The Second Pillar: Mind
When we think of self-care, we don’t always think about caring for our mind. We know that how we think affects how we feel and how we show up in the world so really, it just makes sense that caring for our minds should be part of our self-care.
So where do we start with that? After all, the mind is a very big, sometimes dark and often misunderstood place. It’s a place of thoughts, emotions and feelings that can be seemingly outside of our control. It’s behind a door you might be afraid to open lest a freaking monster jumps out!
But it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s what self-care is for. And, this leads us into the first consideration for self-care and your mind. It’s your mindset.
Mindset is the collection of attitudes, assumptions, beliefs, thoughts and feelings that you hold. It influences the way you view yourself and the world around you. Your mindset helps determine how every day, every interaction, every opportunity and every challenge will unfold.
This is very much based on whether you have a fixed mindset or growth mindset. What’s the difference?
A fixed mindset assumes that our character, intelligence, and creative ability are static givens that we can’t change in any meaningful way.
A growth mindset assumes that skills can be learned, that challenges can be overcome and that failure is temporary and a catalyst for growth and for stretching our existing abilities.
Our mindset dictates so much of our behavior, our relationship with success and failure and ultimately our capacity for happiness. Your mindset can predict your success in life.
If you have a fixed mindset, you typically hunger for approval. You believe that you have to be okay as you are because you’re all you’re ever going to be. If you have a fixed mindset, you may see failures or setbacks as evidence that you’re not good enough. You need to hear the approval of others because you don’t really believe the statement “I am enough”. You internalize criticism and don’t try anymore. Most people with this mindset are stuck.
If you have a growth mindset, you believe that qualities like intelligence and creativity, and even capacities like love and friendship, can be cultivated through effort and deliberate practice. You’re also not as discouraged by failure, — you see it as learning. You know you may not have the ability to do X right now but you know you can change that.
So, what’s your mindset? Fixed or growth? Click here to find out.
Take a minute to think about that. If you have a growth mindset, great. If you have a fixed mindset, are you ready to grow?
Because you can change your mindset. How? By being intentional and supporting your intentions with your self-talk. Self-talk plays a huge part in creating our reality because our brain believes whatever we tell it.
Even if you start off not believing yourself, you can intentionally change your self-talk so that it supports you rather than defeats you.
Here is a daily practice that we are going to work on right now to help shift your mindset:
Try This – What Do I Want?
How do I want to feel today?
What do I believe about myself today that will result in me feeling this way?
What do I want to accomplish today?
What do I need to believe about myself today that will help me achieve this?
What actions can I take to start to make this happen?
And this leads us into self-talk.
Talk to yourself much?
Did you know that your self-talk can either empower you or defeat you. And that’s entirely up to you?
As far as your self-care goes, changing the negative to positive is going to be a game-changer.
Let’s analyze and reflect a bit so we’re crystal clear on what we’re talking about here and you know what it is that you’re wanting to change.
The thing about negative self-talk is that it’s hurtful, demotivating, demoralizing, and unkind, it brings you down and holds you down and can make you fail before you even try.
Your negative self-talk may catastrophize, blame, criticize and belittle. Essentially, negative self-talk is any inner dialogue you have with yourself that may be limiting your ability to believe in yourself and your own abilities. It is any thought that diminishes your confidence and therefore your abilities.
Negative self-talk is linked to an increase in mental health problems, a decrease in motivation, limited thinking that then limits you, relationship problems if your self-talk makes you seem needy and insecure or if your negative self-talk becomes judgmental of others.
Because of this, negative self-talk can not only be stressful, but it can really stunt your success.
Unbelievably, we all do this to ourselves to some degree. Why?
It’s a protective mechanism from our cavewoman days. It’s meant to keep us safe but it’s not meant to be overdone. And we do overdo it!
Basically, it’s the negativity bias and it causes us to remember and react to negatives more strongly than to positives.
That voice might think it’s protecting us from failure, from discomfort or embarrassment. And since it remembers the negative so much more clearly, it’s hyper diligent about avoiding it.
What are the mechanics that make these negative thoughts affect you? It’s essentially that your brain believes your mind. There’s no filter asking “is this true?”, it simply accepts and responds accordingly.
What is the difference between your brain and your mind? Your brain is the hardware, it’s the physical part of you that stores what you know and what you feel and your memories.
Your mind is the software. It’s running the program that creates your reality.
Try This – How Can You Change Your Self-Talk?
Changing your self-talk can change your mindset, indeed your entire state of being. To do that,
we need to learn to identify the thought when we form it. And then stop it right there.
Once we’ve done that,
We can neutralize it – say it out loud. Do you hear how that really sounds? You’d never say that to someone else.
You can change it.
You can change the intensity and make it supportive.
You can make “this is stupid, into this isn’t ideal.”
You can make “why am I such an idiot, into I didn’t think that one through”.
You can also Cross examine it – ask yourself – is this statement true? Is it compassionate? Can it be changed?
You can Change your perspective and speak to yourself accordingly – you all know the saying, whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.
You can be a friend to yourself – be kind, compassionate, caring – like you would to an actual friend and frame what you say to yourself differently.
Physically, you can feel the results of your negative self-talk in your body. Has anyone noticed this? You say something to yourself, it creates an emotion and you can feel that in your body. Often it’s your heart or your solar plexus or your neck or your gut.
So what are the mechanics of this? No! I won’t bore you, but it’s important to understand.
First off, emotions and feelings are different things.I know, I know, it seems that people use these terms interchangeably, and most of us do. But there is an important difference.
An emotion is the physical feeling you have in your body when you experience a thought. A feeling is the meaning you give that emotion.
For example, when you experience fear, your body reacts. Your eyes widen, your heart rate increases, you may feel adrenaline rush through you. It’s physical. Then you give it meaning based on what’s happening around you and that’s a feeling. Maybe it’s scared, maybe it’s insecure.
So, emotion first. You experience a physical response to something in your environment – often just a thought – and that physical response causes you to analyze and interpret it, resulting in a feeling.
Our actions are motivated by feelings, a feeling we do want, or a feeling we don’t want. We chase these – feelings that is – outside of ourselves because we think that it’s things outside of ourselves that are causing our feelings. In actual fact, our feelings are an inside job.
What do I mean by that?
You can manage your mind and control negative emotions through your thoughts.
When you experience an emotion, it’s your brain and body trying to give you information. “Pssst, there’s something happening, I made an emotion so that you’ll pay attention to it.”
This is an evolutionary response. It used to be a lion, now it’s an email.
In the case of the lion, that rise in cortisol and adrenaline resulting in anxiety, that you can feel in your body, creates a thought. “I’d better get the hell out of here”. Totally legit, you’d better get out of there.
In the case of the email, or the text if you’re a Millennial or a Gen Z. That rise in cortisol and adrenaline resulting in anxiety that you can feel in your body creates a thought “OMG what now,” when that thought could be, “hmmm, deep breath, smile, let’s see what we’ve got”.
Every emotion is preceded by a thought. You can control your thoughts. It’s just that most of us don’t really try to. And if you do try, I’m not gonna lie, it takes practice to make it a habit. But you can!
So, we’ve established the fact that body and brain are trying to get your attention with an emotion. When this happens, you really must pay attention. Repressing or suppressing an emotion makes it so much stronger. In fact, doing this is predictive of high levels of depression and anxiety. And it’s avoidant, if you don’t reflect on your emotions and feelings, you don’t come up with solutions and strategies.
If you acknowledge your emotions and label your feelings, you can process them and, hopefully, kind of deal with them.
Studies actually show that labeling, or naming, that feeling helps process it and makes you better able to handle the emotion.
Try This – The Emotion Wheel (from the Junto Institute)
Think about something negative you say to yourself often. Look at the emotion wheel, what emotion does that statement create in you? The inside of the wheel lists the emotions – Fear, Anger, Sadness, Joy, Love, Surprise. Those are all emotions that you can feel in your body, agree?
The outer two rings of the wheel list feelings, what is the specific feeling that emotion has given rise to?
What do your mindset, self-talk, emotions and feelings create in your life? Well, your reality. But before it gets to that, they create your vibration!
Everything is made up of energy– animate and inanimate object alike. Your body, a rock, an apple, and a thought are all equally alive and real, they are just made up of different energy densities.
Energy has a relatively high or low vibration. The energy of our physical bodies is relatively low vibration, which makes it denser compared to a thought, for example. Because a thought is so high vibration, and therefore low density, we can’t see it, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not real.
Even thoughts and feelings themselves are relatively low or high vibration. For example: “I can do it!” or “Everyday in every way I am getting better and better” are much higher vibration thoughts than “I never do anything right.” Or “why am I so stupid?” When we’re caught in a vicious circle of negative self-talk, or what’s worse- we don’t even realize our default inner dialogue setting is negative, our energy also gets stuck in this low vibration setting.
High-frequency energy can positively affect lower-frequency energy. This is how energy healers or energy medicine practitioners, like Maddie, work their “magic”; they use their bodies as conduits for high-vibrational energy to release and move stagnant low-vibration energy within their clients’ energy fields.
You don’t need to be trained in these modalities to allow your own high-vibe energy to positively impact the lower-vibration energy of the people around you or situations you find yourself in. We know that energy flows where intention goes. Being aware of your own energy and the influence your thoughts and emotions have on that energy will ensure that you’re better equipped to bring high vibes.
Try This –
What’s your baseline vibe?
What’s the one low-vibe frequency you often find yourself in?
Some ways to raise your vibe:
Savoring and Gratitude – have a real practice and practice it every day
Love – find reasons and people and things to love and feel it every day
Generosity – when you give to others, time or otherwise, it raises your frequency
Meditation and breathwork – going within!
Forgiveness – frees you from so much negative emotion and raises your vibration
High-vibe food – you feel good inside and out
Eliminate toxins – as above
Think positive thoughts – remember you are not your thoughts and you can change them
Consume high-vibe content and media – violence, degrading interactions, bad behavior are all low vibe content and affect how you feel.
Surround yourself with beauty – whatever your definition is. A plant you love, a crystal you love, whatever. You don’t have to live in a palace.
Spend time outside – play there or be there.
Be sure your relationships are high-vibe – maybe the hardest because you can’t control anyone else but you can minimize exposure to the people in your life that bring you down.
Wow! That’s a lot of information and a whole lot of suggestions to “Try This”. Are you thinking it might be easier said than done? Are you asking, “how do I stay on top of all this stuff?”. Well, that brings us to the last topic in this session….
Mindfulness
Mindfulness refers to a form of awareness where we observe and non-judgmentally pay attention to our inner states – like thoughts and feelings; as well as being aware of what is happening outside the body in the world. When you’re mindful, you’re in the present, not the past, not the future, You’re right here, right now and engaged and present in your body, your mind, your life. Like any skill, it can be developed through regular and purposeful practice. A mindfulness practice can help loosen the grip of habitual, self-limiting, and ‘fixed’ ways of thinking about and responding to ourselves, our circumstances and the people in our lives.
Whenever you bring awareness to what you’re directly experiencing via your senses, or to your state of mind via your thoughts and emotions, you’re being mindful.
Meditation is an amazing doorway to mindfulness because it’s an introduction to stillness and the awareness and observation of our inner states. It’s half the mindfulness equation. What’s the other half? Observation of the world around us and everything in it.
Try This
Set an intention to be mindful every day
Do a morning meditation or a morning yoga session or both, something to focus your mind and your breath and your body on the present
When you are interacting with anyone throughout the day, pay attention to them and your conversation, focus on this and only this
When you are outdoors, notice what is around you, use your five senses
Take time each day to think, reflect and plan
Reject distractions, avoid multi-tasking, be really involved in what you’re doing
Observe your thoughts and emotions
Whatever you’re doing, immerse yourself in it fully and find something, or everything to appreciate about it
You made it!!! 👏
See you in Soul ❤️
