Hi friends! Welcome to episode 3 of the Let’s Talk dirty podcast.
Today we’re going to explore where thoughts come from. And we’re going to use the thought “I have to” to kind of find out more about how to know if what you’re thinking is workin for ya. This is kind of a continuation of the second episode so if you haven’t listened to that yet, go on back and check out episode 2.
Have you ever seen the movie inception? With Leonardo DiCaprio, Elliot Page, and Joseph Gordon Levitt? The premise is really interesting to me and I think it’s actually a pretty good sci-fi, action movie if you’re looking for something to watch and I’ll try not to ruin the whole story for you but there’s this idea that the movie is named for, Inception, which is that if someone is able to infiltrate your mind while you are asleep and dreaming (and they do this in the movie with the use of a dream-sharing technology) then they can plant an idea there in your mind and then when this person wakes up they then believe this idea is their own.
So essentially Leo is like trying to get the CEO of a company to make certain decisions about the company or business but in theory they can put any idea into your head and it becomes easier to do the deeper into the locked up places of the mind you can go. And that’s called Inception.
I’m here to tell you that Inception is real. But no one is even knocking you out or showing up in your dreams or using crazy futuristic technology to do it. We all form thoughts that are based on someone else’s thoughts. It can happen over time, or even in a split second. The longer you go without questioning that thought, the deeper it kinda gets in there and makes itself at home under the covers of your brain.
Let me show you how it works.
I’m going to use the example that actually got me thinking about this idea of inception and it came up when I was coaching a client recently about her career. And we were talking about how she had lost her corporate job during COVID and she was feeling stressed/anxious about getting a new job. And as it turned out there were other companies wanting to hire her, so it wasn’t an issue of whether she could find a new job, but she was actually throwing the interviews or using in-action to sabotage her chances of officially being hired on by anew company.
So, we started to explore what she wanted in a career and she kept saying things like, “Ok I have to have benefits” and “An office job feels most stable to me, I have to stay in corporate”. But the thing was the jobs she had applied to and were willing to hire her or at least take her through to final phase interviews checked those boxes AND they paid more than her previous job she was let go from so something obviously wasn’t totally connecting.
I asked her again to tell me about why she thought she was sabotaging her interviews and she was like, “well I dunno just think I should be able to just take these jobs because they have good benefits and I’d literally have a corner office. I don’t get it.”
When I asked her what she felt like when she was thinking, “I have to have an office job with benefits” she said she felt stale.
So I’ll be honest with you, in all the time I’ve been coaching clients, this was the first time someone had shared that their feeling was stale. And I kind of hadn’t even realized that stale could be a feeling. So true to form I wanted to dive in head first to see what was going on here and when I asked her to share more about the feeling she said that these two thoughts really just made her feel worn out and rotten. So on a hunch, I asked her, she’s a very intuitive client by the way, if she knew someone else that shared these beliefs about what is important in a career. And she immediately said her dad.
So we went on to talk about if those thoughts couldn’t be true, what might she choose to think about career instead. And she eventually shared that she thinks a job that is exciting and requires moving your body and that can be done outside an office might also have the possibility of falling into the category of a “good career”. Thought talking it turns out she has been suppressing these ideas of pursuing another career choice, possibly in the arts, or even in the fitness industry, because she had been holding so tightly to these beliefs that her dad had offered to her from a young age that you have to work in an office and have benefits and a 401k.
So of course her father hadn’t used a special technology to get inside her brain and convince her that the only good job was one that included benefits and an office, but he did use his words and as it turned out in this case, his actions to show his daughter his strong beliefs about the importance of taking an office job with benefits and eventually, she adopted them as her own.
These beliefs drove her to pursue a corporate career and had spent nearly 20 years of her life in a job that she kind of resented and only went to for the benefits, which she believed was a priority for her, but as we discovered, thinking that only made her feel stale, and unchangeable. She actually used the word inexorable, which is more like stubborn or hard-headed. I told you this woman is like next level with the feelings. But that feeling of stale led her to continue to stay in that job because when you feel unchangeable then you’re not likely to change. But of course she didn’t actually like feeling that way.
What was happening then was that she felt this stubbornness to stay the path and apply to these similar jobs but her TRUE thoughts were getting in the way of her ultimately following through and saying yes to these office jobs. So in some moments, her thought was this job has benefits and a 401k and I’ll work in a corner office so this is perfectly aligned with what you’re supposed to do. And in some other moments her thought was “this isn’t a job I care about or want anymore.”
But the second thought was so quiet and timid compared to the first, and didn’t exactly feel believable to her, because she had been thinking this other way for so much of her life.
So if you’ve been having the same thought for a long time and you recognize it, it might at first feel kinda bad, like well shit, I’m just feeling stale there is no possibility here, I just have this belief and I can’t rewrite my life to make this belief go away.
You don’t need to rewrite your life. The past is done, rewriting it is impossible anyway. But just the awareness that you have this thought that is creating the feeling of staleness, is literally the key to releasing that thought.
And what happens with stale bread? We make bread pudding! I literally just thought of that. So there is no need for this defeatist attitude when you identify a thought that is not serving you because identifying the things we’ve been believing that is keeping us stuck is the first and most powerful step in changing our life.
So when you find out what your brain has been up to, I challenge you to thank your brain for doing it’s job all this time. To celebrate your brain for keeping you safe and alive and generally not exerting any extra energy and then take the power. Thanks brain, I got this now. I’m gunna try something new.
So inception, is how some of our thoughts get adopted. They are originally someone else’s thought. Or sometimes a societal norm which is really just a large collection of shared thoughts about a specific topic that we adopt.
I have to… is a common thought that is an adaptation of someone else in your life’s beliefs.
I have to get married by the time I am 25. I used to have that one.
I have to buy a house soon.
I have to ask my mother in law to move in with us.
I have to make the same amount of money as my partner.
I have to take out my nose ring because I’m too old for a nose ring. Thats me also.
I have to get my nails done.
Listen, you don’t HAVE TO do anything.
Have to is not ever true. None of that is true.
Not even the one about your mother in law.
So this is a good place to get a little insight about how our primal brain works. Because if you didn’t pick up a thought along the way in your life from someone else, it came from inside of your own brain, which is hard wired for , what, survival, energy conservation and procreation.
Those of you that are into psychology or have bene to therapy, you’ll likely know what I’m talking about because I think every therapist I ever went to and all of my psych classes explained what the brain’s job is, or what it’s original job was, which is to keep us out of danger, ie, alive, seek pleasure, and exert little to no effort.
And I like to talk about the primitive brain here because so many people want to know WHY, why do I have this thought that is causing me to not reach my goals. I have never heard anyone else say this before so where is this thought coming from?
Well, the very simple answer is that your primal brain and your human brain have two different desired outcomes. Your human brain says, “I want to make more money” that’s my goal, and your primal brain, the one that evolved as a cavewoman, the one that’s only job is to keep you safe and comfy is like “You have to stay in your current job because it’s safe and comfy and you’re not dead so therefor its good.”
So If you think about what your brains objectives are, I think it’s possible to give ourselves a little more of a break when we start having thoughts we don’t want. We can stop beating ourselves up. This is why it’s not helpful to get mad at ourselves when we start understanding that our thoughts create our lives.
Your brain is wired to protect you so that’s a good thing. But unfortunately though we now live in a world where it’s not necessary to protect us from saber toothed tigers. It is necessary to feel challenged and fearful and uncomfortable in order to create more in our lives, and our brains anticipate that negative emotion and they think oh my god a saber tooth tiger is going to attack us if we apply for this job so we shouldn’t do that.
Does that resonate?
So next time you have a thought that you’re like why tho? Where is this coming from? You might find some answers if you explore how that thought might have helped you to stay alive, avoid pain, seek pleasure back when humans were still living in caves and running from large toothed animals.
Dirty little thoughts become BIG dirty thoughts as the compound over time. The longer our thoughts go unchecked, the more evidence our brain gathers to support those thoughts and ideas. I’ve said this before, brains love to be right and they love to play connect the dots. If I tell you to prove to me why you have to do something, your brain will come up with hundreds of reasons why that’s true.
Right, like an example of this in my life is when I think, I have to be more social. My brain is like you have to be more social than you are right now , you have to go out more and meet people more and be in person with people more and then my brain is like, yeah, because I’m the least social of all my friends, Michael, my partner is way more social than me, it’s easy for everyone to just go out more, being social is a critical part of life, I should be able to make more connections with more people, it’s normal to go to bars and drink and enjoy parties, something is wrong with me, no one wants to be my friend, I have to be more social.
But then If I say, brain, tell me why it’s not true that I have to be more social. It might be a little harder, because it’s not likely a thought I’ve had on repeat, but with a little coaxing, my brain can easily play this connect the dots game and prove that it’s totally fine to not be more social. I don’t “have to be” more social. Right?
Many people I know don’t drink or go out every night. I actually have friends that go to sleep earlier than me. I love my sister and she’s not super social so it’s totally possible to have amazing relationships and connections if you don’t go out to parties. There are ways to socialize without going out every night of the week. I enjoy game nights and movie nights with small groups and that actually IS socialization. Michael loves to be social and meet new people and he is my connection to those people, I like that that is his role in our relationship, I don’t need to match his desire for social connection, nothing is wrong with me, I love to stay in, so what’s the problem? I don’t HAVE to be more social.
I can choose to be if I want to, but I don’t have to. And you can see where we could, if we wanted to really get down and dirty and peek under the brain covers here, trace this thought back to either number 1. An instance of inception. Maybe I see that its generally the thought of my community that you have to go out at least 4 nights per week, or someone may have told me I need to be more social because they thought I was antisocial. Or 2. This is my primitive brain trying to keep me alive because socialization is necessary to continue the human race, create community to watch our for saber tooth tigers, and so on.
Or that thought came from a combination of both. Primitive brain and an instance of inception.
I’m wondering if you can think of a time in your life where we’ve felt a conflict in what you think. On one hand, let’s say, I have to have a job with benefits. But on the other hand, I want a job where I can work from home.
On one hand I have to call my friend ,but on the the other hand, I don’t think I I need to.
I’d be surprised if anyone could say they never think like that and frankly I’d guess a lot of us experience that almost daily with small things.
So I want to talk about cleaning up this conflict by becoming more aware of the thoughts you choose versus the thoughts you adopt unconsciously.
And I just want to preface this by assuring you that many thoughts I have adopted from elsewhere are thoughts that I love and want to keep because they do serve me and I can see that they make me feel good and at home in my body and in my mind. So please don’t misunderstand me. Any thought you like and want to keep thinking, no matter where it came from, is yours to keep and enjoy.
So when we have these thoughts like, I have to do X, I want you to ask yourself says who?
Who says I should do or not do this?
If you aren’t liking the results you’re getting when you think I have to dot dot dot, why do I think I have to?
And for the record, I’m not talking about doing something illegal or harmful here ok, because obviously who says you shouldn’t rob a bank is the law so don’t do that, or do, just know what the consequences are and that you are choosing them…but I think once I share this tool for better understanding your true thoughts, you’d be unlikely to identify the desire to rob a bank as your true thought.
What I’m talking about is when you notice this internal dialogue that’s arguing over what is “right”, what you have to do in situations like relationships or career, or even more simple day to day things like
“I really like this outfit but I have to dress more modestly.”
“I was hoping for some me time this week but I have to go to this event.”
“I enjoy dating casually but I really have to start settling down.“
Ok, so here’s what we can do to weed out where we’ve been incepted by a person, or a commonly accepted societal idea or by our primitive brain just trying to protect us. And what thoughts are our truth.
You’re going to plug it into your IGS. IGS is like GPS but for your true thoughts. IGS stands for Internal Guidance System.
Ok so what does your IGS say?
The IGS. This is the place of truth we ignore which then manifests as anxiety or just feeling uneasy or not aligned. Not all feelings of anxiety are created this way but I do find with a lot of clients when you’re not listening to yourself, when you’re doing things and living your life in accordance with someone else’s agenda or trying to be something other that what your internal guidance system is offering, your thoughts start to create a lot of anxiety.
So you’ll hear me talk on this podcast about the simple formula to create any result and it begins with a thought that we have, which creates a feeling. What I’m talking about today is still a thought that creates a feeling of anxiety, but it’s a thought that we adopt from someone or somewhere else that, when we really dig, we really get dirty, we find it is not our own. When we adopt a thought that is not our own and try to pass it off in our human brains as OUR truth, one of the feelings we can create is anxiety.
Thought leads to Feeling.
I have to go to this event. Anxiety.
I have to just ignore what my spouse said. Anxiety.
I have to get better at this. Anxiety.
I have a strong case of IGS which we all technically have but we don’t all allow ourselves to feel it. We’re just over here popping Tums and telling that little grumble to hush up because we don’t TRUST our gut. We may even think it’s annoying. \
That comes from wanting to fit in, the desire to be part of the norm, not rock the boat, stay safe stay comfy. If what your IGS is telling you is not aligned with what you perceive as the popular or commonly accepted way to be, we tell it to shut up and mind its own wacky business. Like don’t tell me to do things that are going to make me look like an outsider! I have to fit in. Right like we have this dialogue without even realizing it and I want to encourage you to listen in on the conversations that you have with yourself.
Conversations with yourself are just the thoughts that play in your mind that sometimes, a lot of times, argue with one another.
So its possible to actually observe a thought conversation in your mind where you identify that some of the thoughts have been generated based on what someone else has said, done, taught or exemplified and some of the thoughts are thoughts that you’ve consciously chosen as your own. That you like
So when you feel that pull that hmm something feels off or not aligned, ask yourself some questions about what you REALLY think. It’s kind of amazing what saying “but tell me what you REALLY think” can pull out of you.
It just takes practice to build up trust with your gut. It takes lots of questioning to figure out where you really stand and what you really want. And what you really think you quote have to do. And that’s okay! Remember, this work is fun? Getting in bed with your brain isn’t the end of the world.
So it you really want to build trust with your IGS to find out what thoughts are true for you and that ones you want to keep, it’s a good practice to commit to holding ourselves accountable. Distrust of this internal guidance system can comes from repeatedly betraying ourselves. Every time we say we’re going to do something and then we don’t do it, we learn that we can’t be trusted. So why would we trust this little voice or pull from the inside when we have proven to ourselves in the past that we don’t know how to follow through, we don’t know what to do in situations that are hard, we give up, etc.
In case you’re like what is she talking about I don’t betray myself. Let me give you an example that you may be able to relate to. You set your alarm before going to bed because you are going to wake up and go to the gym. Your alarm goes off at 7. You hit snooze.
That’s it. You just betrayed yourself and lost a little bit of trust because you essentially made a promise to yourself that you were going to wake up at 7:00 and now it’s 8:38 and you’re still snoozing. So those little things that you can find in your days that help build trust with self will help you to build trust with your brain.
This isn’t a one night stand here people. This is long term relationship with your brain. Be conscious, build trust, question it and tell it what you really want. It will deliver!
So, listen in to when you tell yourself you HAVE TO do something or be some wayy or think some way and then ask, why? Is that really true? Do I like what it feels like to think that way?
Every time you feel like you just have to do something, and you limit yourself by that thought, you are denying yourself the privilege of watching a big beautiful life unfold.
MAKE ROOM in your brain for thoughts that are your own.
Until next time, get out there and get a little dirty.