I’m Diana Swillinger, and this is the Renew Your Mind podcast. Episode 52 Emotions the Missing Piece
DIANA: Hey. Hey. What’s up? You know what’s up. For me, spring is what’s up. It’s staying late to almost 06:00 p.m.. Six um, p. M. People, and daylight savings is coming. I live for this. Oh, my gosh. I’m already energized. I’m dancing around. This month is also the first ever renew your Mind Boot Camp. And I am so pumped. I just got a bunch of stuff for the attendee giveaway. We’re going to have prizes, including a brand new iPad. It’s going to have a special inscription on it as well. Who does not want a brand new iPad? I mean, I could use one. I wish this one was for me, but it’s not. It’s for you or someone like you who’s coming to the Renew Your Mind Boot Camp. My iPad is at least six years old. It’s got a cracked screen, and none of the apps work on it anymore. I pretty much just use it for Spotify. So if you come to the boot camp and you win the iPad, yours is going to be way better than mine, and all the apps are going to work. I even got a cover for it.
So you’re not going to have to go out and buy a cover. You’re already going to have one. You’re going to be totally set up, even if you can’t attend Boot uh, Camp live. Those of you who are like, what? I want an iPad, but I can’t come when it is. If you plan to watch the replays, even, it’s fine. All you have to do is sign up for the boot camp workbook to be entered to win the iPad. I’ll email you the workbook and all the information you need to come to boot camp live or watch the replays. The bootcamp is going to be March 22 through March 26, so that is coming up fast. I’m going to be live streaming it into the Renew Your Mind community on Facebook. And get this for every friend you invite to join the Facebook group that joins the group and signs up for the workbook, of course they’re going to be entered doing the iPad and other prizes, but you’re going to get an extra entry for every friend that you invite. Okay? It’s going to be so much fun. If I could just make a living out of giving stuff away, I totally would. In addition to giving away stuff, I’m going to give away some of my best lessons from the coaching program. Five key lessons with the workbook that will bring it all to life for you. There’s going to be live Q and A. Live coaching. I’ve already had some people tell me they can’t wait to get coached during the boot camp. What all of this will do for you is take the concepts that you hear in this podcast and help you apply them directly to your life, your situations, your relationships, giving you real, tangible next steps in your life. It takes all of it from this I’m learning and it’s theoretical to real.
So you start seeing results. You want to feel more happy in your life? Come to boot camp. You want to feel more calm and confident. Come to boot camp. You want to feel more love and acceptance for yourself just the way you are today. Come to boot camp. It’s really easy to sign up. It’s all going to be live in the Renew Your Mind community on Facebook. But if you want to sign up and get the workbook, you just go to Rympodcast.com, click the bootcamp link and stick in your email. It’s easy. All right, enough about boot camp. I want to get to the topic because that’s why you all are here. So let’s talk about emotions. All right? I used to avoid my emotions, and now I talk about them all the time because emotions are important. Most of us know that.
But when it comes to renewing our mind, just even think about that phrase, renew your mind. Renew our mind. We think thoughts. And when it comes to creating the life we want, or reaching our goals or accomplishing things, we think action. Take action. Change of behavior. Do something or do something differently, or do something new. But there’s a missing link. There’s a missing piece that I think a lot of us are not spending enough time on, and I don’t hear enough other people talking about it. I’m listening to podcasts, I’m reading all the books, and I still think many people, they’re just missing this critical piece. We hear people talking about change your mindset, which is great. Change your perspective. Open your mind up to new things. Think a different thought. All great stuff. And then time after time, these authors, these speakers, they skip right ahead to taking action. Change your thoughts and your mindset, and then you will do things differently. While this is true, I think it’s skipping over a critical piece, the, uh, missing piece. And that’s our emotions.
Without considering our emotions, how do we even know if we’re picking the right thought? Are we fueling the behavior that we want when we aren’t considering what emotion needs to be involved? Are we even going to get the outcome we want? Maybe we kind of get close to creating the behavior that would help us. Seems like we’re doing all the right things, but it’s just not working. Has it ever happened to you. Like, I’m trying to think positive, I’m trying to do all the right things. It’s not working. I’ve had all these amazing thoughts. I’m doing all these amazing things, thinking, doing, but the outcome I want is not happening for me. It always seems like it comes back to exercise is one of the prominent areas that I HM, do this myself. You all okay? I want to be consistent with exercise, and I have not achieved that yet. So I try to think the right things, like I don’t have to want to, but I’ll do it anyway. And I’ll try to feel determined. And that does work for a while, but not in the long run. I’ll have another thought, like, this is going to be fun. But I often don’t really believe that. So I’m hoping if I think this is going to be fun, I’ll feel motivated. But I’m not even sure I’m really staying in that thought of this is going to be fun. I think I jump right to no, it’s not. A sneaky little thought that’s coming right after it. This is going to be fun. No, it’s not. So instead of feeling motivated, I’m feeling discouraged and I’m not even noticing and it doesn’t work. So I’ve tried, let’s get organized and plan. That’s my thought. I’m going to be organized and plan. And then I felt organized and I did some actions, like putting it on my calendar, putting my exercise clothes out the night before, creating a, ah, fun playlist to listen to, adding friends to Map my run so they can see if I’m exercising or not. Maybe you’ll find me on Map My Run now and send me a friend request. Putting weights in my office. I have weights in my office.
I can’t remember the last time I lifted them other than as a prop. And this still didn’t help me get consistent with exercise, in case you were wondering. As it turns out, feeling organized, if that’s an emotion, feeling organized does not create action beyond planning and organizing. I was trying to think and do all the right things here and it’s not working. I’m totally inconsistent. I still am. You all life coaches aren’t perfect. I’m getting curious about what I might need to feel in order to exercise with some consistency. And I’m thinking it’s not determined, it’s not motivated, it’s not organized. Uh, I’m wondering right now if it might need to be something like invested. It’s not going to be the same emotion for everybody else, right? Feeling determined is what a lot of people need for exercise. Or motivated or inspired or hopeful, maybe for me. And I’ll try it invested. If I felt invested, that might be the emotion I need to show up for me with consistent action in the exercise department. I believe the missing piece is the emotion that I need to generate to get the behavior I want. I haven’t landed on the right emotion. So let’s look at that in some other ways.
Here I’ve talked to you about the Mind Shift tool. Before I use this in the work I do, in its most basic form, it walks us through in this specific order what you think, what you feel, what you do. So often we spend a ton of time on what we think. And the buzzword for that today is mindset. Get your mind right, think positive thoughts. Watch what you put in your brain, what you think. And then we skip to what we do. Create good habits, say the right things, do the right things. We jump right over emotions as if emotions just happen. We don’t need to pay any attention to them. They’re just this thing that happens. I know we pay attention to them when we’re hurt, right? We want to blame other people when we’re hurt, or we want to solve for our hurt, or we want to heal for our hurt, but we don’t think about them. When we’re trying to be intentional in what we want for ourselves in our life, what we want to create, we skip right over it. Thinking emotions are a result of whatever action we create in our life. When really emotions, they’re coming from what we’re thinking. By the way, if you have some great outcome in your life, if you win the lottery and then you’re happy, it’s because you have a thought, I’m so glad I don’t have to worry about money anymore. Then you feel happy. There’s thoughts in there. The order is what we think, what we feel, what we do. If you want what you are thinking to drive what you will do, it will be so much more effective if you examine your emotions. Everyone else is telling you, changing your thoughts and actions is what you need to have a better life. I’m telling you, emotions are, uh, the missing link to solving your problem and creating a better life. Everyone else is saying, think this, do this. Nobody’s saying feel this. I’m saying, let’s feel this. Let’s know what we need to feel. So I don’t always want to use examples from my life. You guys will get so bored of my life. And my clients have graciously let me share their stories sometimes, which I appreciate so much because I know the examples are helpful to you. So I have another client story that I have permission to tell you.
Recently, I was working with someone who wanted to create more spiritual growth in her life. And this came up when we were working on an exercise on how to use emotions intentionally to help you create what you want in life. Usually m my client are going to do a worksheet before they get on a coaching call with me, and that was what we were doing here. So she brought the worksheet to the coaching session we were going through it we got to the part where she picked the emotions she thought would help her create the kind of spiritual growth she wanted in her life. She picked excited, and that sounded great at first, right? We want to do something. We often think, let’s get excited, and then we’ll take action. If I’m excited, I’ll do it. Excited sounded great. And then we dove in deeper. I love this exercise, because what we do next is we reverse engineer. From what you think, what you feel, what you do, what you think, what you feel, what you do is the order that it happens in us. But when we’re looking forward to something we want to create or be intentional about in our life, we can flip it around and reverse engineer it. So we set feeling excitement aside, and we worked on these things backwards. Spiritual growth was the final outcome she wanted. So I asked, what do you need to do in order to create that outcome? What you do? She said, Read Scripture on a frequent basis. Pray more, pray with people. Serve and encourage others. And, uh, this was all stuff she said she was already doing, but she figured she would need to keep doing it or do it more in order to grow. Then I asked, what kind of new things will you need to do to create the spiritual growth you want? She said, I think I’m going to need to connect with other people on a deeper level. I’m going to need to be open and authentic with others who are also on a spiritual journey. And she gave me an example of how she had opened up recently with some women from her church in a small group that she was in. And I asked her more like, what do you think about that? Tell me more. I don’t remember exactly what she said, but I remember she told me how she was feeling about it, and she was feeling nervous. Nervous feelings or, uh, nervous sensations in her body. I was like, now we’re getting somewhere. The things she really wanted to do to deepen her spiritual growth were to connect with other people in a more vulnerable way and on a deeper level. And, uh, the nervous feeling was fear, okay?
Because being vulnerable can be scary. In fact, many of you have probably heard of the Brene Brown book. She’s an author who wrote an entire book about vulnerability. She called it Daring Greatly. To be vulnerable means to dare greatly. It means to feel since fear and to move forward. When we have fear, what do we need? I think we need courage. Boom. Um, there it is. She didn’t need excitement to create the spiritual growth she was seeking. In her case, she needed courage. Getting the emotion right makes all the difference. The last step in reverse engineering is what you think. Okay, so going backwards, we know what she wants. Spiritual growth. We know what she’ll do connect with others who are also on a spiritual journey on a deeper and more authentic level. To do that, now we know she’s going to need to feel courage. Now we need to decide what she’s going to think to create courage. The thought my client landed on was, I’m willing even when I have fear. I’m willing even when I have fear. Listen, I want you all to know fear is not really a big deal unless you make it a big deal. Fear is a physiological emotion that we feel in our bodies. Saying words to other people about yourself and being authentic and opening up is not dangerous. It’s not going to kill you. The real risk, if we want to say there’s a risk, is that you think you might feel embarrassed or misunderstood or feel some shame or feel vulnerable if you open up m the risk is feeling an uncomfortable emotion. But emotions are natural and physiological responses to thoughts and then the hormonal and chemical reactions that our body has. Fear is that too. Fear is an emotional experience, and it’s okay to have some fear. Fear can come along with you. Fear happens to pair very nicely with courage. And I know the Bible has verses that say, do not fear. But I also know God gave us the emotion of fear along with all the other emotions, like courage, too. He gave us all of these emotions.
We don’t need courage if we don’t have fear. Courage is a beautiful partner to fear. That means fear can take along with you. When you think a thought that creates courage, you get to move forward with what you want to create in your life. Emotions are the missing piece that far too many of us ignore or we think is out of our control. They’re not. We can figure out what emotion we need to drive, the behaviors we want to have to create the outcome in our life that we want. When you do that, look out, world, look out. Don’t underestimate the power of the emotions you choose to hang out in. Whenever you are feeling an emotion, it will greatly direct what you do, the actions you take forward, and how you create the life you want. Getting your emotions right is the missing piece. And that’s all I have to say about that. Y’all, before I go, this is your boot camp reminder. Boot camp is March 22 through 26. If you happen to listen to this episode after those dates, don’t worry. The boot camp videos are staying live in the Renew Your Mind community on Facebook. So all you have to do is go join the group and to get the workbook, I don’t know how long the workbook is going to be available, but it will be for the month of March. To get the workbook, just go to Rympodcast.com and click on Bootcamp Drop in your email and poof the workbook is going to appear in your inbox. Hope to see you at boot camp. All right, y’all, that’s it for today. So I will catch you next week. Take care of you.
As an advanced certified life coach, I help Christian women trying to live their best lives, but they still feel unsatisfied and stuck. I teach thought management skills that work so you can enjoy life again and step into who God has created you to be. Don’t forget to head on over to Rympodcast Um.com to get my free resources or a free coaching call.
