Welcome everybody. If you are new here, welcome. There is so much goodness. I’m so excited you’re here. If you’ve been here a while, Love you as always. How is your summer going out there? Um, depending where you live, you might still be finishing up, you know, the school year or you might be out and doing all these things.

How is Summer treating you? What are you making happen this summer? What goals are you trying to accomplish? Or are you just trying to get through the day? What is happening in your world? I would love to know all about it. You gotta go follow me on Instagram at Amy dot Smooth Stones Coaching. Send me a dm.

I will totally chat with anybody about anything. I love talking to you. I have to tell you what I have going on this summer. I am so excited. I am doing a special program and I’ve never done it before and I don’t know if I’ll do it again, but I know how busy this summer gets and it feels kind of hard to commit to weekly one-on-one coaching sessions.

Even though that’s always still available, I wanted to offer something that was a little more flexible for those of you who are just working around your family and your holidays and your vacations and everything else, we have in June, July, and August. I have a special offer for you and it is called Peace in My Pocket.

And what it is is voice messaging coaching to help you find peace in your day, and you just get to use your phone. So what happens when you sign up? You will get a full session with me where we’ll introduce each other and get to know each other. I’ll teach you the basics of the model and how coaching works and get you all set up on an app, which is free.

You can do voice messaging. It’s kind of like walkie-talkies. It’s really fun. It’s similar to Marco Polo, but no video necessary. And when you have something going on throughout the summer, if something comes up in your day or anything, you just message me and I’m gonna respond to you. We can go back and forth.

I will respond to you as soon as I can in a reasonable manner, but what really happens is, You know that you have someone in your back pocket ready to support you when anything comes up or if there’s something you you’ve just been wanting to work on and get coaching on and get support on, bring it there.

Bring it to me. Let’s work through it. This is amazing and so incredible and so valuable. Like I wish that I had my coach just in my pocket whenever I wanted them, so I wanted to make this super accessible to everyone. This is going to be coaching for all summer. It’s June 15th to August 17th. That’s like eight weeks of coaching, and it’s only $97.

I can tell you that it will be worth so much more than that. It’s just a no-brainer to come and find peace in your pocket. It’s gonna be the difference between kind of pretending everything is okay and going through the motions, or being confident that it totally is. Sometimes we just need a little cheerleader who has great ways to help you manage your mind and your emotions and deal with your grief, and that is what I wanna do for you.

Peace in my pocket will be available starting next week. You can go to smooth stones coaching.com/peace and you’ll get all the details there and you’ll be able to sign up is really easy and I’m really, really excited for you. I’m excited to see how that this goes. It’s just something I felt in my heart that we needed.

We need to have support and we need to have support that’s flexible. I get it. I have a lot of living kids at home. I know everyone’s busy. I know budgets are a concern. I know there are a lot of stresses on our finances right now, but I promise you this will be the best money you ever spend. So come check that out.

The difference between having a coach and not having a coach is like, If you have an iPhone, you know the white corded earbuds that come with an iPhone, they’re awesome and they work. But they’re made out of this type of plastic that is so tangly it, it just sticks to itself. And anytime you do anything, they are tangled up now.

They still work fine. They’re still functional, but they’re just, you have to untangle them every time you use them. It’s always a problem. It’s always frustrating. Every time you wanna move forward and just listen to a podcast or something, you have to go through all that work to untangle the chord.

Coaching is like having. Top of the line, brand new AirPods. You just pull them out, pop them in, and they work. They’re cute, they’re comfortable. You’re feeling kind of cool. Listen, when you have a coach, that’s what it’s gonna be like instead of untangling your brain, it’s just smooth and easy. That’s what I want for you, and that’s what peace in my pocket is gonna give you because it’s right there.

I’m gonna take care of you and I’m gonna show you how to do it on your own and teach you how to coach yourself. But I will be with you every step of the way. Now, the other thing I gotta tell you really quick is this is the last day. To enter the giveaway to win a Minky couture blanket. If you listen to episode a hundred, I had all the details there, but you can also go to smooth stones coaching.com/ 100.

All you need to do is review this podcast. It takes about two seconds. You pause right now, review the podcast, and then tell your friends about it, and then tell me that you did it. It’s really easy. You just check the boxes. Yes, I did a review. Yes, I shared. Enter your email so I know that you entered.

You’re done, so please go do that. I wanna get a hundred reviews on the podcast. Those reviews just really help people find the podcast and know that it’s full of goodness for life after loss. Now let’s talk about our topic for today. We’re talking about why I love being wrong. Now that sounds kind of weird because don’t most people love being right?

Do you love being right? Like when you’re debating with your partner about what show a certain actor used to be on and you go back and forth arguing for a while and then someone Googles it and you win it is a wonderful, satisfying feeling. We wanna get the right answers. We want to get the A. We want to impress the people around us.

We wanna impress the teacher. You know, we wanna do well at work and have the right answers. We wanna be right as a parent. We wanna know what we’re doing. We like to be right. And the reason our brains like to be right so much is because our brains really like certainty. We know that our brain does a lot of work to create certainty in our lives so that it can feel less anxious and feel more comfortable.

And being right feels really satisfying because it gives us certainty and that sometimes brings a lot of peace. At least that’s what our brain thinks, right? If I’m right, then I’ll have peace. But there are a lot of situations where this is not true. The way our brain works actually works against us and brings us a lot of pain and anxiety and uncomfortable emotions today.

What I wanted you to do as we talk about this, As always, but especially today, I want you to open up with no judgment. Just be really curious as I teach this to you and see how it’s going to be able to bless your life, because this is a really powerful concept. A lot of times we have these thoughts that are painful or they bring up uncomfortable emotions.

Now I use the word uncomfortable emotions, not negative emotions, because I feel like it’s just a better description. There’s not really positive and negative emotions. There’s just vibrations in our body, and some of them we like and some of them we don’t. So when I say uncomfortable emotions, I’m gonna be referring to those things that people would not generally love to feel.

But I wanna give you a couple of examples where we get this mixed up and where being right is really painful. I learned from my coach that what happens is a lot of times we would rather be right than be happy, and I don’t know who said that first. I’ve heard multiple people say it, but it’s really true.

We’d rather be right than be happy, and you might say, no, I, I really wanna be happy. A lot of my clients will say, no, this is what I’m telling you. I, this is why I’m here. I wanna be happy and I’m doing all the things cuz I wanna be happy. But we would really actually be right then be happy. I’m gonna give you a couple of examples.

One of them is stories we tell about people, people’s motivations. We see people doing things and we create a story of why they’re doing it. So, for example, she didn’t text on my baby’s birthday because she doesn’t care anymore. He doesn’t validate me enough because my body changed and he doesn’t think I’m beautiful anymore.

They have always wanted to make me look stupid. How about just any beliefs we have about people in general in Utah, you hear a lot that we have the worst drivers, and I bet the funny thing is every state, every country, a lot of times we want to own the worst drivers ever, and so we just keep proving our brain, right?

We keep creating the story and giving our brain the job of looking out for all the terrible drivers instead of just going along peacefully on our drive. When our partner doesn’t act the way we want, we choose a story that says he doesn’t care about me, and we wanna be right about that even though it’s really, really painful and it doesn’t help us connect with our partner.

Another thought I see a lot is I don’t need coaching. I can figure this out on my own now. That isn’t necessarily a painful thought, but it can be uncomfortable because you want to be right, that you can just do this on your own and it holds you back from saying yes to you and getting the support you need.

So it’s more like a low level uncomfortable when you believe that you don’t need help, that you can just do it on your own and you can. I just think that having a coach makes it 10 times easier and faster to feel better. What if you’re open to the fact that maybe coaching could be great for you? Uh, another thought I see is coaching is too expensive.

I can’t afford it. A lot of people say this to me. We’ll have consult calls and they feel like, you know, it’s not worth it to pay for coaching. But really the value is so intangible and sometimes it’s tangible. I have clients who make money because they invested in coaching, and that actually happens a lot because you’re just opening yourself up to the abundance that the universe has for you and you’re making goals and.

Feeling better and good things happen. What if you’re wrong about what you can afford? What is it costing you to stay stuck? What if you can afford anything because a universe is going to take care of you? How would that feel? Now, I’m not saying go out and buy like a brand new, big old truck, but what if you just decided you were wrong about what you could afford?

Now let’s talk about grief thoughts. Regular brain cells tell us a lot of lies, but grief brains take it to the next level. Plus you feel too weak to recognize it, but you absolutely can. You just have to get to know your grief parts and embrace them, but don’t listen to them. Some of those thoughts are, I’m never gonna be truly happy again.

And there is a place and a time where you’re gonna feel that I’m never, ever gonna be happy again. That’s totally normal. But I really want you to question if that thought is serving you, how does it make you feel? What if you’re wrong about that? What if you just decided, I don’t know if I’m gonna be happy again, but I hope I will.

That’s kind of what I thought. I thought there’s got to be a way to find happiness and healing and hope, and of course I’ll miss my baby. But it doesn’t have to hurt forever. Another one I’ve seen recently is the world is a really dark place and it’s only getting worse. Now this thought really can bring us down.

It’s heavy, but we wanna be right. We wanna look around and we wanna read the news, and we wanna prove ourselves right. Because we’d rather be right than happy. Another one is there’s a correct timeline on grief. You guys have all seen this meme where it’s like, what I thought grief would be like, and it’s a little gradual hill that kind of goes up and it’s happy.

And then the other side is what grief is really like, and it’s this big, messy scribbling ball. This is something that we want to dictate what grief should look like or what is the right way. So we have a lot of beliefs there that. That we might be holding onto that are not helping us. A few other grief thoughts that you might wanna question are nobody understands how I feel.

I’ll always have a hole in my heart. I will never have the family I wanted. I am alone. Nobody knows what to say. Everyone else’s life is great and I’m over here under a dark cloud. Have you ever thought any of those? We’ve got all these thoughts and I hope you’ve thought of your own. So I want you to open up and maybe after you’ve done this podcast, really think of where you’re doing this to yourself.

And once you see it, you’re gonna see it everywhere. You’re gonna see other people doing it. You’re gonna notice yourself doing it. That is okay. That is part of the process. The first step is always recognizing what is happening. Your thoughts are not facts. They are optional. And an easy way to pull out these painful thoughts is to do a thought download.

Take a piece of paper, take a pen, or your favorite, whatever you love to write with, and start writing. And do not lift that pen a certain amount of time, maybe a minute, five minutes, or until the whole page is full and just brain dump everything out. You don’t edit it, you don’t think about it. You don’t judge it.

You can burn it afterwards if you need to. See what’s going on in your head and pick something to write about that is maybe bringing up some uncomfortable emotions for you right now. You can also just make this fun and silly and light and start questioning everything. Like I said, start noticing in other people where they’d rather be right than happy.

See how their painful thoughts are so precious to them. We are like Gollum. Even if you haven’t watched or read The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings, we all kind of know this image of this skinny little gray creature crouched in a corner, holding onto his precious and he’s just holding it so tight and he can’t let it go.

This is what we do with some of our most painful thoughts. So notice where you’re doing this and then give yourself some love and compassion. You are a human with a brain that is doing exactly what it was designed to do, but if you want to choose happiness and peace over pain that is available to you, this is where opening up to being wrong is the key.

And then the next step is learning to love being wrong. There are so many places that I want to be wrong. Our circumstances might be the same. Some of our facts might be the same, but our story can change, and that’s where you will find relief. So let me give you a couple of examples. One that’s a little bit silly and one that is my most painful thought, and I’m gonna show you how you can let go of them and embrace being wrong.

A few months ago, my son lost his glasses. This was like his fifth pair of glasses. We’d already, we broke a set, we got a new set with the warranty and he like immediately stepped on them in the car. Then we got some online that he hated, and finally we had went back to the eye doctor and got this pair that he loved and it fit.

And they disappeared. My brain, of course, is thinking all the things about how I’m gonna have to buy another set of glasses. Actually, I had a lot of thoughts, but we kept looking and looking and I was so frustrated because no matter how many times I told my son to just always put his glasses in the same spot, well, he’s an eight year old boy.

But I just didn’t wanna buy more glasses. I, I wanted to be wrong that they were lost forever and that I’d have to buy more. And one day, after weeks and weeks, they turned up in probably the one place we hadn’t torn apart All the thoughts that had caused me so much. Pain and frustration were not necessary.

The glasses were always right there. I was so happy I was wrong. And I have to keep practicing believing that it will all turn out no matter what. Even if I had to buy more glasses, if I live in abundance, I’ll trust that it will all be okay. The next story I wanna tell you is about River. Now I had this most painful thought.

Where, because I had a D N C and we had sent the baby off to the lab to be tested because I wanted to know the gender and I wanted to know what had happened. I wanted some answers. I felt like surgery and doing testing would be the best choice, but what happened was the lab made a mistake and we were not able to get answers.

I did not have the capacity to even ask what happened to the baby after it went to the lab, and I just assumed that. What happened was river ended up in medical waste and was then thrown in the garbage. And I clung onto this thought. I threw my baby in the garbage for years and it was incredibly painful and I didn’t think that I was wrong about that.

I could even say, this is probably a fact if I went right now and said, what do you do with the lab waste and, and everything, what happens to it? They might throw it in the garbage, but the truth. Is I didn’t throw my baby in the garbage. I didn’t need to believe that about myself. I could be totally wrong about that.

I could choose to believe that I did the best I could with what I have, that I did everything I could to take care of him instead of feeling like I did nothing to take care of him. I was coached on this really painful thought and I was able to let it go because. My coach told me that I didn’t need to believe that anymore.

I could just choose not to believe that, and it had taken a long time to get to the point where I wanted to not believe that anymore, but it is possible, and it was the hugest weight lifted off of me. No matter what your story is, the process is the same. First you identify your thoughts. Then ask yourself how you are wrong.

Now, Byron Katie is an inspiration to me, and she has a process to turn around any thought you have and see how the opposite is actually true. And this is kind of the basis of the self-coaching model that I use, which was created by Brooke Castillo at the Life Coach School. The model says that your thoughts create.

Your feelings. Your feelings create your actions. Your actions create your results. So as long as you believe that you’re right about a thought that is painful, you will keep creating pain and you will keep proving yourself true. You literally are giving your brain the job of finding evidence that your painful thought is true.

And how does that feel? How much energy does it take to hold on so tight to those painful thoughts? Now think about how it’ll feel when you are totally open to being wrong. It’s a whole new world, and when you get there, you’ll wonder why nobody told you about this sooner. Now, that’s a common painful thought for people who start doing this work.

They say, I wish I would’ve known this sooner than I would’ve been able to, you know, do this and that and the other thing. I would’ve spared myself so much pain. I would’ve made different decisions in my life. This is your brain again, wanting to be right instead of happy. Can you see that? Look at it. I should have heard about this sooner.

I wish I would’ve known about this sooner and then my life would’ve been better. But you weren’t supposed to know any of this sooner, not one minute. You weren’t supposed to save yourself from heartache or make different decisions. Let all of the thought that your life should have been different. See the thought for what it is.

A painful lie. Let yourself be wrong. It’s okay to imagine or to think about how beneficial thought work could have been. Sure, that’s pretty normal, but let yourself be wrong that it would’ve been better. Most people that I know have had their lives transformed by coaching. They came to that work because they were in a whole lot of pain.

Just like they say, you have to hit rock bottom to make a change. A lot of people come searching for help when they’re in a crisis, and that’s how it’s supposed to be. That crisis and that pain leaves them right here, just like it led you. Here after the death of your baby. It’s the reason you’re listening to this podcast.

I want you to not just be willing to be wrong, but I want you to love it. Do it on purpose, especially. Around your grief and it’s gonna feel a lot better. So my homework and challenge for you is to just really open up to being wrong. Start questioning all your thoughts, and it doesn’t have to take a lot of time or a lot of energy.

You can just do it when you’re thinking. Do it in the shower, do it in the morning, and just say, what do I wanna be wrong about today? Think of a certain problem you have right now that you feel like you can’t solve it. And it’s really hard. That’s another one. We wanna believe things are really hard. What if that’s not true?

What if it’s easy? What if it’s fun? What if you know exactly what to do? I don’t know. Is not a thought that is ever allowed in coaching. You do know and you can guess what if you believe that you always know. It’s gonna feel amazing and it’s gonna feel kind of funny. It’s gonna be a process and you’ll catch yourself doing it over and over and over, even when you’re aware.

But I promise you, learning to love being wrong will change your life. I’ll see you next time. Are you tired of feeling like your baby’s death was somehow your fault? Go tostones coaching.com and get my free mini course. How to Stop Blaming Yourself After Loss.