Welcome everybody. I am so glad you’re here with me. I have something really special for you. I was thinking. What could I do this holiday season to help people out? I know there is a lot going on, there’s a lot of emotions and it’s just a busy time of year, and so I have actually come up with the best free class.

I’m so excited about this one. It is called the Grieving Moms Guide to Doing Less this Christmas. Whatever you celebrate this holiday season, this is gonna be the class for you. So we are going to do less holding back tears. We’re gonna have less dread, less overwhelm, and a calendar that you can actually handle.

We’re gonna have less eating your feelings and less saying yes when you actually wanna say no. Instead, you are gonna get. More creating the holidays. You want more honoring what your grief needs this year, more genuine connections instead of people pleasing and more finding the light no matter how dark things seem.

This class is gonna be amazing. I promise. If you give me this hour, I am gonna give you your month back. Now, this is happening next week. It is gonna be on December 8th at 10:00 AM Mountain Time, or at 7:30 PM Mountain Time, and I made two times cause I know, like I said, it’s busy so. Either one of those should work.

If they do not work, you still wanna sign up cuz I will be sending everyone the replay so that you can watch this class and really make a plan for what you’re gonna do this holiday season. And I really do encourage you to come live though because I will be asking for input and maybe doing some coaching.

I really just wanna help. This is my gift to you this season, so come to the Grieving Mom’s Guide to Doing Less this Christmas. It’s gonna be so, so good. And do not forget to invite all your last mom friends. I think all of us need this, so I’m really. Really excited for what you’re gonna get out of this class.

Now, before we start on today’s topic of finding intentional thoughts that stick, we need to back up a little and I wanna say, hi. I am Amy and I am a life coach. I use a tool called The Model, which was created by Brooke Castillo. And since I certified with the Life Coach School, I get to use this tool with all my clients and it is awesome.

It truly changes lives and it changed mine. So here is the basic model. We have five lines in our model and we call them C T F A R, which is circumstances thought feeling. Actions and results. Now, our thought line is super important. Most of us run around our life, mostly just taking the thoughts our brains offer us.

We’re not really paying attention. We reuse thoughts. We’ve been taught directly or indirectly, beliefs we’ve picked up along the way, and we don’t really question these thoughts. They are simply sentences in our brain. That’s another way to look at it. What are the sentences. In your brain, and we have like thousands of them per day.

So we can’t pay attention to everything. And a lot of our brain, like the things that happen, our brain wants to go on autopilot, right? Because otherwise it’s really overwhelming. And so, A lot of times we get really stuck in autopilot and we just believe everything that we think, but most of us find out that that isn’t working very well.

We can’t figure out why we feel so terrible and why we get stuck in the same patterns over and over and over. So what we normally do, which is what we’ve, a lot of us have really been taught is. We try to change our circumstances. We try to change the things outside of us, so we tell our family how they need to act or we hate our job, so we change to a new one or.

You know we have another baby because we’ve had a loss and we think that’ll fix it, but we still feel crummy inside. Now, if this is, you know that you are not alone. No one ever told us that. It’s not our circumstances, our actions, right? The things we do or even our results that create our feelings. It is our thoughts.

In fact, like I said, we. Have been taught the opposite. We’ve been taught that the things we do, the things outside of us that creates our feelings, the things we have, but it’s not, it’s our thoughts. And that’s why rich and famous people who seem to have these incredible lives still have major struggles.

It’s because they don’t know this, right? Or it’s because money doesn’t make you happy. Fame doesn’t make you happy. You’re still a human being no matter what your circumstances are, and the opposite is true, right? People who live what we would say are really difficult lives sometimes are really, really happy because of their thoughts and the way they look at their life.

Now once you can see what your thoughts are creating and that they are the root of your problems, it’s natural to want to fix them. We immediately wanna swap our thoughts and make everything better. Uh, and it’s easy to see this in other people and how they deal with our grief. Other people wanna offer thoughts they think will cheer us up like you can try again.

Or Your baby is safe with the angels. At least you weren’t farther along. All these things that we usually do not like hearing. They don’t like other people feeling sad, so they wanna put a bandaid on it with happier thoughts. So if you notice this, this is a great exercise to do, is just notice other people, right?

How they try to, uh, cover up uncomfortable things with other new thoughts. Uh, but we do this to ourselves as well, especially if you know the model. If you’ve been listening to me for a while. It’s pretty common when you first start using thought work to have this period of time where you actually feel worse because you start seeing the sentences that are making you feel bad, but you don’t know how to get rid of them, right?

And you wanna get rid of them, and you feel like, well, I know the model. I know my thoughts caused my feelings. So why do I still feel terrible? That is okay. This is part of the process. Just be patient and know that you can let go of all that judgment like you’re doing just fine. You’re right where you’re supposed to be.

Don’t worry about it. Now, our unconscious thoughts we put into what I call unintentional models. These are the ones we usually see after the fact, and these models just show us what is happening. This is super powerful to do. You can find your unconscious thoughts by paying attention and then doing some thought downloads, which is when you notice something or you notice like a negative emotion or even a positive emotion, something has happened.

You just write down everything, right? Everything, all the sentences that are floating around in your brain, you let it out onto paper. Um, you don’t hold back. You don’t judge. You don’t edit. You just get it out on paper. And as you become more aware and you do this more, you can kind of start seeing this in real time.

You can see what your brain is doing. You can see the sentences in your mind, and then, You can work on thinking something different on purpose. Now, if we want change, we can create an intentional model where we choose how we want to think, feel, show up, and the results that we want. The model is powerful.

I believe you can create any result you want for yourself by using it, but I wanna explain why we can’t just put a happy thought on top of our lives and have it stick and why you might not even want to. Now when you’re here in my house. Smooth stones. We don’t do what some people call toxic positivity, which means we try to put some shiny glitter on something we don’t really like with a thought that sounds better, right?

I’m gonna share the top three mistakes I see people making when they create intentional models and how to fix them so you can find thoughts that really stick. Now, when we make an intentional model, what we do is we can start anywhere we want. We can start with a result we want. We can start with a feeling that we want.

We just take that C T F A R Circumstance, thought, feeling, action result. And we can start anywhere and just build out this model and say what we wanna do, what we wanna create, what we wanna feel, with the same circumstance as our unintentional model. So we notice something is happening, we don’t like, we notice our unconscious thoughts.

We’re aware of it, we have looked at it all. Now we want to change it. We’re going to create this intentional model on purpose. So some of the mistakes that happen, the first one that’s really important is we don’t have a clean circumstance and. I see this all the time. Circumstances really need to be factual and it helps a lot if they are specific.

So sometimes we have, they’re just too vague, they’re too broad, or they’re not factual. They’re full of, um, subjective words or, yeah. Our circumstance is really a thought, right? It’s not facts. It needs to be facts. Like you could prove it in a courtroom or nobody could dispute what you’re saying. Uh, nobody, even if you could say, well, all my friends would agree, or every, everyone would totally agree with me.

We don’t want people to agree with you. We want it to be indisputable. So we wanna take out all the subjective things. We wanna make it a really. Clean fact. So I have an example of a model, and the circumstance is my husband never picks up his socks. The thought is he doesn’t care what our house looks like.

The feeling is frustrated. The action is snap it, your husband, pick up the socks in a half, give him the cold shoulder, and then complain to your friends. Uh, about how he never picks up. And the result in this model is she’s not the wife she wants to be, or I’m not the wife I want to be right. If this happens.

So what a lot of people try to do is keep that circumstance and put a new thought on it. So it goes like circumstance is my husband never picks up his socks. The thought is it’s not a big deal. Right. So we’re picking a thought that we think will make us feel better. The feeling is neutral. A action is I pick up the socks and the result is I don’t make it a big deal.

Right? So this result goes back to our thought. It’s not a big deal. The result is I don’t make it a big deal. Uh, this sounds okay. This sounds nice. This sounds like a nice model. We’re not frustrated anymore. It’s not a big deal, but in this case, they’re putting a positive thought on a negative circumstance.

They still believe that the circumstance is a negative thing, and really this circumstance isn’t even true. Uh, we normally don’t wanna have always or never in a circumstance line because it’s very rarely a fact when you think your circumstance is negative. No thought will ever be able to change that.

And also, this is really broad, so it’s gonna be hard to get leverage. We’re not gonna be able to like find something that sticks, which is what we want. That’s the goal today. How do we find thoughts that are gonna stick in our intentional models? So instead, I want you to take this circumstance and study it like a scientist.

Maybe you say on Tuesday at 10:00 PM there are two black men’s socks on the floor by the couch. That is a fact. Or you could say your circumstance is, I observed Bob removing his socks and placing them on the ground Tuesday at 9:45 PM. See how those are much more specific and they are simply facts. Then you get to think about them however you want.

Your thought might be, my husband never picks up his socks, and the result of that thought will be that you prove yourself right? Because you’ve now given your brain the job of noticing socks not in the hamper and nothing else, right? You’ll never notice when he does put him in the hamper. You’ll only notice when he doesn’t.

So this is the first step. Be specific in your circumstance and be factual. That step alone is incredibly powerful and it’s gonna help you as you take your circumstance into a new model, right? So in that unintentional model, if you have. Kind of a messy circumstance. And then as you go to that model, you’re gonna take that same circumstance.

It’s gonna make a messy, intentional model. If you want a nice, clean, clear, intentional model, you gotta get your circumstance cleaned up. Uh, this is something I help my clients with all the time. Not a big deal. You just have to learn how to do it, and you have to practice. Um, Lots of people make this mistake, especially at the beginning, so it’s not a big deal.

Don’t feel like you’re gonna do it wrong. Uh, just keep practicing and keep questioning. Is this really factual in my circumstance? Now, the next mistake I see is not picking a thought that you believe you need to pick one that is a good fit. Now your thoughts might seem like a stretch. It might even seem impossible, but all you need to do is be able to believe that it is possible for you to get there.

Um, like. I might have a goal to make 10 million in my coaching business, and that seems out of reach, but I also do think it could be possible so I can find a thought that I resonate with and that I believe in, that I know somehow will get there and get me that result that I want. In the SOC example, this person’s intentional thought is it’s not a big deal.

But it is a big deal to them, it, that thought’s not gonna feel true because they have tons and tons of thoughts about their husband and his socks, um, that they’ve probably been saving up for years. All the things the socks mean, and all the times they’ve tried to tell him to pick them up and it’s just a big old mess inside their brain.

So then you add in not having a neutral circumstance, you just. Gonna be even more frustrated, plus judging yourself for not being able to stop being frustrated. It’s like double frustration, right? So when we are putting. A thought. We don’t believe on top of a circumstance. It’s kind of a mess. It’s just not gonna work.

So make sure your thought is believable. Make sure it resonates with you. See how it feels inside of your body, in your gut. What does it feel like If you don’t like it, move on. Don’t force it. There actually is no thought police. You just get to think whatever you want. In this step, be careful. You don’t tell yourself you can’t think of anything that’s not true.

Uh, you, you always can come up with a thought that resonates. Also be careful that you aren’t trying to borrow thoughts from other people that don’t serve you. Like if you have a miscarriage and everyone around you is saying you should just try again to help you move forward. And you, you trust them and you love them.

So you tell yourself you should try again. But it doesn’t feel right. It has to come from you when you are ready. Right? And I, as a coach, Offer my clients thoughts that I think might help them sometimes, but it’s always up to them if they want to use them or not. And the last problem I see is not trying on lots and lots of thoughts.

We get stuck in this all or nothing thinking where. If I just find the perfect thought, then my life will magically change. And it can. But don’t be too precious with your intentional thoughts. I heard Karine Crabtree say this. She is a phenomenal coach and businesswoman. I was listening to her the other day and I just love how she put it with her southern draw.

Just pick a thought that sounds good, and practice using it and see what happens. Give it a good chance, but if it doesn’t do it for you, just try again. Don’t think it needs to be just one thought either. If you have a goal and you wanna hit it, you’ll need different thoughts for different times. Like when I’m on fire and I am moving towards a goal, I’m gonna want different thoughts.

Then when I feel like quitting, all of those thoughts are gonna help me and work together to get the result that I’m looking for. The point here isn’t to stop feeling bad, it’s just to be your most favorite version of you. And if you don’t feel like your favorite version of you, when you’re mad about socks on the ground, then absolutely change it because you want to, for you, because you don’t wanna spend so much mental energy there anymore.

So I guess that’s a bonus tip. Be aware of your reasons for changing. If you like your reasons, you’re gonna be able to find intentional thoughts that stick. Now when you are trying on new thoughts, how do you know which is the right one? Well, you can’t know, and there’s no right one, but you can do a gut check, pick a thought, think about it, and see how you feel.

What happens in your body? Do you feel lighter or heavier? Warmer or cooler? What energy does that thought create for you? Get out of your head and get into a thought that feels good. Now, sometimes the one that feels good is the most uncomfortable. Like when you make a big goal and you want to throw up, or you know you need to talk to someone about a boundary they have broken.

It might be scary, but it still feels right. It feels aligned with you and your values. So what I’m saying there is it might create an uncomfortable feeling. But if it feels like the right uncomfortable feeling that’s gonna move you forward, then that is a thought to hang onto. That’s one that’s gonna stick.

My last tip is to be sure your thought works with you where you are. We’re never trying to be someone else or some version of ourselves that we don’t like. You don’t have to put happy thoughts on your grief. It’s okay to choose on purpose to let yourself be sad. In fact, I encourage that. When we choose to just allow some grief, you’re immediately gonna start feeling peace and freedom, even with a broken heart.

What’s important is that you choose thoughts that feel clean and move you forward. You never wanna choose intentional thoughts that insinuate that you are a problem, that you’re broken, or there is something wrong with you. We gotta tell that inner critic that we love them. We thank them, and we are not going to listen to them.

No way. You are incredible. Love yourself first. Come from total compassion and confidence. You can’t mess this up. I want you to take off all the pressure and just do what feels kind and feels fun. Your intentional thoughts will stick much better that way. If you wanna really dive in and find out what your thoughts are creating for you.

Uh, you gotta come talk to me. I can teach you a lot here on the podcast, but you’ll get much farther, much faster when you work with me. I have some one-on-one spots opening up just in time for the new year. So click on the link in the show notes or go to smooth stones coaching.com to sign up for a free connection call to get you started.

And don’t forget about that. Grieving Mom’s Guide to Doing Less this Christmas. My free class, it’s going on on December 8th. You gotta come, go get your spot right now. Do not wait. It takes just two seconds. You, all you gotta do is put your email in and I’m gonna send you a link to come. And like I said, if you, if you can’t make either of those times work, sign up anyways.

You will get the replay. And I might even have a special bonus offer for everyone who comes. I’ll see you next time. Are you tired of feeling like your baby’s death was somehow your fault? Go tostones com and get my free mini course. How to Stop Blaming Yourself After Loss.