Bumble bees are not supposed to fly. Their body weighs too much, and their wingspan is too short. Thank goodness the bumble bee doesn’t know these facts. What are the supposed “facts” that are holding you back? Sure, there are challenging circumstances in your life. But it’s not life circumstances that are holding you back or making you feel anxious or depressed, it’s your reaction to these circumstances When it comes to happiness, we often hold ourselves back psychologically through self-imposed limitations and mental barriers, many of which stem from past experiences, cultural conditioning, or deeply ingrained, habituated thought patterns. Join me in this week’s episode as I explore some common ways we do this.

I’m sure you’ll agree that changing neurotic perceptions characterized by excessive worrying fear or emotional hyper-reactivity is easier said than done. In order to change the way you perceive and think about yourself and the world, it will take what we might call intentional effort. Efforts to reframe the thought patterns that have become reflexive habits while also managing and regulating your emotional/physiological responses. Once you understand how you’ve been compromised by neurotic perceptions and thoughts, then it’s time to apply a Self-Coaching approach that will allow you to reverse the grip that irrational, anxious struggles have on your life.

Ever notice how silly someone else’s worry seems to you? How many times have you told someone to stop making mountains out of molehills? Unfortunately,// if worry has become your knee-jerk reflexive response to life challenges, then mountain-making is what you do best. People make mountains out of molehills for a variety of psychological, emotional, and social reasons. This often stems from an inability to put issues into perspective, where minor inconveniences are perceived as major crises. And if you struggle with stress and anxiety, you’re probably no stranger to amplifying small problems, making them seem disproportionately ‘mountain’ like.

In everyone’s life there are challenges, some big, some small. When faced with adversity, hope can help us weather our storms. What exactly is hope? There’s no doubt that hope involves our emotions, but did you know that hope itself is not an emotion? Hope is a way of thinking. This means that hope—OR HAVING a hopeful attitude-- can be learned or coached. It’s true that hope may not mitigate the inevitable challenges we must face, but hope isn’t about what’s coming around the corner, it’s about releasing ourselves from the despair of hopelessness in our present. Allowing us to live more courageously and unencumbered by pessimistic projections.

In this Self-Coaching podcast, I’m introducing a new format: weekly Self-Coaching challenges. My intention is to provide bite-sized, motivational instructions that can be practiced each week to enhance your Self-Coaching efforts. Today’s challenge is an exercise in ‘creating a bubble’ of separation from your world of “have-tos.” By practicing being more responsive to your ‘whims,’ you open yourself up to glimpse the life that awaits you.

Today’s Self-Coaching episode addresses the crucial role that optimism and pessimism have on your liberation from emotional struggle. Although I’ll be talking about optimism in next week’s podcast, I felt it was crucial to first address what happens when we identify with pessimism, “I’ll never get better,” “life’s too hard, I just can’t handle it.” This is the voice of pessimism, which has become an entrenched habit of ego identification—in a very real sense, you become your pessimism. And when this happens, you begin what we call a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the neurotic thinking associated with insecurity begins to feel like it’s your voice—It’s not!

Perhaps the best way to describe Responsive Living would be the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) phrase Let go, let god. The simplicity of this adage may escape you,// but trust me, it’s quite profound. In AA parlance, it has to do with letting go of compulsive, destructive thinking and handing yourself over to a higher power. From a secularized, Self-Coaching standpoint, Responsive Living is learning to let go, let life. Translation: letting go of trying to over-control life, and instead learning to risk letting life unfold spontaneously without anticipation, worry, or fear. Join me in this Self-Coaching episode to explore this extremely important Mind-Talk step of learning to use Responsive Living to liberate yourself from a life of emotional struggle.

Releasing yourself from struggle You’ve heard it said that a picture is worth a thousand words. When you get caught up in the incessant chatter of insecurity-driven thinking, having a simple picture in your mind can be far more useful than a thousand words of analyzing or trying to understand the “whys” of your suffering. In this Self-Coaching episode, I provide two compelling, fail-safe visualizations that you will want to use over and over again whenever your mind feels hijacked by insecurity-driven ruminations of emotional struggle.   Why are visualizations so powerful? Simply because the brain likes, even craves, visual images. You can tell yourself to stop worrying, which, more often than not, requires a tedious effort, but if you create a visual image in your mind, you will be short-circuiting the neurotic ruminations that cripple you, allowing you to turn away from the toxic chatter of insecurity and reconnect with a more relaxed, empowered perspective—one that will enable you to proceed to next week’s critically important step 3, Reactive Living.

How exactly do you stop allowing yourself to be manipulated by neurotic thinking? The simple answer to this question is best summed up by something my grandmother was fond of saying: You can’t stop a bird from flying into your hair, but you don’t have to help it build a nest. You may not be able to stop neurotic thoughts from percolating up into consciousness, but you don’t have to passively allow your conscious mind to become part of the “nest-building” problem. This is the essence of Mind-Talk’s Step Two, stopping the progression of insecurity-driven thinking. In this Self-Coaching podcast, I introduce two techniques for stopping this progression (a.k.a., nest building): • Engaging—focusing your conscious mind to actively stop the progression of insecurity-driven thinking. • Active Ignoring—asserting your conscious mind to ignore and disengage from insecurity-driven thinking.

If you do nothing about your thinking, nothing will change. If you do something about your thinking, you will change. In this Self-Coaching podcast, I will introduce you to the first of four steps involved in Mind-Talk. Mind-Talk is my unique technique for ensuring liberation from anxiety, depression, and all emotional struggles. Today's episode with teach you two critical exercises: Detached Mind-Checking and Critically Observing. Once you learn these simple techniques, you will no longer feel victimized by the inexplicable, habituated, neurotic thoughts that have prevented you from the solace that you long for.