Elevate Your Mindset: True Thoughts, Facts, Untrue Thoughts, And More

Welcome to Mom On Purpose, where it’s all about helping moms overcome challenges and live their best lives. My hope is by being here, you are more inspired to become the mom you are made to be. I’m Natalie, your host, a wife, boy, mom, dog, mama, Chicagoan, and former lawyer turned professionally certified coach. If you’re here to grow, I can help. Let’s go.

Hello, my beautiful friends. Today I want to talk with you about elevating your mindset. What do I mean by that? I mean, expanding your skillset and your capacity to manage your brain. And I want to talk with you about how to do that in a very specific way. Navigating thoughts and breaking down thoughts into a few different categories, specifically true thoughts, untrue thoughts, helpful thoughts, unhelpful thoughts, and then separating out all of those thoughts from the facts. So if you are inside the Mom On Purpose Membership, you know that this is foundational to the work that we do inside there.

And lately I’ve been coaching many of you in there in my other private coaching and mastermind containers and noticing there’s some confusion specifically around true thoughts and facts. So in this episode, we are going to get a little bit into the weeds, but particularly if you want to become more skilled and even an expert at mindset management, brain management, and definitely if you are one of my clients, really listen closely to this episode. It might be one that you need to listen to a few times so that you can get it. And why, why would you do this? Why? Why is listening to maybe a more detailed and technical podcast going to be so important compared to, I don’t know, I could have made it a little bit more inspirational probably. The reason is because it will have a lasting impact on your everyday life in an instant throughout the day.

I am utilizing the skills that I’m going to teach you in this podcast, and it shifts my energy completely. It takes me from, you know, where I, where I make a mistake, or when the kids are, you know, being children making it difficult and you know, feeling like it could just snowball and I could have a thought like when it rains, it pours and go down that path, which is what my default brain would’ve used to do. And in an instant, I can flip it. I never think thoughts like when it rains, it pours. You know, you know how that goes. It’s just one of those bad days and then that compounds. Now, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with you if you do this. I just want to help you see how impactful this can be, because you can have a hard moment in a great day, and with this tool, you’ll be able to shift so much more quickly and feel more empowered in anything that’s going on in your life.

So it might just be, you know, the day-to-day grind, kind of what I’m referring to here, but it also could be a bigger challenge. Having empowering thoughts to help you navigate challenges is, I think, the most important skill that you can have because it leads to different decision making. So if you just received a big diagnosis that maybe it’s heartbreaking or scary for you, the way that you think about it matters, it matters tremendously. So the diagnosis is the fact, how you think about it matters. And, a lot of my clients come to me with, you know, their kids who have had diagnoses, or maybe they’re caring for aging parents or, you know, sometimes it’s them themselves. And being able to manage your mind around what you want to think about it. It’s not just so you can feel better, but it’s so you can show up as the person you want to be, the caretaker.

You want to be the person to yourself who you want to be. And so you make better decisions from that place because fear-based decisions, worrisome decisions, they’re not as helpful for you or for the other person as when you’re making decisions from a place of connection, from a place of confidence, from a place of faith, from a place of trust, that is the very real impact of doing this work. And of course, just as it applies to those heavier topics, it applies to the lighter topics as well. It applies to work life balance. I was just coaching someone inside the Mom On Purpose membership who works and is a mom and she works part-time hours and she was having all of these thoughts about the days that she’s off and, and feeling like it was hard to go in between the two hats. And her thoughts seemed like facts, which spoiler alert all of our thoughts that we believe so deeply feel like facts.

And we’re going to talk about how you can separate them out into different buckets, into different elements so that you can change your thoughts, not so that you’re thinking something you don’t believe. But the biggest problem that I see is we think there’s only one way to think, and it’s just not true. Just because your default brain comes up with automatic thoughts doesn’t mean that those thoughts are any truer than other thoughts that are optional as well. So remember, thoughts are optional. Okay? So with that in mind, let’s dive in to the specifics of what I’m even talking about here. I want to break down very simply facts and thoughts and true thoughts versus untrue thoughts and helpful thoughts versus unhelpful thoughts. So facts, I like to think of as the math objective, verifiable and unchangeable. So if you look at the clock right now, whatever that time is, that’s a fact.

Maybe it’s 3:00 PM that’s a fact. How many kids do you have? Two kids, three kids, four kids? That’s a fact. If you get on the scale in the morning, whatever that number is, that’s a fact. Now you have to tie that number to a date to make it really a fact, right? Because what you weighed yesterday might be different than what you weigh today. The same is true with, money. So even if you say something like, I make $250,000 a year, like, is that a fact or is that a thought? Because you know, it can get really into the weeds here. And I don’t want to make this more complicated. Oftentimes I will give that to a client as a fact, but really, if they’re having money scarcity and money challenges, I will put that in the thought line. Because the truth is there’s probably a contract somewhere that says your base salary is $250,000.

But you know, let’s say it’s the middle of May, you, you haven’t made all that money yet. You got paid X amount of dollars on X date. Maybe you’re paid, you know, bimonthly or something like that. And that’s a fact. But when we talk about 250 k for your salary, what if you leave next month? You’re not paid the rest of that out. Of course not. So as you can see with the money, it is actually kind of hard to get a circumstance to get a fact. Even if you talk about the money in your bank account, it’s changing daily, right? ’cause you’re spending, there’s more coming in. Same thing with credit cards. So whenever I coach someone on money, it’s really interesting to get to a fact. The thing with facts is they won’t create emotion for you. It really is so boring.

It’s the math. And it’s hard to get the facts sometimes because our brain thinks in stories. Our brains are designed to make meaning out of things. It was so beautiful. My little, boy, one of my kids was looking at the clouds and just talking about how the clouds look like different shapes. And I was like, gosh, you know, it’s right from the beginning that we are making meaning out of things. And I love that. The problem with it is when we make meaning out of something in a way that isn’t helpful for us. So I don’t want to turn you into robots just looking at the world through facts only. You couldn’t do that and that wouldn’t be fun. So most of the time our thoughts aren’t problematic. So for example, if it’s 75 degrees out, the sun is shining, and you think a thought like, wow, it’s a beautiful day, right?

That’s not a problematic thought. That’s a great thought to have. It’s still a thought. It’s still your interpretation. But the only time that we do the work that I’m talking about here is when you’re facing a challenge, a challenge or a goal, and you want to get to a place of feeling differently about it, of feeling more empowered around what’s going on. That’s when we do the work that I’m talking about here, of breaking down your mindset and putting these different things into categories so that you can think more deliberately and more purposefully. So facts are also what people say or do. This is something that people get tripped up on a lot. You cannot say, my husband was mad. That’s not a fact. That’s your summary of what your husband was saying and doing or not doing. And it might be true, right? That’s going to be a true thought, but it’s still your thought, your interpretation. So the facts will be very boring. Like my husband walked away and said, and then you would put in quotes exactly what he said, verbatim, no summary at all. So for example, my husband walked away and said, “I’m not dealing with this right now”. So that’s the math. It’s very factual. Thoughts are your interpretations of what happened, of the facts.

Thoughts can be true or untrue, helpful or unhelpful. So anytime you are summarizing the facts, anytime that you are interpreting the facts, those are thoughts. You might say, “my child is really struggling right now”. That is a thought. It might be a true thought, but it’s so important that you see that it’s a thought. It’s an optional thought because your brain thinks so quickly, which is a good thing, but it doesn’t always think in the most empowering way. Your brain has a negativity bias. It is scanning for what’s wrong. It is a fear-based survival brain. And its number one goal is to protect you, keep you and your family safe and alive. That’s, that’s actually great. But the problem is it will do that at your own expense. It will scan for danger and misinterpret danger. It will go into fixer, fix it mode, pointing out everything that’s wrong with your house, your kids, and your husband.

And that is not at all going to help you survive. Instead, that is going to get you into a little bit of a spiral of negativity, kind of being critical of those around you and create more disconnection in your relationship. So your brain is wired for survival. It’s not wired for happiness. So when you are taking a look at your thoughts, you’re taking them out of your brain and you are observing them instead of being absorbed by them. So if you have a thought, I made a mistake that thought might not be problematic, you might not need to coach yourself on that. It’s still a thought. The fact is what? Maybe the deadline for one of your kids’ activities was yesterday and you mistakenly thought that it was a week from now and you missed the deadline. You might want to summarize that in your mind and have the story.

I made a mistake. Not a big deal. As long as you don’t make it a big deal. Now, if you take it further with your thoughts and say, I am such a bad mom, I can’t believe I did this. And you beat yourself up and you internalize that, that perfectionism you make your worth, your goodness as a mom, dependent on being perfect and not making any mistakes, that’s where we want to look at that. So I made a mistake. Is that a fact or a thought? It’s a thought, but you know, depending on the facts, it might be a true thought and it might not be a problem that you’re thinking it. What we want to do is just look at the thoughts and decide are these thoughts helpful or unhelpful? Other examples of thoughts? This is too much. I’m damaging my kids. Why is this happening?

I can’t figure this out. This just isn’t possible. This is unfair. Again, something might be unfair. You might want to think it’s unfair. That’s still a thought. I don’t like to ask the question, is this a true thought or an untrue thought? Unless I see that it’s an untrue thought, especially when I’m coaching my clients, and then I can point that out to them. Because even if it’s a true thought, if it feels terrible and it’s an unhelpful thought, there is probably a more helpful way to think about it. So for example, I was just coaching one of my mastermind clients on this and she was just, you know, explaining how she was doing this work as she woke up and her first morning default thought was, I have low energy from yesterday. And she noticed to herself, that’s a thought. Now is that a true thought?

Probably. But is it helpful? Probably not. Now most of the time my clients think, yeah, but it’s true. Like, what else could I think? And my answer is lots of different things. There are so many other thoughts that you can think, I’m not suggesting, and I didn’t suggest to this client that she should think something like, I’m so happy, I feel amazing. You want to think a more helpful and also true thought. And this is where imagination is so important because you have to put your brain to work on the skill of creating what I call our next believable thoughts. So here is one thought that I offered to her. Instead of I still have, you know, low grade energy from yesterday. Let’s think a thought like I noticed some low energy in my body. That’s okay. I’m going to let it be there and expand my capacity for connection and joy while still having some low energy in my body. Now that thought or those thoughts together are so much more empowering because when she thought I still have low grade energy from yesterday, it felt terrible to her.

But when she just shifted to, I noticed some low energy in my body and that’s okay, I’m going to let it be there and I’m going to work on expanding my capacity for connection and joy while still having some of that low energy too. It felt so much more empowering. It’s kind of like the work that I’ve done on being tired. It’s like, do I want to be tired and then mad that I’m tired? No, I could just be tired and then expand my capacity to feel connection and joy while being tired. At a minimum, I don’t want to feel, you know, tired and self-pity. It’s not a not a fun time, my friends. So I hope that I am clearly explaining and teaching and modeling how impactful these shifts can be from true thoughts to noticing their thoughts to more helpful thoughts. The problem with true thoughts is that most people think they’re facts.

So for example, the client I was referring to before who was navigating work-life balance as a working mom who worked part-time, she had the thought, I’m straddling these two things on her days off. So she felt like she was straddling being a mom and working on her days off because just from time to time little things would come up. And I told her that I never have that thought and I frequently am going between work and my kids and all of that. And my thought is, this is such a privilege because the alternative is I would be going into work or I wouldn’t be working at all, or whatever it is. Like my, my thoughts are comparing what I’m doing to something that I wouldn’t want to be doing. Versus she was in a little bit of self-pity, like, I’m straddling this, I’m feeling frazzled. And she even said like, what else would I think?

And I said, that’s the question. That’s a million dollar question. You have to see how your thinking is optional. And then put your brain to work on better feeling thoughts, like I’m expanding my capacity to bounce between two different things at one time. Or like play around with the thoughts that put you into the most confident and empowered place. And I like to think of these as skills, right? When we feel like we are at the effect of our lives or at our jobs or you know, of our marriages, it’s so disempowering. Like the thought, I never had the chance to be a stay at home mom. I was just coaching someone on that. That’s a thought. It’s a terrible thought. So even though thoughts feel so true, they are optional, my friends. And if they are unhelpful, I want to invite you to question them and to think more helpful thoughts.

So unhelpful thoughts make you feel worse. They often put you in the victim mentality, like self-pity. They’re unproductive. They might create resentment or disconnection, they’re often exaggerated. So inside the Mom On Purpose Membership, we have a Cognitive Distortions class where I teach the different cognitive distortions that really negatively impact your life. All or nothing thinking catastrophizing, taking things so personally and your thoughts when they are negative and unhelpful, often have some distorted thinking behind it. So for example, I can never catch up or I’m always behind, right? Those are unhelpful thoughts and I would argue they’re not even true. Okay? There have been times where you are caught up. There have been times when you are, you know, not behind when you are ahead, but your brain will summarize things, will generalize things, and then find more evidence to make that true. So with this line of thinking, like, I can never catch up or I’m always behind, it might just be questioning what that even means.

Like I’m not catching anything. I think of like catching a ball, playing catch with my kids. Like I’m not catching every anything. Maybe that summary just isn’t helpful. What do I need to do? Do I need to plan better? Do I need to delegate more? Do I need to become more comfortable saying no and work on people pleasing? Like what do I need to do to become who I want to be? To live in alignment with my values instead of I can never catch up. I’m always behind feeling like we’re at the effect of our lives. The unhelpful thoughts will prevent growth. They will cause unnecessary stress and disconnection in your relationships and disconnection with yourself. And one of the worst things is they keep you stuck. I pretty much never feel stuck, and I won’t say I never feel self pity. I do feel like I’m at the effect of my life from time to time, but I am able to catch it. Oh my gosh, like eight times outta 10. Now, maybe even nine times out of 10, I’m so much better at it. And it’s a skill. This is just a skill. Brain management, mindset management is a skill. I want to invite you to start separating out facts from thoughts. Even if it’s a true thought, tell yourself, okay, this is a thought and it’s a true thought, but at least label it a thought.

So for example, if your kids come home and they throw their book bags around, they kick off their shoes and they run to go get their, I don’t know, screens or something like that. And you have a rule that when they come home, they need to unpack their book bags, put their book bags away, line up their shoes, and you know, do any homework or something like that. And they don’t do that. You might have a thought like, my kids know better, my kids aren’t listening to me. Those two thoughts are thoughts before you try to talk yourself out of it or before you beat yourself up for even having those, or before you try to convince yourself that those are facts, all I want you to do is notice what happened. Okay? I have three kids. They walked through the door, they kicked off their shoes, they put their book bags on the couch and on the floor, you know, and on the kitchen counter, well, respectively, they ran out of the room, they picked up their screens.

Okay, those are the facts. Do you see how boring that was? Your brain will never think that way. But it’s so important for you to train it to do that so that you can separate the facts out from your thoughts. When you think thoughts like, my kids know better and they never listen to me, those aren’t helpful. They don’t help you show up as the mom you want to be. They probably put you into get my child mode. Like, how do I control my kids? How do I get them to listen to me? And not only will you show up more disconnected and more controlling as a mom, but you, I think feel a little bit frustrated and crazy and annoyed and disempowered because you think something has gone wrong. And again, I, I don’t even want to offer you new thoughts and a new mindset for this example.

All I want you to see is that you have thoughts about the facts that just happened, and the thoughts are, my kids know better and they never listen to me. My kids know better is a thought. My kids never listen to me, is another thought. All we’re doing is making it so that you don’t feel like you are at the effect of your life. We’re taking out your thoughts from your brain, putting them on paper, looking at them, you are observing them. And then the fun starts. Then we can play around with them, then we can come up with other ways of thinking that feel more empowered, but we can’t get to that step. And most people try to jump to the next thoughts, the new mindset, and they skip this part. And it’s the most important part, separating out facts from thoughts. You have to see that my kids never listen to me, is a summary.

The thought my kids know better is your brain having an opinion about your kids. And in both instances, these thoughts don’t help you. I want to help you. I can help you with parenting strategies. I can help you get to a place of confidence and just implementing more effective routines and helping you show up as the leader and the mom that you want to be. But that comes after we take care of what’s going on internally for you. My kids never listen to me and my kids know better, unhelpful thoughts even though they feel so true. I never think those thoughts, my friends. I promise you. I never think those thoughts and I’m not like a permissive parent. So in that instance, I wouldn’t just be letting my kids do whatever they want, throw all their stuff around. I would think of other more empowering ways that I could navigate that situation.

And that’s for an entirely different episode. I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole right now. But I do want to emphasize that what we’re doing here is taking a look at thoughts and just naming them as thoughts. Even if they’re true thoughts, they’re still thoughts. There are always other more empowering thoughts to think if the true thought feels disempowering and unhelpful. There are hundreds of thoughts. Your brain is amazing. All we’re doing here is learning the skill of looking at our thoughts and separating out those thoughts from the facts so that we have the choice so that we feel more empowered to think in alignment with who we want to be in a helpful way, based on focusing on what we can control, which is always us. That my friends, is what I have for you today. I hope you have a beautiful rest of your week and I’ll talk with you next week. Take care.

Thank you for being here and listening. Now, head on over to momonpurpose.com/coaching to learn more about the Mom On Purpose Membership, where we take all of this work to the next level.