Hey. Hey. Welcome to the very first episode of Renew Your Mind. I’m your host, Diana Swillinger. I’m a life
coach, and I’ve been working with women and entrepreneurs for a couple of years now. And my clients, they’ve all been getting amazing results. When I work with them about their thoughts, they’ve learned to feel better, do better, react better, relate better, all by managing thoughts. I find it over and over again. And I’m telling you, it’s all about the mind. The doing, the goals, the action steps, habit changes. All that stuff that everyone teaches us so we can improve our lives. Most of it isn’t effective unless we start with the thoughts first.
So that’s why this podcast is all about the mind. I’m sure we’ll dive into actions along the way. For sure we
will. But you’re going to find that even then, the actions, we’re going to link them back to the thoughts that
precede them. So most of us know how instrumental our thoughts are, but we don’t really know what to do with that knowledge. No one’s trained us how to better manage our brain, and we’re trying to feel better with positive affirmations. Sometimes they can work if you truly believe the affirmation, but so often they don’t. Or at best, maybe you get a temporary effect.
But when we kind of slow down, examine our brains, when we can get more purposeful and work on the skill of seeing how our brains work, and we can take a step back and examine our thoughts, we can actually interrupt the autopilot program that’s running in our brain because our brain is like supercomputers. It’s automatically offering us thoughts. We can learn how to interrupt that and then get leverage to choose what we want to think and believe on purpose because of what it will offer us or what it’s going to actually do in our lives. That is where the magic happens. This is what finally gives us traction in all the things we want. Like, um, getting better at loving ourselves, or letting go of controlling other people, or figuring out how to be content no matter what’s going on.
Or letting go of excessive, um, worry, or getting confidence for what we want to do in our lives. And when we do all this, we get to just plain feel better. So before we go too far, let me give you a little background on where I’m coming from. We’ll dial it back to when I was just a kid. When I was really little, I said a prayer to give my life over to God. And I remember with a tri level in the suburbs of Milwaukee, my bedroom was on the upper floor it was sitting alone in my bedroom on my bed with my legs crisscross.
Um I remember it. It’s kind of Shifani lime green floral bedspread. I was looking out my window to our front yard. We had this perfect green grass, and the afternoon sun was setting and shining on my face. And in that moment, I remember my mind just being full of all my mom had taught me about God. And she seemed happier than ever. So four year old little me, right then, decided to say a prayer to God. And I thought that was it. Uh, I thought I was set. So I went on with my life. I went elementary school through high school, young adulthood, always trying to do the right thing, be a good Christian. So I’d go to church, look presentable. I got married, then I wanted to stay married, raise good kids, keep the house clean, volunteer, recycle, be a good neighbor. And all this stuff was supposed to give me a happy life.
But the reality was, even though I was doing all of that stuff, I still ended up lonely and exhausted. I was not
happy. I was in a strained marriage dealing with anxiety and depression. Eventually, I had enough of the struggle.
I was, like, fed up with being stuck because I felt I was locked in, stuck to this miserable life. And I had
enough of being overwhelmed by just feeling like life was happening all around me and there’s nothing I could do about it. I remember this moment now at that point, instead of being that four year old girl looking out the window at the setting sun, praying and feeling all the hope, because I dedicated my life to God.
Now, I was 30, something on my bed, hiding under the covers, and not knowing how much more I could take of my messed up life. So what did I do? That was kind of a turning point. So I dove into all the things that we’re going to fix my problems. What do we do? We want to fix our problems self, um, help books. Read a lot of those, read the Bible. I found mentors to talk to. I, um, went to church activities. I tried therapy. I did journaling. I got support from all my family and friends and anybody. I was doing all the right things again, and I was still miserable.
I was like, what gives? Is this it?
Until finally I uncovered a truth that was always there, that changed everything. And it was that I could take back control of my mind so I could feel better. Let’s just look at this a little bit more specifically for a moment, because we can talk about taking back control of my mind and managing thoughts. What does that mean? Well, they’re experts in the in the field of psychology, and, um, and brain studies say that we think about 60 to 80,000 thoughts a day. So I’m wondering how many of the thoughts you’re having each day do you choose to have on purpose? Because if you’re like me, I didn’t think any thoughts on purpose unless I was trying to grab a positive affirmation or something. I just let my thoughts happen to me. I’d have a thought. I’m a terrible mom. And then I never even questioned it. I thought it, my brain offered it. I’m like, it must be true, my husband would be late for dinner. Then I’d have a thought that’s inconsiderate. I thought it, so it must be true. My brain was on, um, this autopilot. It was just offering thought after thought after thought all day long. And I didn’t question them until I learned to take back control of my mind.
I realized then that all the thoughts I was thinking, the negative ones, the self-shaming ones, and there were a lot of them, it turned out it wasn’t my circumstances that were responsible for how I felt, it was my thoughts.
If I was feeling miserable, it was because of my thoughts. If I was happy, which wasn’t often, that was because of my thoughts. If I was frustrated, if I would have had the ability to examine my thoughts, I could have traced that back too. And when I learned this, finally everything was making sense. All the things I was feeling, it wasn’t because of what other people were doing or, uh, saying, or life circumstances. It was because of what I was thinking in my own brain. In Romans twelve, that’s the verse that says, we will be transformed by the renewing of our mind. There’s another translation of this verse that puts a little different way. It’s interesting. It says, God will transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. God’s going to transform us into a new person by changing the way we think. That’s how we get new. It’s how we grow. It’s how we mature. And it works.
You know, when I was a kid, I was the third born youngest of um, three sisters at the time, and I was the goof off in the family. I had this quick wit. I would make people laugh, I made funny faces. My aunt called me rubber face.
And I loved to do all sorts of fun stuff and play outdoors and do adventures. I enjoyed life. Then I became an adult, and it really didn’t take very long until I was miserable. I guess as an adult, I just thought life was
happening to me. All the circumstances were out of my control. And then I would have terrible thoughts about all my circumstances. And then what? Then I felt doubt and frustration, shame. I felt victimized, anxious. And for sure I just felt stuck in my life. And I had totally lost the fun person I used to be.
But guess what? She is back. By managing my thoughts, the fun me that I was created to be is back. And I’m loving life, regardless of the circumstances. And that’s what I want for you, too. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m doing this. I want you to be that fun person you were created to be, a person with hope, joy, peace. Okay, so this will take a while for us to get through some of the ideas, um, here. But let me just start on this very first episode by telling you, please don’t be overwhelmed by the idea of 60,000 thoughts a day. Nobody manages 60,000 thoughts a day. That is not possible.
Really, what we want to be doing is purposefully examining just a few key thoughts each day, and that can make all the difference. So through this podcast, I want to teach you how to do it, too, so you can experience life the way you’ve always imagined and always wanted it to be. So let’s figure out how together. How are we going to feel the joy? How are we going to feel the contentment or the peace? No matter what life offers, just like we’re promised, it is possible. And I promise you, till the day I die, this is what I’m going to be doing. I’m going to be teaching Christian women like you and me and anyone else, really, anyone who wants this how to take back their thoughts. Because when we start with our thoughts and we take back our thoughts, then our emotions follow. We get to then direct and manage our emotions. And when we do that, that affects everything. It affects every relationship in our lives. It affects every goal we have. It affects everything we do. It affects how we show up, and we get to choose to show up in better ways and feel better. Does that sound amazing? Uh, if you’re not excited, I’m excited. And I’ll be excited for both of us. All right, well, that’s it for episode one.
Thank you for joining me, and I will catch you all next time. Take care. Thanks for joining me on the Renew your Mind podcast. Tune in next time as we explore thoughts. Did you know that all the thoughts that you think aren’t true? Well, this has been one of the most useful topics in my own mind renewal. You will not want to miss it.
