This has to change
- HeardinLondon
- Jun 11
- 5 min read
Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 186
Most of us want to change something in our lives because we want to feel something different.
We think that having external circumstances change will change the way that we feel inside. I think everything that we do in life is 'cause we're trying to move towards something that we wanna feel or move away from something that we don't want to feel.
Now, most of us are brought up to believe that if we could just have the right set of circumstances around us, we're gonna feel something different, and that's gonna allow us to have the emotional state that we want to. Quite often, we're moving towards things like, broad topic happiness, but actually peace, safety, contentment, confidence. Lots of things that enable us to feel like we can be certain and safe, and that our surroundings are gonna be okay and we don't need to worry about stuff. And we think if we have the right setup around us, the right scenery, then the plot line will just follow. It will all just flow from there if we can just get the setup right.
And I don't think that circumstances cause our feelings.
I think that our thoughts about our circumstances are what cause our feelings.
For me, I know this to be true because I know that there can be a straight set of circumstances that are completely factual, and people can have lots of different feelings about them because they have lots of different thoughts about them.
For someone, it might be the best thing in the world. For some person, it might be the worst thing in the world.
And I think we don't always expand that to versions of ourselves as well. We can think of a particular scenario, a relationship is a cracking example, where you might have thought it was, like, the best thing in the world, and actually in hindsight you can see lots of things that perhaps you weren't acknowledging weren't that good at the time, or weren't that good for you, or good for either of you.
We can look back and have different thoughts about a circumstance and feel different things at different points in our life.
So we can tell from this that it is not the circumstance itself that causes our feelings. It's our thoughts about those circumstances, so therefore changing the circumstance isn't going to change the way we feel.
Changing our thoughts will.
And we can reverse engineer our way back there. So if you can pause and go, "Okay, if that thing changed, if that person stopped doing that thing, if that job were to change, the relationship were to change, the work were to change, the environment were to change, what do I think that that thing would allow me to feel that I'm not feeling now? What's the emotion that I'm going for?"
And once you've identified what the emotion is, you can think, "Hmm, well, what would someone who was feeling that be thinking?"
And once you have that thought identified, you can probably take that to somewhere in your life that you're already feeling that.
This might be the point where I lose you.
You're like, "But I don't feel that. I feel all of this other stress, and I just want the thing to change so that I can feel all right about myself." But let's try and take it really small.
So for example, you might want to feel confident about going into a job interview, for example. You might think, "Okay, well, if I just had a job, I'd feel more confident about myself."
But actually, I can identify it's confidence that I want to go for. It's confidence which is the feeling which is driving me here. Now, what would someone who is feeling confident already, what might they be thinking? They might be thinking, "I'm an excellent asset to this company." "I have an amazing skill set which I can offer people." " I know what I'm doing."
Now, you might think, "Okay, there aren't very many environments that I already think, "well, I'm an amazing asset, I'm... have a wonderful skill set, I know what I'm doing." Let's just pick one of those. I know what I'm doing. Where do you already believe in your life, "I know what I'm doing?" I feel like that when I'm putting my shoes on. I feel like that when I'm making a cup of tea. I feel like that now when I'm making the podcast, and that's, you know, I didn't know how to make a podcast a few years ago. Now this is something that I do every week, and It's part of my routine. We can learn new stuff, and now I just feel really confident that this is something I can do, whereas for quite a long time it was , like, "oh, I will never get my head around that stuff."
And if we can go, "Okay, well, I know what I'm doing when I put my shoes on." If you start noticing, "Oh, that I know what I'm doing when I'm cleaning my teeth. I know what I'm doing when I'm doing the washing up. I know what I'm doing when I hear a friend is in distress and I pick the phone up." If you start making that thought more familiar to you and more available by practicing it, and notice all these things around you where you can go, "Okay, this is a skill that I have.
I know how to do this." When it comes to the job interview, when it comes to the job, this thought is more at the front of your mind. It's more accessible. It's something that you're gonna lean into more obviously, so that when you come to preparing yourself to walk through that door, this thought is just part of your daily dialogue with yourself.
So we can choose the thoughts that we have as a sort of guide and a north star to take us to the emotion that we're wanting to get to when we're hoping to shift all of these circumstances around to feel something different.
The trajectory is identify the emotion that you want or the emotion that you feel like you're lacking. Once you've got that, what might someone who's already feeling that be thinking, and where can you identify that in your life already? Take it, enhance it, rehearse it. Expand it, make it part of your daily vocabulary. And this is the way that we get a lot more access to a lot more of the emotions that we want in our life on a regular basis.
I hope that this little tip has been really useful, how you navigate your own brain this week. Do let me know.
There are loads of resources in the show notes, and I'll speak to you next week.
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