BSB 121
===
Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Bite-Sized Brilliance podcast. I'm your host, Dr. April Darley, and I wanna ask you a question. Have you felt the extreme frustration that comes with doing so much personal development work? You've worked on an issue from so many different angles, but you still aren't getting the results that you want.
Can you relate? Well, I certainly can, and recently I was talking to a few friends about the very same thing. So why does this happen? One of the things that I do for my clients is help them to redesign the way they think. I give them these frameworks and systems to see things from multiple perspectives. Because here's the truth, if the problem were logical, you would've solved it already.
You're a smart cookie. You know what to do. You can follow a recipe or a blueprint or a plan, and that works for a little [00:01:00] while until it doesn't, or in some cases you could spend thousands of dollars, I have done this, and not see any results at all because that blueprint or plan was created to work for that person, and it may not even remotely be what you need.
When that happens, it's often because we're diagnosing the wrong problem, or the problem we're trying to solve just lives on a deeper level, and it has more roots than what we're aware of. And that's why hiring a coach or getting an outside perspective can be helpful because when you're in that situation, you are locked in to a singular perspective, and you may not be aware that just shifting the way you're looking at it is the very thing that you need to create movement again.
When you have done so much work on a particular [00:02:00] issue, and there are three issues in life that give us the most trouble. If you think of these as three different buckets that all problems tend to fall into, here they are. It's money, which is money, job, career, finances, all the material things like clothes and cars and houses.
Love which is everyone you love or everyone who has ever loved you. This is romantic partners, current or exes. This is family you were born into or friends that you took on as family. Anybody that has that really close connection to you. It can even be coworkers, or I've seen acquaintances pop up here as well.
But it's just someone you have created some kind of loving or trusting bond with. And the third bucket is called you. This is everything you [00:03:00] think or believe to be true about yourself, your circumstances, and the roles that you play in life. For example, you the entrepreneur, you the parent, you the taxpayer, all these different roles that you play, either given to you by others or self-assigned, can cause a lot of stress for you.
Now, it's true that external things seem stressful, but in reality, it's often how we are thinking about these external things that is the real cause of our stress, our worry, and anxiety. And when it comes to someone who has done so much personal development, and they have seen improvements in multiple areas, but they hit that plateau. They hit that space where they're like, _"You know what? I know my next level is just... I'm inches away from it, but I can't see how to get there." _
And often, when [00:04:00] you start working on personal development, you've done all the basic things. You have journaled, you have meditated, you have said your affirmations, you have visualized your future self.
But sometimes it hasn't filtered down enough to the identity level. And this is what I want to talk to you about today. Because the identity lives in the subconscious level. And one of the things I teach my clients is to look at the world through a three brain system. Instead of having just one brain like we think, imagine if we had our brain with three different roles, a logical role, an emotional role, and a survival role.
And it's almost like these are three different people who are trying to out-compete each other to get in the driver's seat and run your life. Now, you might prefer that logical brain to be the one in charge. And [00:05:00] it's true that it's the brain that loves a good plan, that loves the strategy, it organizes things.
But this is the brain we actually use the least amount of time, only around 3%. And you make over 30,000 decisions every single day. And only 3% of those are done intentionally and logically. The other 97% are done on automatic pilot. At some point in your life, you created habits, systems, and an identity to carry out these actions without your conscious thought.
These are subconscious actions. And the subconscious, if you think it's anything that lives below logical thought. So it is your emotional brain. It's that desire to fit in, to be loved, to belong, to be heard, listened to, and accepted. And then you have that survival brain. This is like a [00:06:00] caveman running the show.
It wants to know that you have plenty of money so that you can buy all the things you need for life, food, shelter. You can take care of your mate and your tribe or your family. So in modern day society, anything in that money bucket is going to deeply and immediately hit that survival level. And that survival level will hijack the other pieces of your brain and take over.
So you're hearing a lot about nervous system work and emotional regulation. And in part, it's because this survival brain gets activated by something it senses in your environment or a thought you gave it. And it sends out the equivalent of a SWAT team every single time. It's only when you learn to change your thinking and how you are perceiving external events and even yourself that you can really begin to make a difference and not be so activated all the [00:07:00] time.
And when you have done a lot of work on these money, love, and you, so maybe you have done money mindset, your income is great, you're no longer worrying about paying bills or your future, your retirement. Then you might shift your attention to one of these other areas, love and you. And so maybe you have worked on the love area too, but you haven't worked enough on the you.
And you'll see this when you have achieved a lot in your life. You've got the money where you want it. You've got the romantic relationship where you want it. Then you start to get a little itchy and you might start wondering what's next. What does life mean for me? What is my purpose? And when you hit this level That level of thinking is a clear indicator that the you level, the identity level, is the one that needs to be worked on next.
And throughout the different chapters of your life, these three buckets are [00:08:00] gonna be jockeying for first place on what you need to prioritize at that current chapter in your life. So if you are wondering,_ "What is next for me? What is my life purpose? How can I help the world?"_ Because it feels like a dumpster fire right now, and you feel like you're not doing enough, this is identity level.
And when you begin to change your identity consciously and purposefully, you start to see that forward movement that you crave again. Because what happens is the brain has two big jobs. It's designed to keep you safe, i.e. alive, and the second job is to be energy efficient. Now, you may not know this, but your brain uses a lot of energy.
It uses about 20% of your daily energy intake. So if you are a person who ruminates or has a busy mind, is constantly thinking, you are burning through your [00:09:00] reserves of energy. And this is why it feels like you can be exhausted or burnt out or just you have no capacity. And it's because you spun your wheels, you burned through that mental energy, and it feels like you don't have anything left to go do life.
If you are one of those people, you are keeping your brain needlessly activated unconsciously. It's like you're not doing this on purpose, but there is an inner conflict at your lower levels where the emotional brain or the survival brain do not feel safe or like something's possible for you. And if they don't, they're going to stay activated.
Your brain has learned to be energy efficient by creating these automatic programs. It's things that you have to do intentionally in the beginning, and I'm gonna use the gym here. If you wake up one day and say, _"You know what? I'm gonna start hitting the gym," _you have to go do that on purpose because you have [00:10:00] created a habit of not going to the gym.
You maybe sleep in or you sit on the couch and watch TV. So you have got to expend a lot of upfront energy to teach your brain to do something different, and this is why it's so common for people to backslide and have slip-ups. Because your brain is literally designed to fight forward progress that is new.
This is not a default in you. It doesn't mean that you're a failure or you don't have enough discipline. It literally means your brain is doing what it's supposed to do, and is trying to push you back into an automatic program that doesn't require much energy to run. And it takes about 60 to 65 days at a minimum of you making a conscious mental override to do the new thing before you even remotely begin to create an automatic program.
So hang tight if you're in that messy middle space where you're trying to do something [00:11:00] new. You will get there. But until you get to where something becomes automatic, the brain is gonna expend a lot of energy, and it doesn't like to do that. What happens is when you are not seeing the change you want in your external reality, when you have done so much personal development and so much work, it's easy to think, _"I must not be aligned. My nervous system must not feel safe. I must not have an energetic container that can hold all this."_
And that could be true, or it could also be true that you are running unconsciously, subconsciously old identities that are actively sabotaging you, and you haven't done an update.
I'm going to give you an example. I recently had a couple of clients last week, and they both said to me they have this goal. They want to feel more confident networking so that they can get promotions, and do better in business, and just [00:12:00] feel better overall. And they both said out loud, "I'm socially awkward. I'm socially awkward, so this is hard for me."
Now, that may seem like a throwaway thought. It may seem like a normal thing to say, but what you've just told me is that you have created an identity of a socially awkward person. And so your brain never likes to make you a liar. It's going to find evidence to show you why that's true, and you have somewhere along the way accepted the truth of that identity.
You have thought those thoughts often enough. You have felt those feelings often enough to create an energetic pathway that is an expressway to feeling bad. And when you try to take the steps to make your goal happen, you're going to go right back to those thoughts and those feelings that tell you you're not good [00:13:00] enough, that you're socially awkward.
It will require you to build a new identity. And step one is decide that you're not going to be that person anymore. That was an old version of you. Maybe at some point in your life you were socially awkward, but if you are tired of that BS and you are ready to do something different in your life, then it will require you to think differently about yourself, money, love, and you, about your identity, and that's where the work comes in next.
This is about redesigning the way that you think. Redesigning the way that you are perceiving everything that is happening inside and out from a new filter, from a new program. And this can be challenging to do without external help unless you are very diligent and you are very trained at shifting your thinking.
And if that is not [00:14:00] you right now, then that is something I specialize in helping my clients find. I teach them this system to where they can, with a little bit of practice, switch gears between these three brains. They're able to quickly identify which brain is trying to run the show, and then they can take control and shift that whole overthinking spiral away.
So you can literally think yourself out of a spiral. And I know so many people who are nervous system practitioners say that is not possible, and maybe it's not for them. But I guarantee you, I teach my clients how to do it every single day. It takes practice because shifting your thinking will require you to think differently.
And it's not done in isolation. So yes, these nervous system or somatic techniques are also helpful, but you have to be willing to be someone different who does different [00:15:00] things. That is the bare minimum to see progress in your life. It takes courage to keep doing new things intentionally. It takes courage to stop doing old things that are run automatic without your conscious consent.
And it takes the decision over and over, making that conscious decision that my life is going to be different and here's how. So strategy is actually the easiest piece when you wanna create change. It is the identity piece that can take longer because you may not be aware it exists. And this is why getting coaching is so valuable because it shows you where the thinking is going and where the error in that thinking doesn't match the new reality that you're trying to create.
And then I help my clients release those old identities, [00:16:00] any old emotions associated with that, fear, guilt, shame, failure, unworthy, being alone. And so you can create your next level life that makes you happy. That's it. I have a mission statement to help people do life better. That's it. That's all I want for you is to go do life better, whatever that means for you.
Whatever level of impact or service that is for you, I want you to do life better in your own mind. I want you to have that kind of balance and peace that your thoughts aren't spiraling out of control. That you're not worried about money, love, or yourself. That you have trust in these areas, and that you're not getting sucked in to the dumpster fire that is a lot of the planet right now.
And if you would like to find those deeper levels of trust, of faith, of identity, of safety, stability, security, [00:17:00] then set up a complimentary consultation with me at aprildarley.com, and we will talk about how we can literally redesign the way you think to get you to your next level and achieve your goals, or to just stop the spiral of overthinking, because that is so helpful, my friends.
All right, I am wishing you a very balanced and pleasurable week, and thanks for tuning in. If you've enjoyed this episode, please comment, like, share, give me a review. I am so grateful for your time, attention, and wishing you the very best. Until next week, goodbye.
