Episode 36: Hearing Your Thoughts

Good morning, everybody! Welcome to today’s episode of The Work Of Becoming podcast where I want to talk to you a little bit about mornings and having time to actually hear yourself think.

So, for context, in the winter, usually around November when daylight savings happens, I shift into a mode where I actually really, really enjoy getting up early. It seems a little backwards, but for some reason in the winter when it’s dark and cold outside, it actually feels easier for me to get up really early at the crack of dawn, like literally 5:00 AM or 6:00 AM. I started this practice last week. I felt the desire, and I was like, “You know what? I’ve been waking up at 7:00 or 8:00 AM, and I really want to shift back and start waking up early.”

The first couple of days I did it, it kind of hit me all over again why I enjoy the practice so much, and that is this. When I wake up in the morning and I creep out to our living room and I turn the light on really dim and I turn on our electric fireplace and I sit there and drink my coffee in the total quiet, I have time to hear myself think. That is really, really, really crucial from a mindset and behavior perspective, and here’s why.

I work with a lot of clients who are, I would say they would consider themselves to be medium or high achievers. So this is you if you’re a person who probably got good grades in school. You might be a little bit of a perfectionist. You have a lot of dreams and desires for your life. You feel like you have this standard that you need to achieve. When I work with these people, and this, I would say, particularly applies to women, is that for us as women (for me too), one of the things that we’ve done in order to survive in life is we’ve kind of shoved down our inner monologue. We’ve turned the volume down on our inner monologue.

I know for me one of the reasons that I turned the volume down on that inner monologue was because for a very long time that inner monologue was extremely negative. There was a lot of diet culture, a lot of body insecurity in that inner monologue. And so, in order to be able to live my life and do the things I needed to do, I simply stopped listening to myself. Here’s the problem with that strategy.

When you do that, when you turn the volume down on your inner monologue and you can’t hear your own thoughts, you lose the ability to see how your thoughts are connecting to your behavior. So this is when you feel like, “Ugh, I don’t know why I keep acting this way. I keep skipping the gym, and I don’t know why. I keep emotionally eating at night, and I don’t know why. I can’t fall asleep at night, and I keep procrastinating my bedtime, and I don’t know why.” When it feels like your behavior is outside of your control, when it feels like you’re responding to impulses and you are kind of acting out of accordance with your true self, usually that is because you are not hearing the thoughts that are creating feelings in your body that are directing your behavior.

So one of the first things that we do with clients in Alliance Coaching is we help raise that awareness of what are you thinking and what are you feeling, because we can actually influence, if not dictate, the thoughts in our brain. And so, that is the best and most sustainable way to control our behavior is to have a really, really, really good handle on what’s going on in our brain, being able to hear what our brain is saying, and then being able to talk back.

And so, going back to mornings, for me, having that 30 minutes of complete and total silence in the early morning is so critical because I am able to really hear what my brain is saying. I am able to journal through my inner monologue or voice memo through my inner monologue. I’m able to take time to be with myself. I think especially in the culture that we have right now, it is really hard for us to actually have time where we are just alone with our thoughts. This is why a lot of people have a problem with doing nothing. This is why a lot of people have a problem with resting because when you’re just sitting there on the couch and you don’t have your phone to distract you and you don’t have the TV on to distract you and you don’t have work to think about to distract you, when you really force yourself to sit down and be mindful in your body, all that’s left is your relationship with yourself. And if that relationship is uncomfortable, if that inner monologue is nothing something you’re used to hearing, you’re gonna really run away from that.

And so, the lesson I want to impress on you in today’s podcast is that if you aren’t taking time to be aware of your thoughts, to hear yourself think — it doesn’t even have to be in the early mornings. It can be at night. It can be taking a ten-minute meditation or something throughout the day. But if you don’t feel like you can hear your own thoughts, if you aren’t taking time to cultivate a relationship with yourself, that is one area I would really, really, really encourage you to focus on in order to get the behavior change done that you want to get done.

That is what I’ve got for you today. I want to remind you that if that’s something that you need help with, Alliance Coaching is gonna be an amazing opportunity for you. We do have applications open right now, and I would encourage you to snag a spot before the new year hits because typically our volume of applications spikes in the new year, and so, if you want to make sure that you get a spot and you get paired with a coach and you don’t have to wait, I would take advantage of that now. I think going into the new year with support and going through the holidays with a little bit of support is really crucial.

Something that you should know is that we do actually shut down completely, so your 12-week package would skip over the last two weeks of the year. That wouldn’t count towards your package, and so, you do have time and space to be in holiday mode and not think about coaching but also get your spot in time. So we have spots available. We have limited spots available, but we do have spots right now that are open. So if that’s something you’ve been thinking of, I would jump on it! Happy, happy, happy day, and I will talk to you in the next one!