​

Hey Reader,

"Who has made more for humanity? Women or men?"

A few days ago, I was "doing research", aka scrolling on Instagram (LOL, I know you relate!), when one of those interview-style street videos appeared on my feed. On it, a guy was interviewing people at the mall about their opinion about who had contributed more to humanity, women or men?

One of the girls interviewed responded, "Women, of course".

The interviewer, trying to rebuke her response, then continued to ask, "Who walked on the moon first?", "Who's the richest person in the world?", "Who invented the light bulb?"

In response, the girl simply replies, "Fair enough, but women gave birth to all of them."

This is not to point out who has made "more" for humanity.

This, I believe, is a small reminder that no matter what your relationship is to the women in your life, let's not forget to express our gratitude for the women who gave us (and everyone we love) life.

Happy Mother's Day to all the amazing mothers who make up such a big part of who we are!

Stop Negative Thoughts

Reset Your Mind for Positive Thinking

I will be honest with you... This title is a little misleading.

There's no way to 100%, completely, STOP negative thoughts from happening. It's simply not possible because they are a part of being human. We evolved to have the capacity to experience negative emotions for a reason.

The reason: Simple. They help us survive by making us notice and consider everything that may endanger our growth and evolution.

So, if you ever find your inner critic (that little voice that often judges, spirals, and doubts yourself) activating at times, I want you to know there's nothing wrong with you.

If you experience worry, rumination, if you are constantly saying things like:

"Why did I do this?", "Why did I say that?", "Why didn't I do it that way?" "You idiot, how could you do this?"

If you constantly think about the 'what-ifs':

"What if 'this' happens?" or "What if 'that' happens?", and you get stuck in this cycle of overthinking and worrying about every possible scenario, you aren't alone, we all do it, and this is for you.

While we cannot completely eradicate all negative thoughts we have, we can start experimenting with tools that help us reset our minds. So, that on those moments when you start listening to all that your inner critic has to say, you can take it and turn it into an inner coach that propels you to move forward instead.

Here's why this is important: You are always talking to yourself. According to studies, we internally talk to ourselves at a rate equivalent to speaking 4,000 words a minute. That's basically a full essay in just one day.

The key to shifting this negative self-talk and this internal chatter we have with ourselves in our heads is NOT to stop talking to ourselves. The challenge is to learn to do it more effectively.

Your inner voice is not the enemy, it's a multipurpose tool at your disposal that helps you make sense of your life.

The function of your inner voice

Your internal self-talk is how you silently use language to reflect on your own life. It has 4 main functions:

1. Your internal voice helps you remember things, like when you silently repeat the name of someone you just got introduced to or when you repeat the lyrics of a song you just heard for the first time. That kind of self-talk is part of what is called your verbal working memory system.
2. It helps you rehearse, simulate, and prepare ahead of time for what you will need to say, like when you go over what you are going to say before a big presentation, an important talk, or a stressful interview.
3. We use our inner voice to control and motivate (and let's be honest, demotivate) ourselves. Like when you are running or working out and you say to yourself, "Come on, you got this", "Keep going, you can do it.", "Only one more mile, only one more rep..." Or to control yourself, like when you are reaching out for another cookie and you hear yourself say, "No, you said you were going only to have one cookie, and you aren't even hungry right now".
4. Your inner voice also helps you make sense of the world and shapes your sense of self and your place in the world. When you get rejected, when you fail, when you get into arguments, when you are experiencing loss, anxiety, or stress, you use your inner voice to give meaning and make sense of the circumstances that are happening in your life. You create a story to help you understand what you are going through and who you are.

The issue is when we get caught in this incessant vortex of doom and anxiety and negative self-talk that doesn't let you use your mind to solve your problems, but rather gets you stuck on them.

This is the moment we need to learn to manage and harness the power of our internal voice.

Toolkit to reset your mind

You have multiple tools available at your disposal that you can use to manage your emotions more effectively and improve your inner voice. You just need to figure out what the unique combinations are that work for you based on who you uniquely are and what your goals are.

Psychologist Ethan Kross shares practical techniques in his book "Chatter: The Voice In Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It" to make our inner voice work in our favor and change the most important conversation we have each day: the one we have with ourselves.

There's not only one thing you can do to manage your inner voice. Instead, there are multiple different practical tools you can use together and experiment with to improve your self-talk. A few of them that I use myself include:

• Positive distanced self-talk: One way to create distance when you are negatively talking to yourself is to use language to distance yourself from the situation and see it from an outside perspective.

Whenever you are trying to work through a difficult experience and coach yourself through a problem, use your name and refer to yourself in the second person 'you'.

A few examples of what you can say to yourself would be things like: "Jenny, you got this, you can do it", or "Jenny, everyone makes mistakes, you have made mistakes before, you have learned from them, and you will be fine".

• Imagine you are advising a friend: Another way to create distance and broaden your perspective when you are experiencing a lot of rumination (thinking about the past) or worry (thinking about the future) is to talk to yourself like you were advising a friend.

Imagine what you would say to a friend or someone you love experiencing the same problem or challenge as you are. Think about the advice you'd give that person, and then try to apply it yourself. We are often much better at advising others than we are to ourselves. Use this to your advantage.

• Journal and write expressively: Writing down your deepest thoughts and feelings and putting them down on paper allows you to better organize them. Journaling is such a powerful tool because it helps you make sense of what you feel in ways that improve how you feel over time.

When you are stuck in a cycle, commit to doing it for 15 to 20 minutes and let yourself jot down all your thoughts without worrying about grammar or spelling.

• Engage in Mental Time Travel: Another way to create distance between your thoughts and broaden your perspective is to practice "time travel" to the past or the future to highlight the impermanence of your current emotional state.

You can do this by going forward and thinking about how you’ll feel in a week, a month, a year, or even longer from now. Or by going backwards to thinking about things your ancestors, your parents/grandparents, your community, or even yourself experienced and survived before, and that makes what you are experiencing now seem smaller.

• Organize and create order in your environment: When you feel out of control internally, when your emotions and thoughts feel like they are too much, organizing your environment helps you create the order and control you crave to make sense of things externally.

This manifests in things like creating to-do lists, organizing your desk and drawers, and creating a plan to help create order externally.

• Increase your exposure to green spaces: It has been proven by numerous studies that spending time in green spaces helps replenish and restore your brain and your attention, and gets your mind out of your problems or the difficult situations you are encountering.

Things like going for a walk or getting outdoors in places lined with trees or green spaces help you ground yourself in the present moment and diminish negative self-talk, rumination, and overthinking.

Alternatively, if you don't have green spaces close by or it's not possible to get outside, things like watching videos and photographs of nature, or even listening to natural sounds, can create a sense of greater inner peace and improve self-talk.

• Seek out awe-inspiring experiences: The feeling of awe and wonder helps us transcend our current circumstances and put our problems into perspective.

When you are in the presence of something that feels vast and indescribable, something that feels bigger than yourself, when you experience the emotion of awe, it leads to a shrinking of the self. You feel smaller when you are contemplating something that feels vast; it makes you and your concerns feel a lot smaller and a lot more insignificant in the moment, and that helps you deal with them.

When you shrink yourself in that way, your problems shrink too.

Find the things that inspire a sense of awe in you, whether that may be breathtaking natural sights, remarkable pieces of art, or the remembrance of amazing human feats, and cultivate that sense of wonder when you find your negative thoughts spiraling out of control.

Stay Committed to Your Goals

A Proven Framework: WOOP

When you want to stay committed to your goals, there's a simple, science-based mental strategy called "WOOP" that people can use to identify and fulfill their goals and change their habits.

The acronym for "WOOP" stands for:

W- Wish. What is your wish? What is your goal? Be very specific about your goal. For example, "I want to run a marathon by the end of this year".

O- Outcome. What is going to happen if you achieve the goal? List out the outcomes you would get if you accomplish the goal. For example, "As a result, my physical and mental health will improve, and I 'll feel more confident and energized".

O- Obstacles. What are your personal obstacles that are going to stand in the way of you achieving this goal? What might prevent you from accomplishing it? For example, "I don't have a lot of time to train" or "I tend to procrastinate on things".

P- Plan. This is where you devise a plan (or implementation intentions) to overcome the obstacles you identified before. You do this by creating "If, Then" statements. "If I find myself doing X, then I will do Y".

For example, if your goal is to run every night after work, you can create an implementation statement like "WHEN I get home from work, THEN I will immediately change into my running clothes and go for a run. IF I find myself procrastinating, THEN I will remind myself of my intention and the positive outcomes of achieving this goal."

Another example is to use this framework to improve your inner voice, "If I'm stuck in a cycle of rumination, negative self-talk, or berating myself incessantly, then I will use the tools I know that help me ground myself, like mental time travel, positive distanced self-talk, journaling, or getting outside around nature."

By mentally contrasting your desired outcome with any potential obstacles and then creating a specific plan to overcome these obstacles, the WOOP framework helps people stay motivated, overcome challenges, and increase their chances of achieving their goals.

The 4 Levels of Creative Consciousness

Where are you right now?

This past week, I was doing a meditation, and the teacher talked about the 4 levels of "Creator Consciousness".

I had never heard creativity and creative energy described in this way before and I thought it was an interesting way of noticing from what place and type of mindset we are approching the things we are constantly creating in our lives (our habits, our schedule, our relationships, our work, and really, anything we make tangible in our lives).

1. The first level is when you think things are happening 'to' you. In this level, there's a lot of complaining, overthinking, and feeling powerless, and like a victim of the circumstances.
2. The second level is when your thoughts evolve from that place, and you start believing that things are happening 'for' you. In this level, there's this sense that a bigger force is looking out for you. It requires developing a sense of trust and faith that everything has a purpose, even when you don't necessarily see it yet.
3. The third level is when you accept your power and agency in shaping things, and you start believing that things are happening 'by' you. In this level, there's an acceptance of your power, of your agency to act, to create, and build things in your life. It requires a sense of agency over your life and often involves believing we have control over our destiny.
4. The fourth level is when you surrender and you believe that things are happening 'through' you. You start believing that you are a vessel for divine expression and that you are an instrument for bigger things to happen. It's when you let go of your need to control to let things come to life through you.

Wherever you are in this moment in time, do your best to acknowledge it. The first step towards moving forward on any of these levels is creating the acceptance and the awareness of where you are at right now.

Let go of anything that doesn't serve you. Let go of your mistakes, let go of your successes, let go of your expectations, let go of the approval of other people, let go of the status, let go of who you thought you were. And then, ask yourself this:
What remains afterwards?

Your life is not a linear journey. We are always moving up and down these levels at any moment.

Start noticing where you are right now and start moving towards where you would like to be next.

There's something seeking you. If we are able to remember to open our channels to receive, this life can be really fun and special.

On Surrender

Surrendering is not giving up.

The only thing we need to surrender is our need to control.

Surrendering doesn't mean quitting or giving up.

True surrender means letting go of the things that no longer serve you. It means being certain of your capabilities, of your effort, and knowing that no matter the outcomes, you did your best. And then, letting go of the rest.

While you resist something, you continue to repeat it because you haven't understood the lesson it brought.

Acceptance and certainty in yourself are the only things that lead you to stop repeating situations and behavior patterns that don't help you move forward.

Start surrendering all that is keeping you stuck and small.

What You’re Looking Through

The Power of Your Perspective

This is a powerful passage from the Book of Awakening, by Mark Nepo, about the power of your perspective.

A good reminder that the lens through which you look at the world shapes what you see.

If you want to see the gray and dark sides of the world, you will see it.

But if, in contrast, you want to see the sunlight and the brilliance of the world, you will see it too.

At this moment of your life, through what kind of window are you looking at things?

Step in and notice the truly amazing little things. Or step back and look at the big picture. In any case, you will notice that it's your perspective that changes what you see.

A Question For You

"Are you on the right beach?”

A question from ​The Strategy Deck​ by Seth Godin, via James Clear's 3-2-1 Newsletter:

Every path has its own challenges. Are you taking the type of challenges that will help you move towards where you want to go next?

Love creating your mind one day at a time? Forward this to a friend so they can get in on the action and sign up below. Subscribe to The Created Mind Thank you for reading and sharing, Jenny ​​​​

​