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GREATEST HITS - How Our Thoughts Impact Our Results
46 Plays2 months ago
Welcome to the Greatest Hits Summer Series! We’re revisiting some of our favorite episodes from the first year of the podcast and sharing Leanna’s take on them from her current vantage point.
In today’s episode, Leanna dives into the self-coaching model, where she talks about how our thoughts shape our reality. She explains that our brains are meaning-making machines, turning neutral events into thoughts that can either empower or hinder us. Whether it's an email from the boss or a big life change, our interpretations of these events can profoundly impact our feelings and actions, and ultimately, our results.
Leanna emphasizes that we often assume our thoughts are facts without questioning them. But she urges listeners to challenge these thoughts, especially the negative ones that might be holding them back. She shares stories of how lingering negative feedback or self-doubt can affect our confidence and performance, even long after the initial event.
The episode wraps up with Leanna offering some thought-provoking questions for listeners to ponder. She encourages them to reflect on their own thought patterns and consider which ones might need a little tweaking to lead to more positive outcomes.
Full transcript available here.
Connect with Leanna here.
Check out the complete Thought Work Series!
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi everyone. Welcome back to the show. Thanks so much for joining me. Somehow we are halfway through July. What? How did that happen? Summer's like totally flying by for us. I don't know about you, but if you're like a lot of the other moms that I've been talking to right now, especially working moms, you might be feeling like summer is a little bit different from your expectations, especially if you have school age children who have a regular schedule during the school year and then in the summer it's just all off. you might be feeling a little inner conflict about wanting to enjoy summer with your kids and simultaneously wishing that school would just start already. So you can get back to a regular schedule and not have to deal with the summer camp maze and the high school babysitter canceling and calling on tired grandparents or family members or whoever at the last minute to get back up childcare. in whatever patchwork child care situation you've got set up until school starts again. So if you're there, I feel you and you're not alone. Unfortunately what we do is then we feel guilty about wishing the summer away because there's this narrative out there right now that's like we only get
00:01:09
Speaker
18 summers with our children so you'd better enjoy them. Make them magical. And it just puts so much pressure on us. It creates this like scarcity mindset and what happens is we just feel so guilty whenever our reality doesn't match the ridiculously high expectations that we especially high achieving women set for ourselves as parents. It's kind of like whenever they're infants and everyone keeps telling you, enjoy it goes by fast. And you're like, yeah, I know I am enjoying it sometimes. And also I really hate it sometimes because it's so hard. And now I feel guilty because now I feel like I have to enjoy it all the time or I'm failing. So I will be doing a release the mom guilt back to school webinar at some point in August or September. So stay tuned to hear more about that. If you're interested after
00:01:57
Speaker
my daughter starts back to school and I have a little bit more time to focus on creating one. But if you're struggling this summer, I just want to say you're doing great. What you're doing is enough. And also I want to invite you to take a deep breath and think of something that you're proud of just one thing you're proud of yourself for this summer something whether it was a great experience that you created for your kids or one day you had that you felt like you balanced things really well because a lot of times what happens is we tend to generalize our brains like to generalize a whole
00:02:30
Speaker
Situation as good or bad and so we're saying like oh, we've just done a terrible job this summer The reality is is that sometimes we're doing ah not as good job as we want and other times are doing a great job It's just that we discount that and we forget about that So I'm gonna just invite you to look for what's going right instead of what's going wrong. According to the National Science Foundation, 80% of our thoughts are negative and 95% of our thoughts are repetitive. So that means we're like repeating negative thoughts over and over again. So they feel like truths and conclusions that are just so unquestionable that we're like, yeah, of course, I'm doing a terrible job this summer. And so it's really, really normal for our brains to look for what's wrong and then continue to tell ourselves
00:03:17
Speaker
that something's wrong. We have to consciously choose and it takes a little bit more work to look for what's going right. And as one of my coaches always says, it takes five positive thoughts to replace one negative thought. So to this end, I wanted to reshare this episode, how our thoughts impact our results from my ThoughtWorks series that I did back at the beginning of 2024. There are several related episodes in that series that I think are really helpful, but I just felt like this one really captures the overarching principles of ThoughtWorks and coaching and feels really relevant to how I know a lot of moms are feeling right now. So enjoy.
00:04:02
Speaker
Welcome to the Executive Coach for Moms podcast, where we support women who are attempting to find balance and joy while simultaneously leading people at work and at home. I'm your host, Leigh Ann Alaski McGrath, former tech exec turned full-time mom, recovering perfectionist and workaholic and certified executive coach. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the show. Thanks so much for joining me today. So sorry I missed you last week. We had the January cold and flu season impacting our lives quite a bit. We actually went on a trip down to Texas. ah We used to live in Dallas for
00:04:45
Speaker
11 years before we moved back to Pennsylvania. And so we went and visited Dallas and then I had lived in Austin prior to that. So we went and visited Austin and it was so good to see old friends and reconnect. And it was just a really lovely trip. And when we came back, we must have picked something up because my daughter had strep throat. My daughter and I both had COVID and it just took a little while to recover. So if you are getting hit hard by cold and flu season as well, we're right there with you. So today I wanted to talk a bit about the self-coaching model and specifically thoughts, how thoughts get into our brains, how they impact our lives.
00:05:33
Speaker
and how they really drive our results. I've seen this show up several times recently in my coaching. We just wrapped up the January reset, which was awesome. And I saw it show up there. I've seen it show up in some of my one-on-one clients. So I'd like to talk a little bit more about this. So just a reminder of the self-coaching model. To start, there are circumstances. And circumstances are neutral events that happen, neutral things that are out there in the world. They're not inherently positive or negative until we assign some kind of value to them. And then the circumstances go through filters in our brain.
00:06:15
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our brains are meaning making machines and so they apply meaning to that neutral circumstance and it creates a thought. So often we believe that our thoughts are facts. We tend to believe our thoughts without questioning them and I'll talk more about that later but One of my favorite quotes is, don't believe everything you think. Because we often come up with these thoughts and they've gone through the filters that are in our brains and we haven't really taken the time to examine the thoughts and the filters to decide if that's how we want to think about things. We just believe what our brain is telling us.
00:07:00
Speaker
So we might receive an email from our boss and our thoughts are, my boss hates me, my boss doesn't trust me, my boss doesn't believe that I know how to do my job. Those are all thoughts. They're not facts. They are interpretations that our brain is creating from a neutral circumstance and probably many neutral circumstances. And then our thoughts create our feelings. So when we think that thought, my boss doesn't trust me, we feel a certain kind of way, right? If we read the same email and our thought is my boss believes in me, my boss appreciates me, my boss is so glad I'm here, that generates a different kind of feeling within us.
00:07:45
Speaker
So we can read the same words and create different thoughts on our brains. And those thoughts are going to elicit different feelings. And then our thoughts and feelings together drive our actions. They drive what we do. And as we know, our actions generate our results. So I just want you to notice that The thoughts are what kick off the process and what ultimately drive our results. And in the self coaching model, we talk a lot about circumstances and thoughts and about how circumstances are neutral things.
00:08:18
Speaker
And it's like the neutral circumstance gets passed through our brains, which have been programmed over time by biology, by our parents, by our families, by our teachers, our coaches, our society, our media. And so it goes through a filter and we form a thought about it. This is why two people can look at the same exact circumstance and have completely different thoughts. and therefore feelings about what just happened. I was trying to think of examples about where this shows up. And probably because of the time of year, I kept coming back to NFL football. um If you're not in the United States, I apologize. I'm going to use this example. But a team winning or losing,
00:09:03
Speaker
is not inherently positive or negative, right? Because two different people or thousands of different people could look at that and have different thoughts about it. So the Chiefs winning the AFC Championship is not inherently positive or negative, but depending on who's looking at it, different people might have different thoughts about that, right? Someone's going to say, They earned it. They deserved it. The Chiefs are my favorite team and come up with, you know, those are the thoughts that they're having and they're going to feel really happy and really good about it. Someone else might look at it and say, the Chiefs don't deserve to be there or it should have been another team. It should have been the Steelers. I mean, that might be my thought. I know a lot of.
00:09:50
Speaker
people that I know might have the thought it should be the bills. And so, of course, if we're having those thoughts, that's going to elicit a different feeling for us than for somebody who's looking at that and saying, yes, that's what I wanted to happen. I'm happy that that happened. So just notice that even winning, we might say that's a positive thing, but two people can look at winning and depending on who's doing the winning or how they're doing it or how we believe they'd got there, we might have different thoughts about it and therefore different feelings. I'll give another more work example that might be more um universal in our workplaces. So let's say the board hires a new CEO.
00:10:36
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One person might have the thought, I believe in that CEO, I believe in that person, I know their track record and I'm so happy that our company has that person and then they feel excited and hopeful. If someone else might look at that person, at that higher, at that neutral circumstance, the fact that the board hired the new CEO and think this person is not right for this job, they might feel worried, concerned, pessimistic, And, you know, if someone is a part of that search committee and the person who was hired wasn't their first choice, then they might have thoughts like, that wasn't my first choice. The company doesn't value my opinion. Do I even belong here? Right? Like we might start having thoughts about that neutral circumstance. And those are all different thoughts that multiple people might have about the same circumstance.
00:11:35
Speaker
So then our actions and results stemming from those thoughts are going to be very different. If we're feeling very skeptical and pessimistic and worried and believing that this person is not the right person for the job, that's our thought, then we might show up a little bit more standoffish. We might not proactively engage as much. We might question more in a kind of a skeptical way. versus if we believe this is the right person for the job and we're so excited and we're feeling hopeful and feeling full of optimism, then we might lean into that relationship. We might be more open to learning from that person. We might want to connect with that person more.
00:12:20
Speaker
And those two sets of actions are likely gonna drive different results, right? When we look at like, what is our relationship? What does that person look like? What does our position in the company look like? How long are we there? We might end up with different results. And notice that it's all based on that original thought about the neutral circumstance. So our thoughts ultimately drive our results. And now that we kind of see how the model plays out, I want to go back and focus on thoughts because thoughts are what we can change. They're what we have control over. And as one of my group coaching participants observed and said so eloquently, thoughts are the intervention point. So what are thoughts? A thought is simply a sentence in our brain. I'm too much. I'm not enough. I'm a great partner. I'm a bad mom.
00:13:13
Speaker
My employee is lazy. My boss hates me. My partner loves me or doesn't love me. All of these are thoughts in our brains. They're not factually true. or untrue, they're just thoughts that we have. Circumstances could be held up in a court of law, while our thoughts are our interpretations of those circumstances. The meaning we derive from those circumstances, the conclusions we draw, and the thoughts that we have about different circumstances are influenced by so many things. Our brains are programmed by so many external
00:13:53
Speaker
influences our biology, our past experiences, the media we consume, our society, the people in our lives, especially people in authority roles, our cultural norms, and all of this, especially during our formative years when our brain is developing and being programmed. So we can decide whether we want to believe these thoughts or not once we're aware of them. But I think what happens is so often we're not aware of them and we have to do the work to excavate them, to uncover what sentences we're believing about ourselves, about other people and about the world that are ultimately creating our results. So often our brain is running a program that we're not even aware of until we start doing this work. So while we're able to get some results in some areas of our lives that we really want,
00:14:49
Speaker
Obviously, as high achievers, we are able to do that. But we're also getting results in other areas that we don't actually want. Or we might be showing up in a way that is not how we actually want to show up. And we might not be able to figure out why or why we keep getting results that we don't actually want. We often have the thought error that changing circumstances or changing actions will get us different results. But notice that thoughts are independent of circumstances. So we may have different circumstances. We may change our circumstances completely, but what we're doing is taking our same brain. And if we take that same brain without working on our thoughts,
00:15:37
Speaker
we're just gonna replicate our results over and over again. This is why you might yourself or have a friend who has multiple relationships turn out the same way, or they keep attracting the same kind of partner, because what's happening is they're changing that circumstance of who they're dating, but they haven't done the work to actually change their thoughts. Or you might notice that you change your job, you're unhappy in your job. So you change to a new job or your location, your own unhappy in one place. So you go to another place and you find that, you know, certainly there's that honeymoon period where.
00:16:18
Speaker
You're just happy that you're not in the old situation anymore and you're excited and hopeful about the new one. But once you settle in, you feel that same kind of unhappiness once that honeymoon period has ended. And that's because we are taking our same brain with our same thoughts and our same filters and thought patterns into the next set of circumstances.
00:16:43
Speaker
I kind of said before, but so often thoughts are injected into our brain by another person or by media or by a parent, teacher, coach. And it's often they were placed there long ago and until we become aware of them, they have so much power over us. What actually inspired the me to write this episode was that I recently coached two different women whose bosses gave them negative feedback about their performance. And those thoughts were planted in their brains and they remain there. They were put there months or even years ago and they're still there and they're showing up for them in their results and actions. And so this was literally one conversation. Both of them had one conversation with their boss.
00:17:40
Speaker
And what they noticed was that the thoughts around that conversation, what they started to believe about themselves as a result of those thoughts and that that conversation was showing up everywhere. So for one, it was impacting her ability to connect with her new boss and her new team. It was blocking her from connection. because of these thoughts that she had about herself and her performance that her boss said months prior. And for another, it was causing so much anxiety and feeling really stuck and unable to move forward into a new role because she was so afraid that whenever a new person came in to replace her in her current role,
00:18:33
Speaker
that they were gonna do a much better job and she was gonna make that mean that there was something wrong with her and that's why the organization wasn't moving forward in the way that it was supposed to. And it was all because of this conversation with her boss where she believed that she was the problem and she was halting forward progress. So for both of them, it was greatly impacting how they view themselves and their work and how much confidence they bring to their work. These thoughts were planted in their heads by their bosses months ago, and they're still showing up until we noticed them in our coaching work. And I think that's why it's so important to take the time to notice your thoughts and uncover what's behind your feelings and actions so that you can figure out which sentences in your head are directing your life.
00:19:28
Speaker
So what I want to leave you with are just some questions to ask yourself about your thoughts. What thoughts in your brain are creating your results in your life? Are you aware of what they are? What are you still believing now that might not even be true anymore? What thoughts might you want to change so that you can get different results? So thanks so much for tuning in, my friends. I will see you all next week. Have a great week.
00:20:01
Speaker
Thanks so much for tuning in to the Executive Coach for Moms podcast. Please like, subscribe, or follow the show so you'll be notified when the next episode is available. I hope you'll join me again next time. Take care.