Episode 20: How Much Joy Does That Thought Bring To Your Life?

Last week's episode was about noticing and understanding your thoughts, rather than trying to control them.  The next step, once you become aware of your thinking, is to give your thought a "product review." In other words, you evaluate whether the thought you are thinking is helping you create what you want in your life, or helping you create what you don't want. Tune in to today's episode to find out how evaluating a thought is not the same as judging yourself for thinking it, and get some concrete examples of how to practice this skill. 

Think New Thoughts Academy:

Join the Think New Thoughts Academy to get help applying the tools you're learning on the podcast.  

100 Thoughts for More Joy

Wanna think some new thoughts?  Here are 100 of my favorites that you can try out. Be warned, though. Choosing to really, truly believe even one of these thoughts could drastically impact the way you view yourself and others, and might completely change your life. :)

Full Transcript:

You're listening to the Think New Thoughts podcast with Emily Ricks, episode number 20. How much joy does that thought bring to your life?

I'm Emily Ricks, and this is Think New Thoughts, a life coaching podcast to help you find more joy in your relationships. In each episode, I'll share a simple idea that will help you see things in a new way so you can love God, your neighbor, and yourself more deeply than you ever have before. If you're ready to literally change your mind, I think you'll like it here.

Hello, welcome back. So last week, we talked about noticing and understanding your thoughts rather than trying to control them.

Today, I want to explore two more words that describe what I'm aiming to do with my thoughts or aiming to help other people do with their thoughts. The words are evaluate and choose. So in general, I feel like the four words work best when they're taken in order.

First, we notice. Without any judgment, without any evaluation even, without being in a hurry to change what we're thinking, we just notice. Then, we make a CTFAR model and seek to understand how our circumstance is actually separate from the thought we're thinking about it.

We start to see how the thought creates a feeling that drives actions or inactions, and those actions produce a result. The most common thing I see with my clients as we do this part is that they want to start really judging themselves. Once they get some insight about how they show up when they're thinking a thought.

So sometimes on the action line, we notice that we're purposely avoiding talking to someone we're upset with, or we overeat or over consume media to try to push the feeling down, or we get angry and speak in a harsh tone of voice. So a lot of people, as they become aware of their own actions, then slip into self judgment. That sounds like, oh, I'm a terrible person.

Look how awful I'm being on my action line and the way I'm treating other people. Look how terrible I am because I'm thinking this terrible thought. And this is the point where it's crucial to stay open and objective and not slip into self judgment.

When you start judging yourself, then you jump back into the land of trying to control your thoughts. Oh, I shouldn't think that. I need to stop thinking that.

And you start creating feelings of panic and dread and fear and shame and disgust. And so that's the point where I would invite you back into noticing what you're thinking, noticing the emotions you're creating with your thinking, and seeing if you can understand what's going on and what you're creating from an objective viewpoint. Instead of entering the downward spiral of self judgment, I recommend that you evaluate the thought.

So not judge the thought as bad or wrong and not judge yourself as bad or wrong for thinking it. Just assess whether this thought helps you create things you want in your life, or whether it helps you create things you don't want. I call this giving your thought a product review, just like it's a book or a dress or a candle that you bought on amazon.com. Give your thought a product review.

So once we've noticed what we're thinking and gotten some understanding of the feeling actions and result that the thought creates, I love asking my clients to give their thought a rating. Okay. From one to five stars, how much joy does this thought bring to your life when you think it? And notice the question is not from one to five stars.

How terrible are you for thinking this thought and acting on the feeling it creates when you think it? No, we're evaluating the thought. We're not judging ourselves. How much joy does this thought bring to your life? I often slip into believing the thought I don't have enough time.

This thought feels so true to me when I'm believing it, when I'm running around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to do a million things. But over the years, I have taken many opportunities to slow my mind down and notice this thought. I've made models to understand the stress and urgency and pressure this thought creates for me.

And I have seen the things I do and the things I don't do when I'm operating from that stress and pressure. I've realized there are promptings from God I don't ask for or don't follow when I'm believing the thought I don't have enough time. So from one to five stars, how much joy does this thought bring to my life? For me, this thought I don't have enough time doesn't help me to feel grateful or centered or calm or open to connect with God and others.

And since those things are all really important to me, I give this thought I don't have enough time, a one-star review for how much joy it brings to my life. When I believe this thought, I feel rushed and annoyed at requests from other people. I'm less creative.

I make less healthy food choices. I deprioritize sleep and feel more tired and less mentally sharp. I exercise less when I believe I don't have enough time.

And I don't allow myself to really enjoy the things I'm doing and the people I'm interacting with. So if I can objectively evaluate this thought, I don't have enough time, I can assess and conclude that it's not really helping me live in alignment with what I value and who I want to be. So do you see kind of how this works to evaluate a thought? Here's an example from my husband.

At work, when things don't go the way he planned or the way he would have wanted them to go at his dental office, sometimes Kyle thinks this thought, I shouldn't have to deal with this. He has taken the time to notice this thought and understand the feelings, actions, and result it creates for him. And he has decided that this thought, I shouldn't have to deal with this, is a one-star thought for him in terms of bringing joy into his life and helping him show up as the employer that he wants to be.

So here's his evaluation, his product review of this thought, I shouldn't have to deal with this. This thought fills me with negativity, self-pity, and criticism. This thought is an argument with reality that I can never win.

It puts me in a mindset of frustration and resistance rather than focusing on how I can provide training and growth for my employees and quality care for my patients. It decreases my problem-solving capacity and creates stress and negativity that's the opposite of what I want to experience in my office. Can you see how empowering it is to notice, understand, and evaluate a thought? If you're at this point where you can give a thought an objective product review, where you're not judging yourself, you're not afraid of the thought, you're not trying to push the thought away, you're just aware that you actually want to create a different result than the one you're by thinking this thought, then you're ready for the fourth word, which is choose.

Notice, understand, evaluate, and then choose. I am passionate about claiming my power to choose how I want to live, claiming my power to choose how I want to feel and how I want to show up in my relationships. I'm passionate about teaching my kids that they have the power to choose who they want to become.

The main reason I started this podcast is that I want to help as many people as I can claim their God-given power to choose what they ultimately want to create in their lives. And that all begins with choosing our thoughts. You really do get to choose what you want to believe.

You really do get to choose in the end what thoughts you want to think, which by extension means you get to choose what emotions you want to create more of by thinking those thoughts, what actions you want to take and not take in your life. And you really do get to choose who you want to be and the impact you want to have in your family and in your community and in the world. Your circumstances don't determine your mood.

You do as you choose the thoughts you want to think. And the more awareness you gain about your thoughts and what they create for you, the better able you will be to consciously choose to think different thoughts. Choosing what you want to think is one of the most empowering things you can do in your life.

No matter what happens to you, no matter what anyone else says or does, you have the power to choose how you're going to think about it. And it feels so good to exercise that power and to align your thinking with what you really value and what you really want to create. Now, this is a process.

It takes time. Once you notice and understand and evaluate a thought, you probably won't just be able to snap your fingers and stop ever thinking it. I still slip back into thinking I don't have enough time.

And then I use the stress and pressure that I feel when I'm thinking that thought as a compassionate alarm clock that says, Hey, you're stressed. Take a look at what you're thinking right now. And then I notice I'm believing I don't have enough time.

I become aware of the things I'm doing and not doing and how much I'm rushing. And then I gently remind myself that I have exactly the right amount of time to do what God wants me to do today. And from that place, I can slow down and ask him to help me know what that is.

And the stress and the pressure start to melt away. And I remember that I don't need to hurry that I can be still and know that God is God. The stress and pressure don't melt away because I suddenly got more hours in a day.

They melt away because I choose to change the way that I'm thinking. I can choose to believe that stillness and connecting with God is actually the most productive thing I can do in a day. I can also choose to believe that I don't have enough time and life is too crazy to slow down.

And I can run around frantically trying to check things off my list as fast as I can. You can choose to every day is an opportunity to learn from our experience, to taste the bitter, so we can come to prize the good, to experiment in the laboratory and see what our thoughts create and blow stuff up sometimes, and then make intentional choices of what we want to believe and how we want to live. So if you want to find new thoughts to think, look in the scriptures, ask people you admire for new thoughts about a situation that you're facing that you know they have faced.

Pray for God to put new thoughts into your mind, write them down as they come, and then exercise your power to choose and choose to think those new thoughts. After years of doing thought work, multiple life coach certifications, and working with dozens of clients, I have put together a list of 100 thoughts you can choose to think if you want to feel more joy. Think of it as a collection of my favorite five-star thoughts that I've tried out and evaluated and concluded that they help me feel joy and show up as who I want to be.

If you're willing to notice, understand, and evaluate your thoughts, if you're willing to make some CTFAR models and coach yourself, this list will be really helpful to you in claiming your power to choose a new thought. Like a list of meal ideas as you're sitting down to plan your grocery list, like a list of movie ideas from someone you trust when you're not sure what you want to watch tonight. I mention it at the end of each episode, but I just want to make sure you know about that free PDF.

There's a link in the show notes that will take you right to it. And after you've taken the time to notice, understand, and evaluate your current thinking, this list can be a springboard for you into new ideas of new thoughts you might want to start thinking. All right, my friend, that's what I have for you today.

Give your thoughts product reviews and evaluate how much joy they bring to your life, and then choose to think a new thought when you're ready. Oh, and speaking of product reviews, if you've been enjoying these episodes, could you leave me a quick review? Go into Apple Podcasts to the show, scroll down beneath the listing of recent episodes and tap on the pen and paper icon that says write a review. And then right there, you can answer the question, from one to five stars, how much joy does this podcast bring to your life? I appreciate you taking the time to do that and helping me share the podcast with others who don't know about it yet.

I'm grateful in advance. Thanks for joining me today. I'll talk to you next week.