Episode #191: Changing Your Mindset: A Truth Bomb (You Need To Know)

[00:01:05] Hello everybody. This is Heather Moulder, your host of the Life & Law Podcast. And today we are getting into – probably what’s going to be a pretty short yet very powerful lesson.

It’s about changing your mindset.

Today I want to cover a little bit of a truth bomb that I think you need to know. The reason I’m covering it is because it came up recently with a client and it also came up for me last year. And because I have seen this reappearing a couple of times (both through myself and through a client, and realized that this is happening a lot for a lot of us), I wanted to get in here and talk to you about changing your mindset, changing your habits, (because habits start with mindset work).

Typically speaking, thoughts and beliefs go into habits. There are automatic responses that we have. Those all are thinking-type things. So habit work isn’t just about changing something you do. It’s about changing how you think, how you process first and foremost.

So I just want to rip the band-aid off.

Internal growth is not linear.

It’s not a straight path. It loops, it dips, it doubles back.

And we humans tend to treat our brain like it’s a computer. Like we can just delete old programming and install a shiny new mindset, a shiny new habit, a shiny new something, right?

But it’s not a computer. Our brains do not work that way.

Think of it instead as you are slowly writing new code. And the old code, it’s still there. You’re writing new code. It doesn’t completely overwrite. It might overwrite that old code in some ways, but not completely.

Sometimes it’s going to show back up – those old habits, those old thoughts, that old thinking.

So this is why, when you think you’ve mastered something new – a new habit, a new mental shift, boom… Something unexpected occurs that throws you completely off kilter.

And because of that, your old patterns creep back in.

Real-Life Examples Of How This Happens

So, for example, I worked really hard, y’all, when I first left my legal practice to start this business around my mindset. I cared a lot, like, frankly, most lawyers do, about what other people think of me. So much so that I held myself back from going all in on the new business.

I kept thinking things like: “What are my colleagues going to think? What are they going to think that I’m no longer practicing? What are they going to think that I did this for 18 years and I walked away? Are they still going to respect me in the same way? Am I doing work that’s “hard enough” and “good enough”?”

Those were the things that were going through my head and it held me back from for years. Kid-you-not, years.

I’ve talked about this before. I didn’t go all in on social media. I didn’t go all in on reaching out to law firms like I had planned because I felt less-than. And I worked on that mental shift for more than three years, y’all, before I felt like I finally overcame it. At least enough to get out there, start this podcast, get on social media, say the things I really wanted to say.

And then last year, it all came rushing back.

Imagine my shock when those feelings came back at me last year. I had to work to overcome that. It felt like all over again.

This is also why my client, who worked really hard last year to build new boundaries:

• to not say yes to every request made of her just because she wanted to please other people and didn’t want to let them down;
• to not over-promise the world because she wanted to prove herself.

She got over that. She built real boundaries. She learned how to say no. She was super proud of not over-promising the world all the time.

And then after more than six months of progress, she felt like she was back to square one.

She got sick. She missed a week of work. She came back feeling guilty for having missed that work and started to go back into those bad habits because of the guilt.

When Changing Your Mindset, Relapses Aren’t Failures (You’re Not Back Where You Started)

But here’s the thing that I want you guys to understand.

She was not back where she started. I was not back at square one.

The lesson that you need to know around habit work, mindset work, and any type of personal growth work is this:

New experiences, new challenges, and new phases of life are expected to trigger old habits because you have not worked through those things in this new context. And context matters. A trigger might have been overcome, a big one, but another trigger has not yet been overcome.

And you likely have different thoughts and beliefs around this new trigger or this new context that you have not worked through. The thinking, the beliefs, the habits.

You haven’t worked through those yet in that way, and that’s okay.

What it means when this happens is that it’s time to revisit it and work through it in a new context with those new or other or different thoughts, beliefs, and ways of these habits showing up.

Now, they might feel super similar to where your brain wants to say, well, it’s the same thing. I am back at square one.

NO!

So think of it this way. Let’s go back to the computer analogy and the fact that you’ve written new code. Well, that new code, and I do know this from my husband who knows these things. He is an SAP consultant. He was an MIS major, and although he doesn’t directly code a lot, he knows and understands this. And in talking to him about what he does, it’s very clear that oftentimes what a lot of companies do is they come in and they write code for a very specific situation, but it only works in that specific situation.

And so when you do it in that way, it’s not going to apply to these other things that are very similar, but they’re not the same. Your brain is seeing it very similarly. It’s not exactly the same. You might feel it, but it’s not. And so you have to re approach it in this new context.

You need to write new code for this new context. The moral of these two stories and the real point here for you to know is this.

The next time an old habit, an old fear, an old doubt reappears that you thought you’d overcome, do not panic.

In fact, expect it to happen. Not as “It’s never going to work, I’ll never overcome this”. But knowing that this is a normal thing, that you haven’t dealt with it quite in this way, and it’s time to learn anew. There is a new situation, there is a new reason to write new code.

This is your opportunity to learn and grow even more. You’re not back at square one. You are just ready to outgrow and create a new way of thinking, a new way of being, a new way of doing in a new way, in context.

The goal isn’t to never struggle again. That’s not really possible, y’all. The goal is to learn how to respond differently within a new context each time old patterns resurface.

I hope that this is helpful to you in the here and now. Take it, think through it. Feel free to reach out to me if you have questions, and we’ll be back next week. Bye for now.