#52 - Empowered Mindset
Hey, hey ladies. Happy Wednesday or whatever day it is that you're listening to this. Welcome to Lady Sculpt Lifestyle, I'm your host, Lylas. Today, we're recording episode number 52, empowered mindset. Before we get into today's topic. I want to talk to you guys about the vulnerability series. I've been getting so much feedback on the vulnerability series. And I just wanted to talk to you guys a little bit about that. So many of you have been emailing me with how hard it was for you to listen to that series. I had one listener, let me know that she stopped listening. When I started recording the vulnerability series, because it was, it was challenging and she ended up what she calls it, ripping off the bandaid and listening to all 10 episodes in a row.
The vulnerability series is supposed to create some discomfort. Being vulnerable is uncomfortable. It is hard because we are a civilization that isn't accustomed to being open to vulnerability. We try and hide the fact that we're vulnerable, we try to mask it with strength, what I really wanted to do with the vulnerability series was open up the conversation from a really authentic place. My goal with that series was for you to end that series knowing me better and from your feedback, it sounds like I achieved my goal. I also want you guys to know that after recording those nine episodes, I feel lighter. I feel like my emotional state has been lifted and I really want to encourage you to lean into the uncomfortability of being that little bit vulnerable, whether it's with your friends or your family or your spouse, or, you know, a therapist or wherever you feel comfortable, find someone in your life that you can be a hundred percent honest with, without feeling judged or without worrying about what they're going to think. What moving into that space does is it deepens and creates an intimacy and a connection that you're not only creating with the person you're telling the person that you're being vulnerable with, but it also creates that connection with yourself.
I got to know myself so much better over the last few months. And I'm very aware now, when I have when I need to hold space for myself. When I need to take on less when I need to make room for me, time. I do feel like that is the next evolution of the relationship that I have with myself. And that far is to pass is the momentary discomfort of leaning into that vulnerability. And I just want to say that I really appreciate those of you who have reached out to me and been open and being vulnerable back with me. I feel like I know you. Love that feeling. Okay.
So what else do I have to update you guys on? So last week I was talking about going on a boat dance party. But I was really excited about and so have you ever reached out to me via social media and like wish to me the funnest weekend and checked in after the weekend and asked how it went. And I have an update, you guys, I had to not go. I had to cancel it. I was super disappointed, my puppy dude, who I've talked about a fair bit on this podcast and ended up getting pneumonia. And he was in the hospital for 12 hours on Friday, and then Saturday and Sunday, he was a pretty sick puppy, he still is. So I'm actually recording this episode from back in my home office because me and my husband are having to juggle him while my husband's at work, I'm here. And then when my husband's home, I go back to the house sitting to spot to watch the other dog because the poor dude is being quarantined so that no one else gets sick and doesn't get sicker. So we've got a sick puppy. You guys I've never had a puppy with pneumonia. I didn't even know that dogs getting pneumonia was a thing. I've never seen so much snot come out of a dog's nose. Like literally, you guys have gone through boxes of Kleenex. I have to blow his nose, like every three minutes. It's kind of like having a sick toddler. And you can't really, I mean, you can explain it to him. He wants to play, but he gets winded really quickly and he sleeps way more than usual, but that's what's going on in my world. So for those of you who are in my world in Lady Sculpt, or finishing up transformation from May. I have been treading water. I have been juggling a lot of balls and we definitely did not plan on having a very sick dog and it's taken up a fair bit of my time. So if you haven't heard from me in a few days, that's why that's what we're doing. That's what we're dealing with over here. But he is on the men. He's definitely getting a little bit better every day. And we're really hoping within a week or two, we'll be able to reintegrate him in with other dogs and get back to life as normal. Okay, you guys, that is my update.
Shall we get on with episode 52. Let's talk about empowered mindset. So, I want to start off with telling you guys a few stories. I want to give you some real life examples of what an empowered mind looks like. And then we're going to deep dive into the breakdown of really what is an empowered mind and then how do you get there? Okay. We have lots of things to go through in today's episode. So I want to start out by telling you a story of one of my sculptors. And she told me this story, I'm not going to go into specific details, but basically what happened was her husband is a contractor and took on this big job that was worth a lot of money and during the first initial legs of this job, catastrophe struck. And the entire job went literally up in flames. Basically the payout, the paycheck for this job went up in flames with it. However, my sculptor said she noticed where in the past her mindset would have went off kind of the deep end in this situation where she would have went into worry and panic and scarcity. She really focused on the positive that everybody was okay, nobody got hurt. They were able to control the fire so that there wasn't a lot of damage done to surrounding areas and she just really focused on that it wasn't as bad as it could have been and what she wanted to happen next. She said it was kind of like magic within a few days, actually there had been a company that had property nearby and because of the way her husband had controlled the fire, this property wasn't damaged. And someone from that property actually reached out to my sculptor's husband and offered him another project that was worth quite a bit more than the initial project was in the first place, because they were so grateful that he had been so diligent at controlling the blaze. I remember as this sculptor was telling me about this experience, this story, this change in her mindset, she felt it, she felt the shift. She knew where her mind would have went, in the past and she noticed herself focusing on. No, I'm not going to let my brain go to worry and scarcity and anger and all of those negative things that our brain naturally wants to go to in those kinds of situations, those panicky situations. And instead she controlled the mindset and to me. This is a beautiful example of an empowered mind and what the possibilities of an empowered mind creating can do. Now, some of you, like, But let's maybe that good stuff would have happened regardless of how she controlled her mind. Yeah. You know, it is possible.
But from my experience, when we focus our brain on the negative circumstances, the things that went wrong, the things that could go wrong, the what ifs. We don't open ourselves up to the opportunities that may present themselves. So that was a beautiful representation of how I was able to watch one of my sculptors manage her mindset in a way that was very serving to her that had a beautiful outcome. I want to give you guys another example. This is a more personal example with me. I've talked a lot about this in my community, but for two years, my husband went to school in the city while I lived up in Whistler and this was a really hard time. I knew that I would really struggle with being separated from him and the mindset, the thoughts of this isn't fair. I'm lonely. This sucks. All of that, right. Aside from the fact that he was going to massage school. So he was, you know, working on women. All day, every day. Right? My brain had the opportunity to go absolutely crazy. And I remember being coached. I remember that coach asking me, how do you want to feel. And I am one that always wants to go into gratitude. If you listened to the 40 things I've learned, you know this, I love coming back to, or finding gratitude when I'm feeling negative feelings. So for me, I wanted to find gratitude. So me and my coach came up with the thought, how lucky am I to have this time to focus on me. I want to tell you guys those two years weren't super easy. It was hard work, but having that thought fueling my brain. How lucky am I to have this time to focus on me? I was able to do so much work on myself, on my life coaching abilities, and coaching my own mindset and working on creating my own empowered mindset. I was also able to compete for the first time in five years when my pro card with the WNBAF. I was also able to create the transformation program during that time I created the 16 week transformation program. I went on a three month west coast road trip with my dog until COVID hit and we had to be line at home, but I was able to do so much because I was really thinking about what I wanted to do with that time that I was so grateful to have, to spend on myself. The other option would have been that I would have been sitting in, yucky feelings and probably would have ended up distracting my husband a lot more. I probably would have tried to spend a lot more time with him. Maybe even move down to the city, try and like, integrate myself into his life, which he was very focused on and needed to be in order to complete his schooling. It was a pretty intense program. And he needed that space for him to study and because I was able to manage my mindset. I was able to give him that space and have so much personal growth at the same time.
One final example, I'm going to keep this one really short. So with the dude being sick, what it's created in my life is I'm now having to commute back and forth from Vancouver to south Surrey, four days a week to look after both dogs at the same time, without the dogs being in the same space. So at first I noticed my brain being very annoyed. Like, I've worked very hard not to have to commute to work. This isn't fair. I don't want to be on the road. This is going to cost a fortune and gas. My brain was kicking out all those thoughts and then. The first day I commuted the first day that I made that trip in for work,It was actually yesterday morning. a girlfriend of mine had given me a new podcast to listen to in a very specific episode and I put it on in the car and I stopped at Starbucks and I grabbed a coffee. And I sat down in my car and I started driving. And the beautiful thing about the commute I'm doing is it's the opposite of where everyone else in the city is going. So I'm not in bad traffic. So I'm able to drive pretty easily. It's not stop go, it's straight. It's just a long drive, right? I'm literally driving across the city. I was thinking to myself during this drive. I'm like, I get to do this twice a day. At least four to eight times over the next two weeks. My brain, I was like, I instantly fell into gratitude about having that six to eight hours of time to just drink a coffee and listen to a podcast, for me it's rare. I really enjoy driving. I just don't like city driving. I like road tripping. I don't love congestion and traffic, but once I realized I wouldn't be in congestion and traffic, my brain was able to relax a little bit and I was able to find gratitude about it. So these are all examples of an empowered mindset. So basically, an empowered mindset is the ability to look at a situation or a circumstance rationally and decide how you want to think about it rather than being reactive. Now, that's a best case scenario. I've been practicing this work and really living from a more conscious mindset for a number of years now. And I want to tell you, I am still reactive. My brain still instantly has reactions to every circumstance, right? It's just how our human brains work. And it instantly kicks out all of the reasons why I should be angry and I should feel resentful. And this is terrible. And you know, all the negatives. But I'm really able to sit back a little bit from that. and usually not always, but most of the time I can stop myself from reacting and I can move into a place of how do I want to feel about this? How do I want to think about this? Is there another way to think about this that serves me better and to me, that is really the embodiment of an empowered mind. It's that prefrontal cortex thinking that on purpose conscious controlled thinking, right. And this really allows us to show up in our life in a way that feels really good for us, because most of the time when you are being reactive, when something happens, when someone rear ends you and you jump out of your car screaming or you instantly cry and feel terrible cause it wasn't your very much so that's a reactive state, right. But if you can stop for a minute and say, okay, is everyone all right? Everyone's safe? Good? How do I want to feel about this? I want to feel in control. Okay. What do I need to think, to feel in control of the situation? right. It happened, there's nothing we can do about it. I need to get this information and this information and this information everyone's safe. It's going to be okay. And then immediately you kind of drop into a feeling of control rather than feeling out of control, panic worries, scarcity, all of those feelings.
So understanding that all circumstances are neutral is the first step in empowering your mind. The first time I was taught this, you guys. I was like, wait, what? So every single circumstance is a neutral circumstance until you have a thought about it. Like every single circumstance, you winning the lottery, your dog dying, your husband cheating. I mean, these are really extreme circumstances. Uh, you are missing a workout. Uh, you being fired like. you being proposed to like all of the circumstances are neutral and the reason we know that is because two people having the same experience being in the same circumstance can react very differently, can feel very differently because they think about the circumstance very differently. Does that make sense? Are you guys kind of staying with me? So, understanding that all circumstances and situations are a hundred percent neutral until you have a thought about it and your thought about it is within your control. Now your limbic brain, your primitive brain is going to kick out some optional thoughts when it first happens. This is your reactive brain, right? It's the brain that is pre-programmed for you by all of your experiences in life. Now, most of us have a reactive brain like mine, which spits out all the terrible worrisome, fearful thoughts, right? Our brain likes to show us the things we should be scared of first, because it's a survival mechanism. However in the day we live in now, this 21st century, it's pretty good. We don't have to be that scared of that much, right? Most of the time it's not life-threatening. And it's not going to be the end of the world. We can kind of put that fear to the side and be like, rationally, how bad is this right rationally? Is there a way that I can look at this and find a silver lining or a positive side of things, or, you know, how do I want to feel about this? For example, a husband cheating, right? It can immediately feel.
Like the end of the world, like it's scarcity and devastating, and your whole life is over and it's going to change or you can look at it really rationally and be like, okay, that says a lot about him. Would I really want to spend the rest of my life with a person like that or why did that happen? Maybe we can be curious and talk to them about it and see if maybe there was something that was missing in our relationship that we can fix or that we get, like how you show up in that situation. From whatever it is you're thinking about, it can really change the outcome of the situation, right. If you are thinking horrible thoughts that are making you feel devastated and scarcity and fearful and clingy, you're going to show up in a very different energy. Then if you show up in from a thought of like your lost buddy, I'm outta here, right. Does that make sense? So know that you have control over that your brain might kick out some optional thoughts right off of the hop, but you are not your brain. Your thoughts are optional. You get to choose whether you want to believe those thoughts or not. So your brain might kick out, you need him. Your life won't be the same with him. What will other people think? All of that? But you get to choose. Do I want to think those thoughts are those thoughts serving me or are there thoughts? I would rather think and the human brain, especially the prefrontal cortex, is the part of our brain that allows us to think about our thinking, it's kind of like a muscle that you need to train. So the more you think about your thinking, the more you practice being less reactive and more rational and more purposeful and more conscious and more empowered in your mindset, the better your brain will get at it. And I've gotten to a point now where my brain is pretty good at finding silver lines almost to the point where it annoys some people. You probably have friends like me. Where we're just kind of like, oh, that sucks. But here are the three good things that a sucky situation could turn into, right. And when you can really think like that you don't stay in the suffering of it for very long. I actually heard a fantastic quote this morning. I was listening to a podcast on my drive down to south Surrey. And he said, I'm going to try and quote this exactly, but I may not get it right, as human pain is mandatory. However, the suffering is by choice. Now, the suffering has to do with how you think about the pain. So guaranteed your human experience is going to have painful moments, but how long you're in pain, how long you suffer in that moment with that experience is totally up to you and the way you think about it. When I heard that sentence, I was like, yes, that is so true. So know that you can have an empowered mindset that really, really decreases your human suffering because of the way you're choosing to think about situations.
Understanding how to manage your emotional state and bring yourself up to a place of what we call emotional adulthood, which is when you're taking responsibility for all of your feelings, which gives you all of your power back. When we are blaming other people for our emotional state. When we're like, he hurt my feelings. He makes me unhappy. I need him to do this to make me happy. I need to be thin to be happy, when we outsource our emotional responsibility, we make ourselves the victim of our circumstance. We then require somebody else to do something in order for us to feel a certain way or we require the scale to show a smaller number in order for us to feel a certain way. Know, you guys. You have so much more power than that. All you have to do to feel happy or loved or thin or attractive or amazing or beautiful or powerful or whatever it is you want to feel, all you have to do is create and generate a thought that makes you feel that way. And practice it over and over and over and over again until you've built up that muscle in your mind where your brain starts kicking out that thought automatically, all right. I've done this, I have a whole episode on empowering your beliefs coming up in this series where I'm going to give you guys all of my empowered beliefs to practice. One of them is that I'll always land on my feet. I'll always figure it out. And that thought I've used it so many times that it's so automatic that when I run into a problem or something that would have scared the hell out of me 10 years ago. Now I think, all right, we're going to figure this out and it doesn't scare me anymore, it motivates me and arises to the occasion of it.
So next time you feel disempowered or self doubt or unsure. I want you to ask yourself a few questions. First question I want you to ask yourself is what am I thinking that is creating this and take it from me. When you start going into your own brain, the first few times it's going to be really chaotic up there, you're not going to really be able to differentiate your thoughts. There might be a whole bunch of thoughts that create a whole bunch of feelings. But I want you to start opening that door. Just pause for a second and see if you can like, figure out what it is you're actually feeling. And then what it is you're thinking that is causing you to feel that way, okay?
The second question, I want you to ask yourself is what else could I choose to think? Another way. I like to word this, is how else could I choose to think. So once you know what you're thinking even if you can't pinpoint what you're thinking, you just know that you don't feel good about just asking yourself, the question of how else could I think it's going to send your brain into a direction that is different from where it is currently at. So it's currently thinking thoughts that are causing you to feel bluff disempowered, self-doubting all of these things. But if you put your brain to work on how else you could think.
The third question, actually, we'll send your brain directly in that direction.The third question is what would I need to think to feel empowered? And I want you to think empowered in this specific situation that you're feeling disempowered. So when you send your brain on a specific task, when we ask our brains to figure out a solution, to find a way to think about this, that will make us feel differently, our human brains are designed to do that. They're designed to go to work on answering our questions and finding solutions. The problem with most human tabs is we ask ourselves terrible questions. We ask ourselves questions, like, why do I feel so bad? How come I can't achieve this goal? We ask ourselves questions that send our brain to work on telling us why we're so bad, why we're so terrible, why we can't make it work, why we're so stuck, why we can't be successful, why we're still overweight instead of asking our brain questions about finding a solution. How can I make weight loss more fun? How can I make weight loss easier? Who can help me figure out weight loss? When you ask your brain questions, that sends it in a pathway to finding you a solution to your problem. Your brain will blow your mind. Okay,
So, to wrap up this episode, I want you guys to watch your brains this week. I want you to watch your thoughts, and I want you to notice when your brain is kicking out, thoughts that are disempowering you. That makes you feel like you can't or like it's hard or like you're struggling or like you're unsure of yourself. And I want you to just notice those thoughts, come up, watch them go by like clouds in the sky and recognize that they aren't you. Most of the time those kinds of thoughts aren't even true. It's just your brain automatically kicking out what it thinks will keep you safe. Instead this week, I want you to start working on finding thoughts that make you feel like it's possible, that empower you to move in the direction you want to move. Whatever that goal is, whatever that life looks like, whoever you want to grow into being, start generating thoughts on purpose. Start writing them down on sticky notes. Put them on your mirror in the morning, put them on your computer screen at work, put them in your pocket, pull them out sporadically throughout the day. Start purposefully inputting, empowering thoughts into your brain. This is the best way I know how to create an empowered mindset on purpose.
All right my friends, that wraps up episode number 52. I'll see you next week. Have a fantastic first week of September. Bye for now.
