The formula for success... Yes, it actually is as awesome as it sounds, I have a lot to teach you today, but before we dive into that, I want to just direct your attention to a free resource that I have, it's called five shifts to jump start your health, it's five things you probably have never thought about before, but it could be the missing links for why you're not getting the results that you want, so if you wanna check that out, just head to terraform dot com resources, and it'll be right there for you. And I also want you to join the conversation head to our free community at community.nononsensewellness.com. Every week we're gonna take this podcast and we're gonna dissect it, we're gonna talk about it further, we're gonna get all your questions answered, that community is the place to be for the people and the information and the inspiration that you're gonna need to get you through the week, all the links for those are going to be in the show notes, so just scroll on down wherever you're watching, and click links to get your info. Okay, let's get down to business.
So you guys know that I came from the therapy world and I transitioned into the coaching world, there is a lot of overlap there, but when I had my own coach explain this concept to me of motivation and the formula for success, my mind was totally blown. Yes, I'm a coach who has my own coaches... Everyone needs coaches, I think. Especially coaches maybe. So the idea was seemingly really simple, but it was so useful, it was profound, so a lot of the things that I learned as a therapist were things that I got to know, and then you as a client only got to experience those things if I held your hand and walk you through it. But when I got into the coaching world, it was this transition to... There's a lot of things that I know, but I can teach you how to do it for yourself. You do not need me. That's the whole point, is that if I coach you well, at some point, you don't need me anymore, that's my goal. So this idea of the formula success, this concept, it's not new, I did not come up with it. I call it the formula, but it's been called lots of things by lots of other people, and it takes the principles from psychology and puts them into a usable formula that anyone can use when I was taught this through undergrad as a Psych major, and then again in graduate school, we use different terms and the concepts were much more abstract, and it wasn't until I had my own coach and I became a coach that I started understanding these concepts in a more usable framework, so it was really important for me to teach and share this formula early on in this podcast, because I'm gonna refer to it a lot, and it's something that I use in my coaching a lot, and so I want someone who pops into this podcast way down the road, they can come back to this...
Refer back to this episode and understand this framework that we're talking about because we will use this a lot together. Okay, so let's talk about motivation. Why? Motivation is never gonna be enough. You already know this to be true, you got real motivated on Monday and by Thursday, you were over it. Right, we've all been there. Why is it that even though we know what we should be doing, we know even what we want to do, or the result that we want to get, but we just still don't do the thing that we know will get us to where we wanna go to, how Matt, you've been there, we've all been there. I know that I want... To lose fat and gain muscle, I know what to do to do that. So why is it that I don't do those things? It's because I'm relying... Most of us are relying on motivation, and it's never gonna work. So what's the missing piece? The missing piece is never how motivated you are. Motivation is an emotion. It is not a strategy. Let me repeat. Motivation is not a strategy. It is an emotion. Motivation is fleeting because motivation is an emotion, and our emotions are not What are running the show.
Your thoughts are... What's running the show? Let's talk about emotions versus thoughts, because we're gonna stick right here for a little while because I really want you to understand this concept, every action that you take is driven by emotion, it's an effort either to increase positive emotion or decrease or avoid negative emotion, but we're missing the most important part of that statement, the thinking that creates the emotion... Every one of your emotions is precipitated by a thought that creates it. Here is a simple example of how I can illustrate to you that your emotions actually come after your thoughts, your thoughts are the drivers of your emotions. Okay, imagine you have a pet goldfish, fishing, and fish, your thoughts about fishy are that he is the best pet ever, you love him and you adore him, and you can't ever imagine not having fishy. He's the greatest. And then fishy dies, and now you feel sad and grief, you do not feel sadness and grief because fishy died... Imagine it this way, if you were on vacation and fish, he died while you were gone, you wouldn't feel sadness and grief because you didn't know... So she died, right? He's been dead for a week and you've been floating around Europe and feeling great.
It's not until you get a home and you understand that fish is dead, and now you have thoughts about fishy being dead, and now you have emotions because of those thoughts. Does this make sense? If I don't... If he's dead, but I don't know it, I don't feel sadness. I only feel sadness when I understand that fish has passed, and now I have thoughts about how I miss fishy and it'll never be the same again, and I'll never have a fish like him again. Those thoughts about fishes death are now eliciting those emotions in me of sadness and grief, are you following... Okay, let me put it in a different way. Let's say that you are my friend and your pet goldfish has died. She has passed. I never cared about fishy, I didn't have any thoughts about him, and his passing does not elicit any thoughts of me about missing him or things never being the same like they did in you, and so I don't have any sadness or grief about fishy. So what happened is still the same as she still has passed, but I have no thoughts or emotions related to it.
I do however, have thoughts about you as my friend, and as my friend, I love you and I care about you, and I don't like seeing you in pain, and so that will listen in me thoughts of empathy and sadness and sympathy for you as my friend does that make sense? Are you following me? So the fact that fishy died is still the same thing, but you have thoughts about fishy dying and I have thoughts about fishy dying, and they are very different, and then they elicit very different emotional reactions in each of us. Does that make sense? So this is the beginning of the formula for success in your life, there are circumstances, circumstances are the things like fish passing... That are just the facts of life. They are things in your life that you do not have control over, you never have... And you never will, you do not control these circumstances, the things that happen to you, the things that happen outside of you, you can't control other people, you can't control the past, you can't control the weather. These are all the circumstances or just the facts. They're the things that you cannot control.
This is the only part of the formula that you do not have control over. Every single other thing I'm gonna talk about, you have control over... And you're the only one that does. So the rest of the formula is all within our control Our thoughts, our feelings, our actions based on those feelings, and then the results that we get based on those actions, that's the formula, the circumstance, the fact of life, that's the part we don't control, but everything else or thoughts about that circumstance, or emotions that are elicited because of those thoughts, the actions we take because of those emotions, and then the results we get because of those actions that is all within our own control, most of us are not fully aware of the power that we actually have... We so often forget how much control over our own experience we truly have, most of us aren't even aware of our own thoughts, and that's really to our detriment, because what we are thinking determines our emotions, determines our results in actions, determines our results. Were in the driver's seat. So let's talk about thoughts, that second step of our formula, so the first step was circumstances, the things we can't control, thoughts are the first step that we can control in order to understand our thoughts, we have to know our thoughts, we have to be an observer of our thoughts, this is a learned skill, this is not something you were ever taught in school or by your parents, this is something...
This is not something that you're born able to do, like you have to be able to separate yourself from your thoughts, and that requires a lot of practice. So I remember last episode, we talked about you being the captain of your ship and not just cruising on auto-pilot, most of us are going through our lives cruising on autopilot, not being fully aware of the constant thought real that's running through our head. When you decide to be the conscious captain of your life, you have to... The only way to do that is to start being aware of the thoughts that you're having every second of every day, because those thoughts are creating your life, they are creating the results that you are getting, whether you like the results or not, those thoughts are creating it, this is a bitter pill to swallow for a lot of people, it was for me, understanding that I couldn't just blame my situation on circumstances was sometimes really hard because that meant that I have to take responsibility, I have to be responsible for my own thoughts because that means I'm responsible for my emotions, I'm responsible for my actions, and I'm responsible for my results, I am the circumstance, I can't change, I can't change other people.
So let's put this into a few examples so that you really get a clear picture of how this working in your life... Okay, remember how this goes. We have the circumstance. And that's the thing. That is just the fact of life. It happened, it's happening, I can't change it, I have no control over it. Then become my thoughts about that thing, I have control over my thoughts, then comes my emotions based on those thoughts, again, I'm still in control because I control my thoughts, circumstances, thoughts, emotions, then I take action based on those emotions, remember, because my actions are either trying to increase those good emotions or trying to decrease those bad emotions, right. And then that creates my result, now if I don't like the result and I'm gonna have to work myself back up the chain, right, if I like my result... Cool, I can keep doing what I'm doing. So let's put this into an example, when I was a therapist, one of the things that we were taught when performing couples therapy was to have the one person... Okay, so let's just do an example. So we would tell wife, wife, use an I statement to your husband, and we would encourage her to say, husband, when you act like this, it makes me feel like this, I feel like this.
Because you did this, and now I understand from a different perspective as a coach, how... Pretty useless that is... It's any wonder I helped any couple, maybe I didn't, because that whole concept is so backwards, because what I'm implying is that husband is doing something and he's making me feel this way because of Him... This is happening for me. I'm not taking any responsibility, wife is not taking any responsibility for her own internal thoughts, emotions, actions, results, so here's how this would look instead, wife cannot control... Husband, wife cannot control how he is acting, what He is saying, You cannot... No matter how hard we try, women, especially us, you cannot control other people, it doesn't matter what you do or say, you cannot control them. You can influence them, but you cannot control that. So husband's gonna do what has been is gonna do... Wife, instead of saying, You make me feel like this. Wife is gonna say, husband did this. My thought about it is that I hate it. And he's lazy, and he's stupid. And he doesn't love me. And he's selfish. That's my thought. Wife's thought. Now, wife's thoughts about her husband are going to make her feel mad, angry, frustrated, vindictive, complacent, there's a lot of things she could feel about that, right, that's gonna direct her actions, now she's cold, she won't talk to him, she avoids him, and the result is their marriage is in trouble? A wife could also choose another path, wife could have thoughts when husband does X behavior, wife could have thoughts of curiosity and wonder what he's going through, is he stressed out at work? Is he not feeling well? What is this bringing up for him, wife could have thoughts of, he's doing his best, I know he's working so hard, I know he's trying so hard, wife could have thoughts of gratitude and those thoughts are going to create very different emotions and wife right now, her emotions are love and empathy and sympathy and caring? And those are going to create very different actions and very different results in that marriage, so yes, you cannot control husband, but wife can control what's going on in her own internal system, and then her actions might influence husband actions.
My influence results for the marriage. Does this make sense? So a lot of times the idea of couples therapy is one person trying to change the other... Right, isn't that way? That's why every couple of I ever saw, that's what was going on. Wife was trying to change husband, husband was trying to change wife, but neither one of them was trying to change themselves, and that is where we have to start, if I can't change my own internal thoughts, emotions, that I cannot change my results and nothing will change. I have to observe my own thoughts and how that is contributing to the situation... Let me give you one more example. Okay, let's use me. My example, I had a desire to make a podcast, I wanted to do it, I knew I could do it. I knew it was something that I was being called to do. The circumstance is Tara startup podcast, the thoughts I was originally having about that where I will fail, I will be judged, people will make fun of me. It's going to be a flop, nobody's gonna care. Right, these are the thoughts. Now, what are those thoughts create a lot of feelings of anxiety and avoidance and fear, and...
So what was the action that then happened because of those emotions, I avoided... I didn't do it, I would do everything, but actually sit down and record a podcast and so... What was my result? No podcast. So in order to change my result of no podcast to Yes podcast, I had to start at the top. I had to start with my thoughts, and I wanna pause here for a second, because I don't want to give you the idea that it's so simple to just, Well, I'll just change my thoughts and that'll be that... It's not that easy. It's never that easy if it was... We wouldn't be having this conversation. So what I first had to do was understand my thoughts, I had to observe what I was thinking and why I was thinking it, and I had to give myself some grace I... It's Okay, Terry, it's okay that you feel like that you're feeling this way, that you're thinking these thoughts, here's the reasons why you might be thinking these thoughts, and I had to work through them for myself, once I went through that process for myself, then I was open and freed up to change my thoughts without resistance.
Okay, that word resistance is gonna come up a lot, but what I want you to understand is that if you force yourself to change your thoughts, you just white and uncle like I'm changing my docs... That is my natural state. Just white nucleus, force myself to do whatever the thing is, it's not gonna last, it's not gonna last. If you're forcing it, you have to be able to take a step back, observe your thoughts. Understand why you're thinking those things. Where is this coming from? Is this a thought you've been having since childhood, is this a thought that stemmed from this situation, where is the stop coming from, give yourself some time, give yourself some grace, work through the thought that's not serving you before you can change it for a thought that will serve you. Okay, so what did I do? I went through that process and they changed my thought to, I don't care if nobody lit my mom... Well, right, thanks, mom. I don't care if somebody doesn't like it, my worth is not based on that, my worth is not based on people liking a podcast or not... So I decided that I have something to offer.
My thought is, I have something to offer. What if I could help one person? What if just one person was helped by something I said That was enough, and that thought now made me feel emotions of confidence and purpose, and those feelings got me to sit down and record that first podcast. So it's a process, but ultimately what you're doing is working on changing those thoughts so that everything down the chain can change... Does this all make sense? I hope this is really useful for you guys, so when you can change your thoughts, then you can have new emotions, new actions and new results, so how do you start using this in your life? I want to caution you again that it's never just as easy as saying, Well, that's my thought, I just need to change my thought when you try and force it, it's just... It might work at first, but it's not gonna last. So I want you to understand that this is all a process. Weight loss is a process, wellness is a process, health is a process. You'd be willing to be in process, a part of that process, the very first step of that process is going to be that you are going to be a conscious observer of your thoughts, you are going to pay attention to all those little thoughts that are going through your head all day long, and what you'll find is that you have this just non-stop running dialogue of thoughts, and some of those thoughts are helpful and some of those thoughts are shitty, and they are definitely not helping you.
One thing you might notice as you start observing your thoughts is that you might think like I did and I started really paying attention, like, Oh no, most of my thoughts are shitty, like I am kind of an asshole to myself, like I think really mean things about myself of why am I doing this? I didn't like the things that I observed myself thinking, so again, if that's you, if you start observing and you're like, Damn, I mean to myself, give yourself some grace. It's a process that we have to go through. You can't just say, Well, oh my gosh, I'm so mean, I need to stop this. It doesn't work that way. You have to just observe with curiosity and observe with grace and graciousness and forgiveness for yourself. That's the best place to start. Don't judge yourself if you don't like what you hear, when you start paying attention, it's really important to just give yourself love and grace, take this slow. You have to understand and hear your thoughts before you can start changing them, so even when you start hearing them, really make sure that you then start trying to understand why am I thinking like this? Where is this coming from? So we're gonna talk a lot about this concept in the future, and if you coach with me, this is something that we are going to really start to put into practice because the cool thing about it is that once you learn how to do this for yourself, once you start practicing this formula, you can use it for literally every situation in your life, literally every circumstance, you can plug into the formula and realize like, Oh crap, that's why I'm getting the results I'm getting, and then you can figure out how you wanna change it to get the results you actually want, it's so super useful that we will talk about it a ton and we will explore a lot more if you want to work through this a little bit, or you have questions about... head into that group, into our community group and start asking the questions because... I'm happy to give you some answers. Okay, I'm so excited for you guys to try this out until next time, my friends, Be Well