Episode Description

We have 60,000 thoughts per day and when we aren’t paying attention to them, they can have a negative impact on our lives. I used to beat myself up when I heard myself thinking negative thoughts, but I learned that it’s actually pretty normal for our brain to do that. What matters more than “thinking positive” is thinking ON PURPOSE. Today, I’ll teach you a tool I use with my clients to show them how their thoughts are impacting their self-esteem, their confidence, their relationships, and everything in their lives. In this episode, I mention Brooke Castillo and The Life Coach School, where I was trained and certified as a Life Coach. This is where I learned about the Self-Coaching Model. Because of this, my life is forever changed. Download the LCS model practice sheet here: Self-Coaching Model

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https://sheilamorgancoaching.com/contact/

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Transcript

Hey everybody. Thanks for joining me. Welcome to episode 10. Oh my goodness. I can’t believe that I have done this many episodes. I realize that I haven’t published them every week like I wanted to. I realize that it hasn’t been perfect. And I gotta tell you that really stopped me for a while.  

I kept getting hung up on that. I kept getting stuck in that and I got past it. And here I am, episode number 10. I mean, it was years that I was wanting to make a podcast. Years. I knew I had something to say. I knew I had a message. I knew I could help people. And I was terrified, but here I am 10 episodes in. Thank you for joining me. Thank you for supporting me. This is super fun.  

So today what I wanna do is I wanna share with you a coaching tool that changed my life. And I use it with my clients. I, I, I don’t know what else to say about it. It, let me just teach it to you and then I want you to try it. I wanna hear if it works for you. 

I mean, it does work. I know that. I don’t need to hear if it works for you.  

I would like to hear how it works for you and what is created for you. And by works. I mean, it shows you the impact of your thoughts on your life. It shows you how the thoughts you have create results, whether you like the results or not take a look at your thoughts and you’ll understand why those results are happening.  

So it’s called the self coaching model. Uh, it was created by Brooke Castillo and when I discovered it, it was through Brooke’s podcast called the life coach school podcast. And that is the school where I was trained to do this kind of work. To do coaching work. 

And I’m just so excited. I’m all breathless about this. I kind of, you know, I always kind of dance a little bit with the music before I start before I start talking, but I’m just excited that we’ve done 10. So I wanna share with you some examples of the model at work.  

So the concept behind the model is it’s a universal law. It’s not this, this truth was not created by Brooke. And Brooke even says that, like, she’s just using this tool to highlight this universal truth. And that is that everything, everything in the world, everything in the universe can be fit into one of these five categories. The categories are circumstances, thoughts, feelings, actions, and results. 

The circumstances are everything that exists. It’s every action that you take. It is like this table is a circumstance. This podcast is a circumstance. And the thing about circumstances is they are neutral. And what I mean by that is it doesn’t mean anything until somebody has a thought about it.  

So for instance, this podcast, somebody might think, this is the best podcast I’ve ever heard. And other people might think that’s the crappiest podcast. I’ll never listen to it again. The podcast is neutral. The thoughts people have about it, however, are obviously judgments their opinions. They are not neutral. they’re good. They’re bad. They’re positive. They’re negative. They’re comfortable, uncomfortable. 

All of those things, but all the things that go in the circumstance line, we call it the sea line for short, they’re all neutral. If you took all the human brains off the planet and they didn’t know about planet earth, you know, if you’re sarcastic like me, you’re thinking who says we haven’t taken all the human brains off the planet? 

My gosh. Right. That’s a thought, that’s an opinion. So obviously that’s not a circumstance, but if you took everybody off the planet and things were happening on the planet, like the temperature, the weather, the animals, the buildings, the vehicles, everything that’s on the planet. It’s neither good or bad. 

It just is, it just exists. And the same is true for every action that’s taken, every event that occurs, anything. You can measure anything that has a weight or a substance, or even like a person and the things that a person says and the things that a person does, those things are. They have no meaning whatsoever until somebody has a thought about it. 

I know this is crazy stuff. It’s really out there. I get it. Sometimes hearing this stuff can be confusing. So I’ll try to keep it clear. Circumstances are neutral. Let’s move on. Okay.  

Thoughts. I just was sharing a lot of my thoughts with you that this model is amazing, that it has helped me see things more clearly, helped me understand why my life is the way that it is. 

So thoughts are things like, “oh, this is cool. This podcast is amazing. I love hot weather.” Any opinions, anytime you use adjectives or adverbs or you’re describing something, anything that somebody may not agree with. That’s a thought.  

Brooke defines thoughts as a sentence in your brain, which is fine to me. Like, that’s something that you can hear, but I think a thought is also a memory that you have. It’s maybe even to go so far as saying like the impacts of trauma in your past. The way that you react to things. I think it’s a thought that your body is having.  

Your brain is not the only place where there’s information stored. Your whole body is like a storage facility for your brain. So a thought is anything that comes up from them.  

Now, emotions are the sensations that you have in your body that come from a thought that you have. There are a lot of different opinions out there about exactly where emotions come from. Exactly where our thoughts come from. And I kind of feel like sometimes we have a hard time separating out thoughts and emotions because they seem to be so tightly connected. And it is important and it is part of the practice to learn to separate them, 

if you can. And the way that I like to do it is I like to think of the thought as, okay, here’s the sentence. Here’s what my brain is saying. And then the emotion is, here’s what my body is saying. Here’s my physical reaction to what my brain thinks.  

Okay. So we’ve had so far circumstances, thoughts, emotions. Those are the first three. The next one is actions.  

And actions are anything that you do, anything that you don’t do, that is driven by your emotion. You have a circumstance, a neutral thing out in the world. You have a thought about it. You have an emotion that’s created from that thought. And then you have an action that’s driven from that emotion that you have.  

The very last line is the results line. This is the line where you look back at what has happened in your. Directly from the thoughts, feelings, and actions that you have taken. 

The cool thing about the results line is it proves the thought line true. That’s how, you know, you have put together the model correctly. Like a model car? This is the model of our thinking.  

I had a client recently and she was telling me how discouraged and afraid she was feeling. And I said, great, why are you feeling that way? 

And she told me, she’s feeling that way because she’s gonna be doing a project alone. And I said, okay and? and she kind of gave me a funny look like, well, duh, I’m doing it alone. Like that’s a problem. But Doing a project alone, Doesn’t mean anything. So doing a project alone could be put in the circumstance line. 

She has a project, she’ll be doing it alone. But she was like, no, this is a problem. And I said, okay, why is it a problem? And that’s when she told me her thought. Her thought is I’m going to fail. And I said, ah, there it is. Doing the project alone is a neutral circumstance. It doesn’t mean anything, but she has thoughts and ideas about doing this project alone. 

You might think Awesome. I have total control. I get to do this project all by myself. No, one’s gonna get in my way for her. It was, oh my God. I have to do this project alone. This is terrible.  

Two different people with the same circumstance can have different thoughts about it. And that’s what I mean by the circumstances are neutral. 

It is a fact that she is doing a project alone. So her thought I’ll probably fail. I said, well, what’s the emotion that’s coming from that thought. Oh, and that’s very clear. She felt very discouraged.  

I said, so what actions do you take when you are feeling discouraged? She said, I’m not taking any action. I’m sitting and I’m worrying about it. And I’m thinking about it. And scared to pick up the phone and call anybody to participate, to be part of this project. I said, okay, so your action is, you’re not taking action. You’re doing other things. You’re distracting yourself.  

She said, yeah, that’s right. I said, okay, let’s look at the results now. So the result of those thoughts, is she’s failing ahead of time. The project isn’t even going. That’s how failed it is. Remember our thought? I’ll probably fail and you look at the results and it proves the thought’s true. 

And this is the magic of the model. You can see why you’re getting the results that you’re getting. And it always leads back to a thought. And once you discover what that is, and you begin to change how you think, change how you feel and take different actions, your results change. And it is amazing. 

I am doing podcast number 10 because I changed a thought that I was having about my podcast, which was, I am not capable. I was believing I’m not capable of doing a podcast. And it kept stopping me and I kept getting tripped up. But my thought about the podcast now is I am capable. And here we are, I’m on podcast number ten. 

So freaking exciting. Podcast number 10, I’m teaching you about the model. One of my favorite coaching tools.  

I have some interviews coming up for you that I’m excited to share with you, and I’ll have a lot more coaching tools, different ways to have better relationships with yourself and with other people. And I hope y’all stick around because it’s going to be epic.  

I love you so much. Thank you for hanging out with me. Y’all have an awesome week and I will see you next time. Bye.