Safety Behaviors That Keep You From Making Progress
Collecting knowledge is useful. Collection without application adds subconscious weight until the mechanism grinds to a halt.
I’m speaking poetically, but from personal experience.
In 2019, I started an Instagram account called ‘Startingtothriveat45’. It was a way to share what I had been learning about growth mindset, habit formation, neuroplasticity, and a new way of being through the awareness and understanding that our emotions are created by our thinking, not by things outside of us.
Up to that point, I spent years spiraling in and out of depression. This created its own collateral damage.
But around 2018, I discovered Brooke Castillo’s The Life Coach School Podcast.
At the core of her teachings was The Self-Coaching Model (aka “the Model”), a framework she developed to organize and explain visually the causal relationship between thoughts, feelings, and behavior and the results in our lives.
Like elegant code, the Model was clean, deceptive in its simplicity despite its robust and universal practicality.
I started using the Model daily, not only to see what my automatic thoughts were creating, but to learn to think purposefully — to choose thoughts that would generate emotions that would drive behavior that aligned with and ultimately created results/change I desired.
This helped me change my relationship with myself, my daughters and my husband. Instead of feeling subject to the whims of depression, I used the Model to see what thoughts were creating the constellations of feelings my mind labeled ‘depression.’
I started learning to relate to those painful thoughts differently.
Instead of immediately judging or fearing them, or witnessing them with shame or embarrassment, I started to practice compassionate awareness. In the words of Eckhart Tolle, I worked to become the watcher of my mind.
Observing yourself in real time can be painful, but doing so with the intent to deepen your understanding of human behavior for the purpose of expanding and broadening the lens through which you view and live life IS the entry to a new path.
But awareness is just one part.
Awareness without support, tools, or scaffolding for new ways to move forward can add to distress.
The brain can only hold so much awareness and knowledge before it starts collapsing under the weight of everything you’re trying to hold.
I go through phases of trying to capture or hold everything that might be useful for understanding human behavior.
Inevitably, my ‘system’ becomes overloaded creating anxiety, fear and worry.
I used to think the solution was emotional management and regulation.
But for the subset of people who find safety and emotional regulation in knowledge, the missing piece is execution — i.e., moving from consuming to doing, thinking to applying, from in your head to making tangible progress.
For those with ADHD (or who suspect they have it), this is about learning to extract more reward from doing versus knowing.
Does this resonate?
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These are the types of conversations I have each week with my 1:1 coaching clients. I have openings for a few new 1:1 clients.
If weekly mindset coaching for 6 to 12 months while you do the transformational inner work to grow sounds exciting and supportive to you, I invite you to sign up for a free 90-minute deep-dive coaching call so you can experience firsthand what it would be like to work together, and how mindset coaching can change your life.
To book your free call, click here.
