Life Unstuck

I'll be honest, this episode got a little ranty but I make no apologies. I hate the word humble and what it stands for and with very good reason. Nothing good comes out of not acknowledging your strengths and your accomplishments. The world will pass you by if you keep eating that damn pie. Go over to https://www.facebook.com/groups/lifeunstucktribe/ to continue the conversation and let me know what you think about being humble.

Self-love is simply life-changing. Once you have get to the point where you have a deep unconditional love for yourself despite your imperfections life can truly open up in your favour. However, loving yourself isn't as easy as many make it sound. There are 4 components that you need to learn and exercise in order to cultivate self-love. Join me on today's episode as I discuss the 4 components and how you can step into your own and feel confident permanently. Also, join my FB group Life Unstuck Tribe to continue the conversation and share your insights. https://www.facebook.com/groups/lifeunstucktribe

Values are not always consciously utilized. Once we figure out what they are they can be monumental in lighting the path that we need to take. Each person has their own set of values that are really the core of their being. Using your values as a compass in tough situations can really make the decision-making process easier if you are committed to using them. While this topic isn't always very exhilarating it is life-changing when used intentionally. Go to bojanamilic.com/epi004 for this week exercise. Podcast freebie episode 4- values as a compass for life (AutoRecovered)  

Too many people are waging war on their emotions are trying to avoid them out of existence.  Emotions have a bad rep I think mostly because people don’t understand them and don’t have a very good grasp on what to do with them. Emotions are a vital part of the human experience. Without emotions, the world would be bland. But what have we been taught? Don’t show your emotions because you will be seen as weak, over the top, crazy and a whole slew of other things. Society has classified that emotions should be something to shy away from and as a result, people don’t know how to read their emotions, how to control them or generally what to do with them so we end up avoiding them. Your emotions are linked to your thoughts. Those thoughts you can either be aware or unaware of.  Yur thoughts create your emotions and you end up playing a game on ping-pong back and forth between the two.   So going back to neuroplasticity and how neurons that fire together wire together you end up with emotional pathways. So depending on what you are continuously thinking about you will have certain emotions expressing themselves over and over. We have mistakenly been taught to believe that you should spend the major not feeling anything. This is absolute garbage. You should always be feeling something. Numbness is a coping mechanism of shutting yourself off from your emotions. People who have good emotional management don't need to numb because they know that emotion cannot harm them. It comes and if you acknowledge it and give it the space to exist it will dissipate on its own.  Each emotion has a way that it feels physically in your body. What that means is that you will feel different sensations in your body depending on what emotion you are feeling. For everyone, this will feel different. Your body has a reaction. But we are not well versed in sensing and understanding what emotions we are feeling and because we have been told that emotions are bad we feel a certain way and we automatically think that this bad.  So people are always feeling anxious because they have a physical sensation that they have associated with fear and anxiety and that’s automatically where they go to. And because this cascade happens so quickly you can get into the pattern of perceiving that physical sensation as negative instead of positive.   I’ll give you an example. I took my daughter to the park one time. She was maybe 18 months old. Now she’s started talking very early so her vocab was pretty good. I put her on the swing and push her. She looked at me terrified “Mama I’m scared!!” I didn’t stop pushing all I said was “baby you’re not scared you’re excited” the second I said it you could see the switch flip she had this huge smile on her face and she wouldn’t get off that swing. Still loves it to this day.  At that moment I basically reclassified her emotions. I had to give her a bigger context. How many of you who have kids would have stopped that swing and fed into the fear? This is how anxiety is passed on from one generation to the next. You have an adult who is not in control of their own emotional experiences who give the child “evidence” to support their lack of control. I want you to think about how many times you have done that? If you just have a moment don’t beat yourself up. Don’t expect to be able to coach your child through their emotions if you can’t say with confidence that you have a good handle of your own.  When we don’t know any better and have never had someone who is emotionally rich teach us about what emotions are and how to deal we are at the mercy of being run by those natural automatic ways of the brain. Now your brain may develop a preference or familiarity with certain emotions. The brain does what is easy and what it has practised. Therefore ee can get stuck in a couple of emotions.  Think about what emotions you are familiar with, what emotions do you typically function in? what comes up a lot for you?

Choose your thoughts like you choose your socks. With care and purpose!  We run around with thoughts rushing through our heads all day long. In 2005 the national science foundation published an article saying the average person has 60 thousand thoughts a day. 80% tend to be negative and 95% repetitive. Your thoughts will go unchecked until you do something about them. We give more thought to picking out our socks than to what we think. You check the weather, you decide what you want to wear then go into your sock drawer and go through and choose which pair would be best. We don't do this with our thoughts. And Why? Well because we haven't been encouraged to do so and shown how.   In the next few episodes, I want to really break down how your brain and your mind work. I think this is fundamental to you actually getting empowered to change things and really move our life in the direction that you choose. You feel stuck because you are! Your brain loves to save energy so it will do what is easy, not what is always in your best interest unless you make it. I firmly believe that the majority of people have never been taught the skills of being able to control their thoughts and emotions and these two are vital in how we go through life, what actions we take and what results we get. This is part of the reason why mental health these days is in such crisis. We look at people as sick or disordered when in reality a lot of the time it’s an awareness and skillset issue. We like to categorize health into good health and bad health as if it’s by accident. Health is not a noun, health is a verb. To have good mental health, to have good physical or emotional and spiritual health it all requires ACTION. This is absolutely non-negotiable.  I want to let you know this is difficult for the first little while because you are rewiring your thinking patterns. For simplicity sake. I want you to think of your brain as divided into 3 sections.  The reptilian mind- basic, primitive, evolved to take care of your survival. Nano-second processing. The mammalian brain- this is where your needs and emotions are stored. Then there is the human brain as I like to call it. This is where your executive functioning and problem-solving is and this is the part from an evolutionary perspective of what makes us human.  You do not use only 5% of your brain. Your brain is working all the time to its full capacity. We are only aware of a very small fraction. This part is the voice you hear in your head. Your voice. Your brain processes an estimated 11millions bits of info and you are only aware of about 50 bits at a time. So your subconscious mind is the 11 million bits and your conscious is the 50 bits. As you can see the subconscious runs the show.  I want you to think about your brain as a computer. You have the hardware- the subconscious that runs in the background. Then there are the programs that you do access too-your conscious. The majority of your subconscious download occurs between the ages of 0 to 7. You may have shit in that program that you don’t remember that is having a huge impact on how you see the world around you. If the program you are running in the background is riddled with stress, anxiety, this will affect how you experience your world. However, if you change the program you change how that computer works.  Your brain is placid. The neuropathways that are fired most often become your default or go-to mode. So if you have gotten into the habit of being an asshole towards yourself that program will always be playing. Becoming aware of what you are saying to yourself throughout the day is critical. You need to notice what you are saying, identify who you got that from because chances are you got your record from someone, and then rewrite that record or program by reminding yourself of the evidence against those negative thoughts.

Introductory episode reviewing what this podcast is about and what you can expect as the listener. All those ready to shed all the garbage that is weighing them down and live their best life can join my Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/lifeunstucktribe/