Ep #27: Rewriting Your Story

I'm Mikki Gardner, and this is the Co-Parenting with Confidence Podcast, Episode Number 27, Rewriting Your Story. [music] Welcome to Co-Parenting with Confidence, a podcast for those courageous moms out there who wanna move past the conflict and frustration of divorce and show up as the mom they truly wanna be. My name is Mikki Gardner, I'm a certified life and conscious parenting coach with my own personal dose of co-parenting experience. Throughout my co-parenting journey, I have learned to become confident in who I am as a woman and a mother, and I'm here to help you do the same. If you're ready to learn what it takes to become a great co-parent and an amazing example to your children, well, get ready, and let's dive into today's episode. [music] Welcome friends. Thank you for joining me today. This episode is a bit of a continuation on last week's episode number 26, Choosing Who You Wanna Be. So, if you haven't listened to that one, I recommend that you hit pause here and take a listen to that first and then come back. So if you're here with me right now, let's assume that you've already listened to the last episode, and we're gonna be diving even further into the three areas that we identified last week, which was that gap between who you're being and who you desire to be. Those were removing what's blocking you, opening up to more, and stepping into that energy today. Today we're gonna take even a deeper dive and we're gonna look at it through the lens of rewriting your story. But to do that, we really have to start at the very beginning, which is, who are you? Well, I believe that we all are the same. We're just a big old ball energy zipped up into a giant little meat suit that we wear around. We're basically 99.999% energy, and we're 0.0001% matter. This is just scientifically proven, right? We're made up of atoms. Atoms are 99% energy, 1% physical matter, so we're really no different. Yet here's the kicker, we spend 99.99% of our time focused on the physical, right? That physical manifestation, the physical experience, our body identification, and we spend that 0.0001% of our time focused on our energy. Now, this is an issue, because when we stay focused on the physical, we're limiting ourselves to what we can see around us, to what we've already created, to the past. Ultimately, we're letting what we can see, our physical reality, dictate our future, right? It might sound like when things calm down, I'll start doing X, Y, Z. I'll feel ready to start dating when I've lost 10 pounds. I'll get along with my ex and co-parent better when he stops blaming me for everything. Can you see how this keeps you stuck in the current reality based on the past things that have happened? Well, this is where I want us to all to say just, No, thank you, and it's time to re-write our story towards something different where we can open up to the infinite possibilities of the universe. This is all of the stuff we can't see. This is where all the energy lies, and it's really, really hard to do when we're so focused on what we see, what we think is around us, right? And we're constantly telling ourself that story over and over that it can't be any different. I mean, the real fact of the matter is, is that we don't ever attract what we want, we attract who we are being. That's why people get so frustrated about the idea of things like the secret or a vision board, or you can manifest anything you want, just think it, and it will appear, that's not how it works. We don't get to just think something and it suddenly magically appears in the universe. No. When we start stepping into an energy field where we are being something that receives that, that's a different exchange and that's what we're talking about today. So how can we even begin to re-write our story? Well, it's about aligning our thoughts and our feelings and our actions toward what we desire to be today. And we have to stop reliving the past, using all of those limiting beliefs that cloud our vision, because it literally clouds the lens from which we're viewing our entire life. And there's three areas that we're gonna look at today, mind, emotions, and behaviors. Notice these are very similar to our beliefs, how we think, how we feel, and how we act. So, I'm gonna start with our mind, the way that we identify. This is what I started with here, that idea that we are energy, and if we're energy, we have to start by understanding who are we, right? And that doesn't mean that we're necessarily our thoughts in our head, you're not your thoughts in your head. You know, when I learned this the first time, it was like my mind was literally blown off. I couldn't even fathom the idea that I wasn't my thoughts, that I wasn't that voice in my head that was constantly telling me how awful I am, right? But it's a 100% true. Thoughts are just sentences in your brain, it's whether we attach to them, it's if we fuse to them, and it's if we believe them, that they start to determine what we do in our life. And so, this is where we really have to understand that we are in control of those thoughts, maybe not having them, but we are in control of whether or not we believe them, if we attach to them, and if we take that thought train all the way down. When we're living unconsciously, we're living in default. We're sort of believing any thought that comes into our brain without question, and then we're literally using the past to dictate our future because we're just in default mode. The fact is, is that every single moment we're creating habits, we're creating our way of being, whether we're doing it consciously or unconsciously. And so, when we're doing it unconsciously, we're literally living on default and we're firing and wiring those neural pathways in our brain to create more of what we already have. So if we're feeling heavy, if we're feeling down, if we're feeling sad, and we're on default, we're just digging deeper into those neural pathways, wiring that heaviness further and further into our experience. So when we look at mind and identification as one of the areas, meditation is the only way that I know to help start to look at this differently. Because meditation offers us a different way of living. It helps us tap into that energy field within ourselves, that source energy, that unseeable force that is always at play and always available to us when we tap into it. It's our higher spirit. When we intentionally tap into this energy, we start to create new neural pathways in our brain automatically. We're literally teaching our brain, you don't have to go to this thought all the time, we can do something different, it's called neuroplasticity. It's literally rewiring your brain towards what you want and firing and wiring new thoughts, so that you can put yourself in a position to consciously respond to your life versus living by default and reaction mode. But it takes commitment, it takes sitting down in silence and witnessing your thoughts. And you know, if you sit down in silence and your brain starts to race and then you notice, Oh, my brain's racing, Oh, I got caught up in my thoughts, you know what that means? You were successful. You were just a master meditator, right? It's not about having no thoughts; it's not about sitting on a mountain top quietly and never having another thought. No, it's just simply noticing, Oh, I got caught up, I got swept away by the thought, I'm gonna come back to breath. That's all we have to do. That's successful. That's meditation. Sometimes, if you're anything like me and you have a brain that runs at a very high rate, it's constantly moving and going and constantly on to the next thing, so to sit in silence is that expectation for myself. I will forever fail. Really, all I'm looking to do is sit in silence, witness when I get caught up in a thought, and then simply bring myself back to that energy, bring myself back to source, bring myself back to that calm, quiet, content part of me, because that's where I wanna spend more of my time and make more of my decisions from. And so that's why I sit every morning to practice that, running away with thought, catching myself and coming back. You know... And I think so many people think that they have failed or that they can't meditate. People came to me all the time and say, Well, I tried meditating, and I totally know that it works, but it just doesn't work for me. Translation, nothing changed. We expect immediate results, and then we get really disappointed, really disillusioned and frustrated when it doesn't happen today. But time is really just a mental construct that we attach a story to, it's taking too long. It shouldn't take this long, I should have figured it out by now. All of that is just resistance. And really, it's not a problem, it's just the universe is showing us that you're not totally aligned yet. And so, when we understand that we attract what we are being, not what we want, we realize here that it's not necessarily a problem, we're just misaligned, and how can we align differently? We're gonna talk about that in a minute. But so often when we don't see the results, when we've been trying for a while, we start saying things like, it's not fair. Other people have it easier. Why does this always happen to me? No matter what I do, nothing ever changes. And this is where you have to be the author of your story, and when you have to be the director of your life and you'll cut. You catch yourself here. Each time you catch yourself, you... That you're telling that old story, that you're telling a story that it just isn't for you, all of those things, you yell cut and you question yourself, how do I need to think, feel, and act, so I'm living differently? What do I need to align to right now to be who I want to be? When you can stop, when you can see that you are getting swept up in those old stories, when you're caught in that thought pattern, and you notice it, that is success. That's when you yell, cut, no more. You clean off that lens, right? I'm not looking at this from the old lens, I'm gonna clean it off, and I'm gonna look at it differently. Your ego's gonna lie to you and tell you that you've tried everything. Well, no. I guarantee that's not true, because it's not true for any of us. It just takes effort and consistency, because right now you're defaulting to those old patterns, and so you just have to choose differently. And I know I sound like I'm over-simplifying this, but it really is just about having a relentless commitment to becoming the version of you that you truly wanna be, right? We have to have that relentless commitment if we want anything to change in our life. It makes zero sense to expect our whole world to look different just because we want it to when we show up the same way every day. We have to show up differently first, and by doing that, by showing up differently, we automatically shift. We automatically change things, and we go into alignment towards where we wanna be. So today, we're gonna talk about shifting the emotions and the behaviors of our focus. So the first thing I wanna say about emotions is that all the studies, all the science that they're finding now, is that our kind of homeostasis, our natural set point as humans is to feel good, it is. I know it doesn't feel that way sometimes, but that is our natural set point. Unfortunately, we often live under chronic stress, fatigue, depression, and all of that floods our system with stress hormones, with inflammation, and that becomes our "normal." This is why meditation is so important, because it literally rewires, re-programs our addicted mind back to what is natural for us. Every time you sit, and science has proved this, that every time you sit in meditation, you are reducing the inflammation in your brain, which reduces the inflammation throughout your body. It literally is rewiring us each time we bring ourselves back to our natural set point. So when we think about emotions, there's a range that we feel all the time, from good to bad. On the good end, the feeling good end, joy, love, freedom, enthusiasm, excitement, ease, happiness, optimism, hope, calm, secure. Then there's sort of like those neutrals, they're in between the good and the bad. Neutral is boredom, maybe frustration, overwhelm lives there, irritation. And then we start to drop down into the feeling "bad." These look like disappointment, discouragement, self-doubt, anger, hatred, jealousy, resentment, worry, shame, guilt, insecurity, un-worthiness, fear, depression, despair, and grief. Nobody wants to live in the feeling bad state, because it feels bad. [chuckle] But it doesn't mean that anything has necessarily gone wrong, or that we're broken, or that we have made mistakes, or that we're wrong because we feel it. It just simply means we are misaligned; we are out of alignment. What we are feeling is dictated by how we're thinking. So we are thinking something that isn't serving us, often it's those old thought patterns, often it's those limiting beliefs, often it's all of that story that we've told ourself that keeps us misaligned. We get pulled down to that lower end of the scale into that feeling bad, and then sometimes we get trapped in it, we get really stuck, and that's when they're suffering. You know, the fact of the matter is, is that the reason we want anything in our life is because of how we think we are gonna feel when we have it. Yet we resist and avoid prioritizing our emotions on a regular basis. We haven't been taught how to do that, and so we think that we get... We try to avoid them, we try to act that we don't have these emotions, but the fact is, we're emotional beings that sometimes think about things, you know, instead of being thinking beings that every once in a while have a feeling. No, we are feeling, we are emotional beings, and so we have to honor that. So whenever we realize that we are caught maybe in the neutral or the negative, the negative feeling bad emotions, really, we have to notice what we're thinking, but we also want to shift out. If we want to focus on breaking the pattern, on acting differently, we have to be willing to start with those emotions. And in order to shift away from those thought patterns that we've used to create the story that we currently hold, we have to create a new story. We have to create new habits by processing and working through our emotions and then allowing it to shift our behavior. You know, there's frankly a lot of ways that we numb, and we distract so that we don't have to feel all of these emotions. There are a lot of ways that we numb or we distract to avoid the negative emotions, the feeling bad, and some might not even be things that you've thought about as distracting behaviors. But some of the mental distractions that we go through might look like blaming others, right? Ourselves, society, other people, we might complain a lot, that is a distraction to keep us away from feeling the negative emotion. Trying to rationally talk ourselves into why it's okay, being logical, it's just logical that things are this way. A mental distraction might look like toxic positivity too, chanting positive affirmations, right? Just think happy thoughts. Think happy thoughts. Think happy thoughts, [chuckle] right? It doesn't make the negative go away, it just is a distraction. Or it might look like analyzing things over and over and over, believing that that will stop it from happening again, which really, as we know, when we focus on it, we just get more of that. Other ways that we might distract through our behavior is avoiding people altogether, giving up, being distant. It might be excessive activity, like TV watching, exercise, video game, sex, overdoing, shopping, whatever. It might look like substances in excess, eating, alcohol, drugs, smoking, whatever that is. And this isn't an exhaustive list by any means, but I just wanted to offer you some of the ways that many of my clients that I see and many of the moms that I talk to, numb or distract themselves from these uncomfortable feelings. So really, we have to allow ourselves space to process those emotions and then find ways to shift the behavior, to shift into a different emotion, into the emotion we want. And one of the most powerful ways that I've learned to do this is through visualization. And so, what visualization is, is it's literally creating a story, creating a visual for you and mentally rehearsing it, feeling the energy of it, and memorizing that feeling. And then, what we do is we memorize that feeling, we rehearse it every day, because our brain can't tell the difference between a thought of something that we see and something in our imagination. And we can use this to our advantage to re-tell our story to help us change our inner reality, because in time that changes our external reality. So, to end this podcast, I'm gonna walk you through a visualization technique. And so, I want you just to take a minute, if you're not in a place that you can close your eyes, then just hit pause and come back. But what I want you to do is I want you to take a moment and close your eyes and let's take three big deep breaths together, in through the nose, out through the mouth. Another big, deep breath and out. One more, make this your biggest breath today. Let it all out. And I want you to imagine that you are in a place that you feel completely at ease and content. And then you notice off in the distance, there's someone there, and I want you to walk towards her. And as you get closer and closer, you realize that it's you. It's you in 10 years, 20 years, five years, one year, but it's a version of you who is your highest version of you. She's doing all of the things that you so desperately want to do now. She feels the way that you want to feel. Maybe she is successful in business, maybe she's completely at ease, maybe she is a mom that is so loving and caring. Whatever it is for you that you really truly desire to be, she's the example of that. And I want you to memorize everything about her, engage with her, watch her. With whatever she's doing, how does she do it? How is she feeling? What does she think? Notice what she looks like, how she dresses, what does her environment look like, how does she interact with the space and the people around her? And when you've done that, when you've truly just soaked in as much as you can of the detail around, everything you see, I want you to really memorize how you feel right now. When you are in her presence, what are the feelings that you have? Where do you feel that in your body? And when you feel like you have everything you can from that image, I want you to wish her well, give her a hug, whatever you feel compelled to do and then turn around and walk back to where you started. And then I want you to open your eyes, and on a piece of paper, I want you to write down what you saw. I want you to write down what you felt, and once you've done that, we are gonna use this as a blueprint, as a guidepost for each and every day where you wanna spend time with her every day, maybe you start your morning with her, really memorizing what is it that she would do? How would she respond? Because what we wanna be able to do is really step into her today, step into those behaviors, step into those feelings, and step into those thoughts of the highest version. This is not about what we want, but who do we wanna be, and stepping into that being today. It's really about being aware of the story that we're telling ourselves and just not wanting to hear it anymore. To release the entanglement and the fusion that we have with those thought patterns, with those feelings, and really step into alignment with who we really, truly are, that core sense of who you are. Beginning to see more, right? Re-writing that story and then stepping into that today, because when you do that, you will find more evidence of how you already have what you want today. When we start being, thinking and feeling and acting in a way that is aligned towards what we wanna do, we create more opportunity for it. We are firing and wiring the brain cells to create new pathways, new thoughts, new stories, new direction and new energy. So that's the show for today. I hope that this episode has offered you an opportunity to think about how you wanna tell your story and who you wanna be today, right? In your future? Yes. And how you can start being here today. And I'm curious, what needs to shift for you? What do you need to become more aligned with? Do you feel like you wanna make these changes, but you just don't know how? Well, so today then is your lucky day, because on April 14th, I'm hosting a workshop called How to Confidently Co-parent Through the Chaos of Life. This is a workshop that's perfect for those frustrated moms who wanna feel calm and grounded and confident, no matter what their life, or their ex, or their kids throw at them. We're gonna be doing a lot of this work together in that workshop and so much more. So, if you're ready to sign up and join me live for this free workshop, where we are going to walk through the story that you have today and start to re-write it, then go to the link in the show notes to save your spot. Thank you so much for spending this time with me. I am so grateful. And if you know someone who could use some positivity and this message in their life, I'd be so grateful if you'd share it with them. I'll see you next week, and in the meantime, take really good care of you. [music] Thanks for listening to Co-Parenting with Confidence. If you want more information or resources from this podcast, visit co-parentingwithconfidence.com. I'll see you next week. [music]