BSB 104
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Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Bite-Sized Brilliance podcast. I'm your host, Dr. April Darley, and I wanna start the show off with this really interesting turn of phrase that I had a marketing mentor say to me once. She said, _"April, people will pay for painkillers before they pay for vitamins". _Now the point of that statement was really to say that when problems are big problems, they get more attention. It's like that old saying, _the squeaky wheel gets the oil,_ but problems don't always look like problems. And you see that a lot when someone is a high achiever or life is going pretty well for them in some way. And maybe you're sitting there thinking, you know what?
Life is good. I don't really have big problems. But you might have the hidden cost [00:01:00] of some things that you're doing every day that because they aren't showing up in a big way, you think they're not problematic at all. But yet you're sitting there feeling some kind of way, and usually it's frustration that something you want to do, have, be, or achieve isn't happening fast enough for you or at all, and you've tried all of these different solutions to try to figure it out, but yet that little thing that's not really a problem is just not coming together for you.
Problems don't always look like problems. And I wanna take us back since we're in January and this is all about that New year, new you, or this is that Capricorn energy where we feel that fire to change, to create new habits, new goals, all of these things. But I wanna take you into this space of doing that personal audit and really looking at what you think isn't a [00:02:00] problem, but reverse engineering that and look at something that maybe is very minor in your life. It's frustrating though, and let's break that down a little bit. Now we tend to have things we do repeatedly. That's thoughts we think, emotions we feel, or actions we take. And these are actually habits. You can have a mental habit, which is internal, and this is a string of thoughts you put together forms of belief and your brain will tag that string of thoughts or belief with particular emotions, and then that gets lodged in your brain as a story. So sometimes it's the internal habits that are creating the problem, meaning the thoughts, the emotions, or the beliefs have created something that is harmful for you and not [00:03:00] helpful.
I had another mentor say to me, _"Your brain loves a story, so why don't you tell it a good one?"_ But we get caught up sometimes and we don't speak very kindly to ourselves. We don't think positively about ourselves or a situation and we get into the negative mental habit of rumination or downward spiral.
These are things that affect you internally and eventually when you tell these limiting stories for so long, it starts to impact something that's called_ self-agency_. It's that part of you that believes it can do anything. The brain is very powerful. Your thoughts are very powerful. But if you tell these harmful stories because you've created this habit, then you are taking away your own self-agency.
There is a [00:04:00] piece of you that will begin to believe,_ "I can't do it. It's not possible for me"._ And so you settle. Your external environment is not where you want it to be because your internal house is very cluttered. Sometimes it's the other way around. Your external habits are affecting your mind. And I wanna give you an example that's in my own life, because if you've listened to me for a long time, you know I am not afraid to use myself as a role model or a cautionary tale.
I will absolutely tell you where I screwed up so that you do not repeat my mistake. Let me trailblaze that path of failure for you so you don't tread it, my friend. I'm not afraid to go there. I noticed that I had a problem with tv. Now, I grew up in a family where TV was on 24 7, but as I got [00:05:00] older and I moved out of my house. That wasn't my pattern. Sure I would watch tv, but about three years ago, I came home to take care of my mother. She was sick with cancer and so I was back in that household with 24/7 tv and as a caretaker, you just wanna be there with your person. So TV became t he habit again, 24 7.
And a little weird thing happened is that if you have mis wired signals of safety versus danger, let me share that with you. From an evolutionary perspective, back in the caveman days, if you were walking out in the wilderness and things got really quiet, your brain interprets that as a predator is in the area and you are in danger.
So it activates your sympathetic nervous system to prepare you to look for these [00:06:00] threats and to respond with fight, flight, or freeze if necessary. By the same token, we learned to listen to bird song as a sign that everything's okay if the birds are chirping, we're good. Now, translate that to the modern day world.
If you live in the city, there's some kind of background noise all the time, so you don't experience that. But my mom lived in the country like deep in the country and things were mostly quiet. And that kept me activated. And I'm wondering, I never asked my parents before they passed away why they kept the TV on 24/7.
I know that my mom said we kept it on if we had to leave the house to give the dogs some company. Right. And a lot of people do that. But there was something about sound that comforted them, and I'm wondering if they also had miswired silence as danger. And so what I had to do is when I clued that in, [00:07:00] I had to learn to sit in silence.
And let me tell you, my brain did not like it at first. I would start to get sleepy, and that is a sure sign when you are experiencing de stimulation and you get sleepy. This is your brain's way of trying to get you to bring more stimulation in. It's a form of dopamine withdrawal because you're so used to being overstimulated that your brain's like, _"I don't like this._
_Let's bring more stimulation in"_. So if you're sleepy, you'll maybe go turn on the radio or get up and move or do something different other than to sit in the silence. So that was the first thing I noticed. It was, oh, maybe I'm sabotaging here. And the next thing was I used to pride myself on being a multitasker, but multitasking is not real.
It's task switching. That's [00:08:00] what your brain does. Rapid task switching. So I used to really brag about my ability to have the TV on and to be able to write blogs and do work and do all these things. But as I've gotten older, I noticed that I wasn't able to do that as well anymore. So then my tasks were not getting finished like they used to.
I got distracted. That is a sign that your brain is no longer liking what you did before. S o I decided to do something different. I rewired that signal, that silence equals danger for myself using my methods that I teach in my coaching program, and then expanded it from there. But I still had a TV problem in the morning.
And I was like, you know what? It's a new year. It's a new opportunity to shut that off and see what happens, because now I don't get sleepy anymore in silence. But still, I was like, you know what? What [00:09:00] a great way to start my day with a little TV, a little checking emails, do my thing. So day one. I turned it off.
It was a little itchy for like the first 30 minutes. My brain is like, Ooh, I'm sleepy, and I'm not getting that external stimulation like I used to. But then what happened is I started to get these creative insights, almost like downloads, and I was writing all this stuff down and I'm like, wow, this is amazing.
I wonder if it was a fluke. So the next morning, again, no tv. And again, these amazing creative insights. So what I have discovered that my brain is incredibly creative from about 7:00 AM to 9:00 AM But what I was doing before with that external habit of just doing a little TV in the morning was killing my creativity, and I didn't even know it until I stopped it.
I didn't think I had a problem because [00:10:00] it wasn't a real problem. It wasn't something that I thought affected the quality of my life, so I didn't pay attention. Think about what habits you might be engaging internal or external habits that might create a tiny little problem in your life that until you cut it out, you don't even know you have it.
But the funny thing is, your subconscious is where your intuition lives, and your intuition is incredibly smart. You all have intuition. If you're listening to this right now, we all have intuition, but the question becomes, will you sit in that silence to listen to it? Are you aware of it? Do you discount it or blow it off?
Or do you let that wisdom filter up into your conscious brain and listen to those silent whisperings of your intuition that are telling you to do something [00:11:00] different, and maybe it's something you are absolutely resistant about doing. But until you cut it off consistently, you may not be able to spot some inefficiency in your current system. System of thinking, system of being, system of doing.
You have to embrace the silence to get the wisdom, because problems do not always look like problems. I wanted to leave you with this b ecause I've been stringing these episodes together, episode 102, 103, and this will be number 104. They're all designed to build on one another to really dissect the way you are living your life.
That is what you're doing and how you're thinking, how you're feeling. To find the areas where that is not efficient, that is no longer working for you. Maybe that worked for some old version of you, an old [00:12:00] identity, an old way of living that you're not currently in anymore, or that you are ready to move beyond.
But if you're doing the same old things you did before, thinking the same thoughts you did before, it's not going to help you reach that next level of your evolution, that the highest piece of you is ready, willing, and able to go to. So until you do something different, things may not be different for you.
And you may not experience that as a hardship, a heartache, or any kind of massive painkiller problem. It might just be a vitamin problem where if you make this tiny refinement to get you closer to your higher self's alignment, then it's the vitamin you need to make you the healthiest version [00:13:00] possible.
Think about it, my friends. That tiny piece of information could change your life. Now, if you need some guidance on digging into your subconscious where instinct and intuition live, then this is where I can help you because in my programs. They are bespoke. They are individual to you. We work with the way you think.
So this is not asking you to change the best parts of yourself. This is not a program that looks at you as if you are broken, that you need to be fixed or that something is wrong. We actually take the opposite perspective. There is something about you right now that is a massive strength, but it may be underutilized or misused in another area.
And what we do is find it, extract that genius, and shift the perspective on it so that you can amplify your greatness. There are things [00:14:00] hiding in blind spots in your subconscious that you need to know, and when you see them, it changes your life. Deeply and profoundly. Right now, if you are ready to evolve and move into the next evolution of yourself and your impact, go to aprildarley.com.
You can schedule a free consultation, or if you are a fast action taker, go ahead and sign up for the program. I am ready, willing, and able to serve you, my friend. All right, until next week. Happy auditing. I'll see you then. Bye-bye.
