Intentionally Curious

52. You're Not Your Thoughts & Emotions

January 22, 2022 Jason Ramsden Episode 52
Intentionally Curious
52. You're Not Your Thoughts & Emotions
Show Notes Transcript

You're not your thoughts & feelings. Sure, you get angry. You get sad. You get happy. You get mad. You get frustrated. 

You get..but you're not

You're not an angry person. You're not a sad person. You're not a happy person. You're not a mad person. You're not a frustrated person. 

You're a human.

In this episode, I dive into how self-awareness around our thoughts and emotions can help us change our thinking and the results we get in our lives.

Get after it my friends and we’ll see you next week!

For links to everything mentioned in this episode and more visit:

https://www.jasonramsden.com/episode52

Jason Ramsden:

And our feelings are what create the actions in our lives. And then those actions are what create results for us. You know why? Because we're human. Hi, I'm Jay, a certified life coach and former educator who believes that rediscovering ourselves takes just a little bit of courage. This show is focused on helping you develop the mindset and the courage to regain your confidence to redefine yourself and to reimagine your life. One episode at a time. Well, hello, my positivity posse. Welcome to Episode 52. Positivity on fire. I'm excited for you to be here today. I want to start this off with a quote today I came across my meditation prompt recently and it kind of resonated with me, hopefully it will for you. Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them occur toll. Alright, so that's what I want to dive into today. First off, you're not your thoughts and your feelings. Alright, I get it. You get angry, you get sad, you get happy, you get mad, right? You get frustrated with the things in your life, you get stressed out, you get you get Yes. But you're not. Alright, lots of times people say oh, that person is a angry person. No, they're not an angry person. Sometimes they're angry. But you're not an angry person, you're not a sad person, you're not a happy person. You're not a frustrated person. You're not a stressed person. You're not a mad person. You're a frickin human being all right? Hear me again, you're a human. And humans have thoughts, we have thoughts in response to the circumstances in our lives. No matter what those circumstances may be. It may be where we are at a certain point in our lives, it may be where we are with our finances, our money, and maybe where we are with our weight. It may be where we are in our relationships. But your circumstance, right? Your circumstance creates thoughts, you have thoughts about where you are in your life right in this moment. And those thoughts create feelings. Do you see the flow, right? You have something in your life that's going on, you're having thoughts about it, and they create feelings for you. And our feelings are what create the actions in our lives. And then those actions are what create results for us. You know why? Because we're human. Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, I want to talk a little bit today about being aware of what's behind them. And that goes back to the very beginning of it's the circumstance. And plain and simple. Like if you want different results in your life, you have to change your thoughts and feelings about your circumstances of where you are right now. You know, I said before, it could be weight, it could be relationships, it could be professional life, it could be where you are in your work, it could be feeling you know, your circumstance of not moving forward, whatever it may be, watch, you dive into the awareness behind your thoughts and your feelings, your emotions, about your circumstances, then then my friends, let me tell you, you can seriously you can achieve unlimited potential when you do that. So that's what I want to get into today for you. Because I feel like it's really pertinent as we're starting off the new year. I know, you know, almost the month of January is gone. But it's a really good time to talk about it. So let's dive into that. Now, I may be talking a little bit about meditation today. And that's okay. Like if you're if you don't meditate, you don't have any interest in it, it's okay, we're going to take the underlying pieces out of it. I fully believe my meditation practice that I've been working on for you know, 430 plus days is really changed my life. But again, if that's if that's not what you're into, it's cool. Okay, no worries there. But we're going to take some of the components of that, to talk about the thoughts and emotions, of being aware about them. So there's a guy called Daniel Siegel, he has created what's called the wheel of awareness and it is really specifically about people who meditate right in the wheel of awareness what it says Like if you could think of being aware about your, your, your thoughts and your and your feelings, your your emotions, okay? And if you look at it as like a wheel, in the middle is your awareness. Okay? And then your awareness spins around the wheel to focus your attention and it's pretty, you know, it's like a clock okay? So there are the first place it lands and just like a new day, right, it goes away nine first place it lands is the first five senses so what are you You know, what are you seeing? What are you feeling? What are you touching? You know, those sorts of things. That's where it lands first. That's where your attention goes first. Think of those kind of like that attention is your circumstances. That's where you're in taking in into your life at the moment then, and you have some sort of the next stage is like, the sixth stage is bodily sense. Asians. And what that means is that your body that has reactions, right you feel certain things. For, for instance, if you are in the middle of a meeting and you flub something in a presentation, you get flushed, right? You feel heat come on one of your senses, right? triggers that bodily sensation. And then the next stage, the seventh sense, is your mental activities, right? All of a sudden, you have thoughts about what other people in the room may be thinking about you. And we're making up stories about what's happening, right, based upon the intake of everything that's happening in our lives. Alright, so you have these mental activities, and then there's this eighth sense, that is the interconnection between all of that, okay, and that is where we find ourselves having actions, right, we may have a response to that, we may ask for a glass of water, we may be asked to pause for a moment, we may ask to go to the restroom, you know, whatever it may be. The the interconnection of all of that is what drives us at that point in time. And here's what I want you to think about, okay, the awareness part, if you elevate yourself outside of your body, I know that seems funky. But like in any given circumstance, when you're having thoughts and feelings about if you could remove yourself from that moment, if you could remove yourself from that circumstance, if you could elevate above it, and look down upon it. And you saw yourself having thoughts and feelings in a certain way. Let's say they're negative, right? They're not moving you forward, they're not serving you in any way. If you are taking advantage of being high above it, a vantage point of being high above it, you can then say to yourself, I'm going to switch my thinking about this particular circumstance in the moment. Okay, as soon as you switch that thinking, things start to change for you. So that's where that that's where we're talking about the power of, of self awareness, the power of open awareness, going back to the quote, understanding that rather than living into your thoughts and emotions in any given moment, being aware of what's behind them. Okay, that elevation out, being aware of what's behind them, allows you to change a different path go down a different path. And what this all ends up being, it really all ends up just being self aware writing, it's one of the things that we want to measure going down our journey to become better at. But what I want you to hear today is that being self aware, allows us to change our responses, allows us to reach to change the actions that we take, which ultimately will help us change the results that we have in our life. And that's the big takeaway here. Okay, once you create self awareness in your life, once you realize that our thoughts, drive our feelings, drive our action, drive our results, then you find yourself in a good spot. So what are some of the things that you could do to be self aware? So the first part we talked about a little bit, it's the practice of being just that natural observer of yourself. Right? So that means as you're going through the day, you recognize thoughts and emotions, we talked about it, you elevate outside of yourself to realize what is going on in your brain. And rather than like criticizing yourself, or having thoughts and emotions about any particular circumstance, you just make a mental note of it. You say, Okay, I see that, I see that in myself, I see that that was a reaction to whatever it may have been, someone pissed you off in a meeting, and all of a sudden, now you're inside your head about it. Alright, so but if you elevated out what was the actual root cause was that person, right? They didn't, they didn't make you feel that way you made you feel that way in response to whatever they may have said to you, or whatever they had made done in the meeting. Alright, so that's kind of that being a natural observer of your surroundings and your awareness. When you do that, right. When you take on a practice of observing what's happening, you can start to make connections, alright, or correlations between your patterns of thinking that's pretty easy, right? And, and you do it from a place of not judging yourself, you do it from a placement of not having shame that you're having these thoughts and feelings. But you really want to, you want to get to the root cause, right? You want to understand why you have those thinking patterns. Right? It's kind of like being a doctor and diagnosing certain conditions, is once you understand the patterns that you've developed, behind any sort of reaction that you have, that's when you can start to shift things, right. That's when you understand, Okay, I've had these thinking patterns over time. And if you want to like, get rid of them, you say, Okay, well, those don't have value for me anymore. Those don't have value for me. So what I'm going to do is kind of move forward with like, what becomes Next for me, if I'm saying that those don't have value for me anymore, I'm gonna start giving myself patients I'm gonna start giving myself grace. I'm gonna start saying to myself, Okay, this is something I may have believed in my past life. But I don't believe in anymore about myself, I'm making a shift. So I'm having the shift in my life, I'm letting go, I'm moving on. Because that belief in that particular situation about my circumstance no longer serves me. It has zero value, it doesn't work for me. And it's time for me to move on. When you do that, you start to then kind of have this recalibration of your life, right, the more that you ask yourself, what it is, that's truly happening. And you start to imagine, if it's something that I do with my clients, we've worked through kind of this Imagine if process, if you imagine if your life was different in a certain way, if you desired something different in your life, if you desire something different for yourself, and then you make a commitment to following through on new values, new thinking, new feelings about that. And you would not be swayed at all, by any buddy else's input. Right? When you start to make a change in your life, and you start to think differently about what you want. When you start to move forward, sometimes people will fall out of your life. And that's an that's an okay thing. All right, they're not in alignment with the new you. So if you want to make change in your life, you want to recalibrate yourself, you want to re envision yourself in how you want to live, if people fall out of your life, that's okay. Okay, you just need to accept that. You need to accept that you are becoming someone more than who you were before. You are someone who's getting out of old patterns. You're someone who is not the thoughts and feelings, or the thoughts and emotions that you're having. You're starting to recalibrate yourself for positive growth, and people don't like that. They like people to stay the same. Nobody likes change, change is hard. Change changes everything for everyone. There's always challenges that come with change. But when you start to develop habits around becoming more fulfilled as a person, when you start to develop habits around, moving forward with your life, when you start to work on yourself, when you start to have better beliefs about who you are and what you can achieve, things will change, you'll attract new people to your life, and you will repel all people from your life. And that is all right. All right, what you need to remember here, in this particular situation, is that personal empowerment. Alright, I'm gonna say that, again, personal empowerment, which is the act of you becoming stronger, right from from, from a police a belief about moving forward, that you've moved forward, remove the mental clutter, the crap that's in your head, the stuff that makes your brain go, you've created some sort of peace for yourself. You've gotten rid of the habits in your life that have caused guilt, and shame. And I don't mean the habits of the things that you do the circumstances know the thoughts and feelings you have about them, the thoughts and feelings you have about them. And then all of a sudden you find yourself in a different place, you have become self aware, you understand, when a certain circumstance happens, the triggers that make you have certain thoughts about them. That Make You have certain feelings about that which cause you to go down a certain path. Okay? You find yourself in a spot where you are self aware about you. I'm gonna say that again, self aware about you. Because you're able to consciously notice, whenever you have negative feelings, whenever you have negative thoughts, whenever you feel better about your life, and you can come back down, you can ground yourself in some new thoughts and feelings. You can ground yourself in new self worth, you can ground yourself in loving yourself. And that is an unbelievable gift, my friends an unbelievable gift. I make it sound simple, right and change your thoughts and your feelings about your circumstances. Now it takes time. But if you put in the work right, if you are courageous enough to become self self aware, if you are courageous enough to start taking better care of yourself both physical and mental. Right when you develop self care when you develop self compassion, when you start to put it into practice, when you start to say this okay, what am I feeling right now in my body? Like what Thoughts are running through my mind. What am I saying to myself? What emotions are around me? What am I wanting to do? What am I? What are the consequences? Right? What are the consequences of how I'm thinking and feeling? My fitness, right? Think about that. When you start to challenge the ongoing patterns in your life, and you're self aware about it, well, let me tell you, things will change for you. I know because they've changed for me. When I've gone through an entire year or so, of working through these mental blocks, working through these beliefs I had about myself working through what it means to live in my own self worth, because of my new self awareness. It's, it's life changing. It's life changing, I now believe that I can do anything, that I am capable of doing anything, that I can make a difference in this world. And that's what I really want to leave with you today is like, if you just take the simple steps a little at a time, and we've talked about this before. Sometimes you go forward two steps. Sometimes you go back two steps, sometimes you go five steps forward, sometimes you go back three steps. Life is this continual journey of plus and minus little wins, little losses, big wins, big losses, you have gains, you go backwards, like it's okay. Don't stop fighting the good fight for your life. And for your life, I mean by don't stop fighting for a better life for yourself. And it all starts with right now it starts with accepting yourself as you are right now. And then you can go about making change in your life, then you can go about moving forward. When you become self aware about who you are in this moment. That's when you unlock the potential unlock the power to totally change everything in your life. Alright, my friends, I want you to go out there and fight the good fight for yourself. Go after it, get after it. Do the work. Imagine a new you redefine yourself regain that confidence. That's what this show is all about. You could do it one episode at a time I totally believe in you. And the truth is, you should believe in yourself. And as we prepare to wrap up, thank you so much for being here. So I end every show because of you. My life is better because you listen to the show your life is better. Because you commit time to doing the work you are better. And you're given the time means the world to me. Time is the most precious gift. So thank you for that. And as always, my friends be well be happy be you and until the next time. May your quest for positivity. Begin today. A positivity posse. If you're ready to coach yourself, I invite you to download my free workbook. Seven Steps to regain redefined and reimagine your life. Head over to www dot Jason ramsden.com backslash my dash links and click on the download link at the top of the page. It's that simple. And hey, if you're interested in working with me as your own personal life coach, visit Jason ramsden.com and click Get Started in the upper right hand corner of the screen. I hope to talk to you soon until then have an amazing day. Positivity on fire is a production of impact one media LLC. All rights reserved.