, Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

If you are like me, you will love the feeling of freedom that comes from continually growing in your life. As you become aware of old thought patterns, habits, and results you are currently creating in your life, you will then have the choice to change.

That my friends, is how you make your life a really really good life. You might even start to LOVE it!

Thank you for listening to my first podcast!  I hope you can follow through and join me next week as I lay out the argument that our circumstances do not define us.

If you can think of someone you love who would be great to discuss these ideas with, make sure to like and share with them. 

A rising tide lifts all the ships in the harbor at the - so let’s get as many ships in this harbor as we can!