Episode 172 - Are Your Thoughts Keeping You Stuck?
How often do you have thoughts like, "I hate doing this," "I'm bad at this," or "What's the point?" and brush them aside? We often push through our days without stopping to question the stories running through our minds, but what if those seemingly small thoughts are pointing to something much deeper? In this episode, I'm sharing why learning to notice your thoughts and getting curious about what's underneath them can change the way you move through your life. The next version of you is possible, and creating the life you want sometimes starts with uncovering the beliefs you've been holding onto so you can finally let them go. Here’s what I cover:
A recent thought that led me to uncover the deeper fears and beliefs hiding underneath
How somatic work helps reach the thoughts that can’t be accessed by cognitive behavior therapy alone
How reflecting on a 12-year cycle inspired me to let go of old patterns and cultivate new energy
Why you can choose what you believe on purpose and how that can transform your life
How my upcoming free workshop will help you find the conscious and subconscious beliefs quietly running the show
Reserve your seat for Sara’s next workshop: sarafisk.coach/voice
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
Transcript
00:59
So the other day, I was sitting down to write a sales page, and in this business, and in many businesses, there's a lot of writing to be done.
01:06
And as I was sitting down, I said out loud, under my breath, "I hate this." And my whole body tensed, my shoulders, my jaw. I was just...I was mad that I had to do it. I wanted to do something else.
01:21
And I caught it in a way that I haven't before, and it changed my trajectory in a really interesting way, and I want to tell you why that exact moment mattered so much.
01:36
And to understand that, we need to go back for a little bit. When I first became a coach, I was trained in something called the Model, which is a cognitive behavior therapy tool.
01:48
Cognitive behavior connects your thoughts to your feelings, then to the actions that you take, and then the results that you get. And when I first learned this, it felt revolutionary.
02:04
This was a structure, a real, like, learnable structure for something that had always just felt to me like the weather, right? Moods that arrived out of nowhere, reactions I couldn't really explain.
02:18
But what the model and what cognitive behavior therapy said was, "No, that's not random. There's a thought under that.
02:26
If you find the thought, and if you can identify the feeling, and if you can see what that makes you do, that explains why you are getting what you are getting." And I started using it on myself.
02:40
I used it with clients, and it was amazing. And it was amazing because that whole world of, like, inner emotions, I was very disconnected from.
02:50
I was very disconnected from my body, and I often had the feeling that I was, like, army crawling my way through something forcing myself to do something on the outside that did not match how I felt on the inside.
03:04
And so I think that's really familiar for a lot of us, is that we know that we are supposed to do something, right? I'm supposed to make dinner. I'm supposed to, uh, go to work.
03:16
I'm supposed to enjoy being with my kids. But inside, something doesn't match, and so that mismatch was what I felt a lot but I couldn't name, and I didn't know why it was happening.
03:28
And so the Model really gave me that first look into there's something that happens, and the thing that happens isn't good or bad.
03:40
There's some kind of situation, and then I have a thought about it, and then that thought produces a feeling, and then when I'm feeling that, I do certain things, and I don't do other things, and then that's what gets me my result.
03:54
So if we go back to, "I hate it," you know, that I said about the sales page, a sales page isn't good or bad. It's neutral. But my thought, "I hate this," produced a feeling of tension in my body.
04:10
And so then I would have normally, you know, sat down, made myself do it, forced my...That's the army crawling feeling, right?
04:18
Just kind of forcing my way through this activity that had to be done but I didn't really want to do it.
04:24
And then I would have gotten a sales page that needed a lot of work because of that unresolved tension. I loved it.
04:32
It was a structure that I understood, that I could use, and it worked, and it kept working.
04:39
First, I was a weight loss coach, and there was a lot of conscious thoughts that keep people from losing weight, and that was really helpful.
04:49
But then later on, when I went to help women stop people pleasing, I felt like I ran into a wall. This was the wall.
04:59
A lot of the thinking that was driving my clients' feelings to lose weight or to stop people pleasing wasn't conscious. They didn't have access to it.
05:09
They weren't saying it out loud like I said, "I hate this" about the sales page. And what I learned was you can't work with a thought that you don't know you're having.
05:20
You can't fix a belief that is buried under there so far that you don't even know it's running the show, driving the bus. So then I got further training.
05:32
I got trained in somatics, somatic experiencing, and parts work, and then learning to listen to the body when the mind doesn't have words for what's happening.
05:44
The body was such a rich source of information and connection, and it felt like I had really found another missing piece.
05:55
It was genuinely, and has genuinely, provided some of the most important work I've ever done with myself and with the women I coach, because now we can look at your conscious thoughts, that's cognitive behavior therapy, and we can find your subconscious thoughts.
06:13
And so after having those two kind of pieces of the puzzle, I leaned more heavily into the somatic work and the parts work. And recently something interesting is happening.
06:24
I've been coming back around to kind of the next level of cognitive behavior therapy.
06:31
And it's, it's sharper now because I can see how much those pieces interact and kind of what's running underneath it.
06:41
And I've noticed a cycle in my own life, and I'm wondering if you're gonna recognize it too. So let's talk about it.
06:49
Since I have left the Mormon church, I would describe myself as someone who is spiritual but not religious. And one of the things that I've enjoyed learning about is astrology.
07:03
I don't want to overstate it. I don't think it's a huge part of my life, but I have really enjoyed seeing patterns and recognizing things that feel true from my experience.
07:15
And something interesting is happening right now.
07:18
Right now, in late July, there's something happening called a Jupiter cazimi, and that's when Jupiter sits at the exact heart of the sun, and it marks a kind of reset in Jupiter's cycle.
07:32
Jupiter takes 12 years to move through the full zodiac. So a cazimi like this lines up with the start of a new 12-year arc.
07:43
And I have been feeling that kind of letting go of old energy and wanting to cultivate new energy all over my life before I even knew what this astrological event was and what it meant.
07:59
And do with this what you may, right? Like I said, I like seeing patterns. I like seeing things that assign meaning to my life.
08:08
Um, that's probably some of the vestiges of, of religion actually, but I enjoy it. And so astrology is just one of the things I enjoy learning about.
08:17
But this particular 12-year arc led me to do something that I haven't done before. I looked back 12 years. 12 years ago was 2014. My faith was starting to break apart.
08:34
Um, there were pieces of it everywhere, and I just felt like I was hanging on to a life raft that was breaking apart in the ocean, and I was just frantically trying to keep as many pieces of it together because I did not know what else to do.
08:54
My husband had already left the church, and I hadn't.
08:57
I was still holding on, trying to figure out what his decision meant for us, for our marriage, for our family, for the whole architecture and the structure of the life that I thought I was building.
09:11
Now, Mormonism didn't exactly teach me how to let someone else be an autonomous agent.
09:20
You would think it would, but it really didn't because in Mormonism, what really matters is keeping the rules and everybody staying inside the structure and everybody making it work, and sometimes you don't like it 'cause, you know, that's normal.
09:32
But in the end, we have to stay in this structure because that's how we get the eternal reward at the end.
09:42
So clinging to the pieces of my life raft, clinging to the pieces of my life raft and seeing that he had completely jumped overboard created a lot of fear, a lot of uncertainty, and I dealt with it the way that I had been trained to deal with everything.
10:01
I tried harder to look fine. I look back at some of the pictures in my camera roll from 2014, and I am smiling.
10:12
I am pretending, and I know I can remember some of those moments where I was actively just pretending to look fine. I could talk to my husband about some of the things, not all of them.
10:27
I had a lot of anger toward him. I had a lot of grief. And I not only wasn't always fully aware that that's what I was feeling, but I didn't know how to talk about it with him.
10:41
And I knew he was carrying his own weight too, and I didn't know if there was room for mine as well.
10:49
I didn't know if we could talk about it and still be fine because so many of the conversations we were having was just about getting through, you know, the day-to-day of five young children at home and homeschooling them and all of the kind of pressure and stress of just normal family.
11:09
And on top of it, he was leaving the church that we'd belonged to for our whole lives, and so it was a lot.
11:16
My inner world felt like it was just constantly churning with worry and fear, trying to appear fine because my friend group at the time was a group of women who were all LDS Mormon and very suspicious of my husband having left, suspicious of me in some ways because faith and obedience was, like, the main...
11:48
The things that were the most important to them in their lives as well.
11:52
And so I look back to pictures of me with them. I just remember feeling terrified that they would find out that I had more doubts than I really had, that there were all of these things going on. I just I just tried harder and harder and harder to look like I was fine, to look like I was managing it, to look like, "No, no, no, it's gonna be fine, it's gonna be fine, it's gonna be fine." And then in 2016, my daughter came out.
12:22
That just kind of threw gasoline on everything. It didn't make it instant that I could leave.
12:32
I was still hiding, but now I was not just managing my own fear about myself, I was managing my fear for her as well.
12:43
More secrecy, more holding it together on the outside while the inside felt like it was just cracking, and my worries for her about what this meant for her life, especially inside the community that we were a part of.
12:57
And so it was kind of with all of that pressure, all of that holding it together that I found coaching in 2018.
13:06
And I learned that model that taught me that the way I was thinking was shaping how I felt and how I acted and the results that I was getting in my life, and it felt like a structure that I could hold onto while the life raft, you know, the last pieces of the life raft were breaking apart and floating away.
13:29
And so I really held onto it, and then I started teaching it.
13:33
And as I said, I used it with clients, and I saw how much a- of a difference it made for them, and then I saw the pieces that we were missing. Which brings me back to the sales page the other day.
13:48
Here's what I want you to see.
13:52
As I noticed that sentence that came out of my mouth without even me really thinking about it, and the tension in my body, I could have just pushed through it the way I pushed through 2014 and '15 and '16 and '17 and '18, and I could have decided that it doesn't matter, I've just gotta get this done.
14:11
But I stopped, and I decided to take a look at it. I found more underneath it.
14:20
Fear of failure, fear of not really knowing what I'm doing, worry about the future, and even underneath that, a specific kind of shame.
14:35
My coaching business used to be a lot more financially successful than it is right now, and there was a quiet subconscious part of me that had decided that that meant something was wrong with me.
14:48
And none of that was conscious until I caught the sentence and the tension and then stopped to look underneath it.
14:58
So after a few days of sitting with that work and realizing, okay, there's a lot of value in, like, really keeping track of my thoughts, it felt like it was a piece of this next 12-year cycle, the next version of myself, and I made a decision.
15:20
I decided that that next version of me is possible. That is the sentence that I am taking to believe on purpose, because that's the other part of cognitive behavior therapy.
15:33
You can actually decide what you want to believe on purpose. If it feels true, it can guide you in the direction of the change you want.
15:43
If it doesn't feel true, you need to back it off a little bit until you find something that feels true, because what this isn't is just blowing smoke and trying to get rainbows and daisies and unicorns when you don't really believe that that's possible.
16:00
So it has to feel believable, and this sentence that I came up with feels very believable. The next version of me is possible, and I am deciding that it's possible for me today.
16:12
I also decided I don't have to know exactly how it shows up. I don't have to decide that right now.
16:19
I don't know the special combination of circumstances and people and opportunities and challenges and obstacles that are going to shape the next version of me.
16:29
My only job is to show up and to do the work that I have in front of me, to cultivate the feelings that I want, which are calmness and groundedness and passion that I also feel very naturally when I am talking with clients and working with people inside of Connected and in the free workshop Speak Up.
16:53
It's where I feel, like, really the best in terms of energy and alignment, and so I'm gonna go with that, and I'm gonna let the rest work itself out.
17:04
And that's the decision that I decided to make when I felt kind of called back to this belief work, thought work.
17:16
12 years ago, I was holding pieces together with duct tape and terrified of what would happen if I let any of them go. And duct tape is actually pretty strong, so that's probably not the best.
17:27
I was holding pieces together, right, just with my bare hands, and I was afraid of what would happen if I let it go.
17:37
I didn't know what was coming next, and today I am telling you I could not have imagined how beautiful life could be. I'm so grateful that that past version of me let those things go.
17:59
I'm so happy with the choices that I made that I didn't even know at the time what the consequences would be. It felt, it felt like jumping off a cliff, literally diving into the unknown.
18:18
And it was terrifying. And 12 years later, I could not be more grateful. And so to honor this in myself and to honor this in you, I came up with a plan that is not even fully formed yet.
18:38
I haven't picked a date, but I wanna teach you this model, and I wanna do it for free because once you see it, once you get it, it is so powerful.
18:48
So my goal in this workshop is to help you find those conscious and sometimes unconscious thoughts that are running the show, that are underneath that tension.
18:58
Because when you see them, when you find them, you can decide something different for yourself.
19:03
You gotta be on my email list to find out when registration for this free workshop is going to take place. So use the link in my show notes to get on my email list.
19:14
If you rate and follow my podcast and you come to the workshop and let me know that you did, I'm gonna have a special gift for you. So thank you so much for listening.
19:23
Thank you to so many of you who have been a part of the journey, not just of this podcast, but of me and my coaching business.
19:31
And here's to the next 12 years, because I know that when we look back, we are gonna be so grateful for the choices that we made because we can make them on purpose.
19:45
We don't have to wait for anyone else to create the life that we want. We can do it. Our relationships can become clearer. They can become closer.
19:56
We can have so much more of what we want, and sometimes it starts with letting things go and finding out the reasons why you're holding onto them. Thank you for listening. I'll see you next week.
