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One of the things that I’ve been working on recently is the concept of what I call “thought loops.” Essentially, a thought loop is a thought error that tends to happen in our brain and is reminiscent of the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder but is something that we can easily control.

In this episode, we take a deep dive into what these errors are, how they present themselves in our lives, and how we can overcome them. I also explain how these compulsive and irrational thought loops have shown up (and are still showing up) in my life.

Get your earbuds and listen in as I give you some tools that you can start using today to surmount the compulsive and irrational thinking that often drains us of our energy and redirect this energy to the things that truly matter in life.

 

What you will discover

  • What thought loops are and some examples of those “errors.”
  • Why resisting these thought loops is not a good idea.
  • The questions you need to ask yourself in order to overcome these thought errors.
  • How to separate yourself from the thought loops.
  • How you can use the energy created by these thought errors to do something productive.

Featured on the show

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Life Coach School Podcast, where it's all about real clients, real problems and real coaching, and now your host, Master Coach Instructor, Brooke Castillo.

Hello, hello, hello, my friends. How are you guys? Tell me out loud. Hey, I just moved from my office back into my house. I took the whole first front part of my house that's supposed to be like the living room and the dining room and I've turned it into my office, so I'm at home and I'm adjusting to figuring out how to get my work done and not be distracted by my adorable puppies and my kids. That's what I'm up to today, so I'm actually recording this podcast on a Saturday. I just went and took my son Connor to his soccer game. We just got back and I'm like, "Uh-oh, I don't want to be doing work on the weekends," but I'm actually excited to be able to do it because Chris is out of town. He went to Oktoberfest with my brother-in-law and some of our best friends, and Christian is golfing and Connor is in his room recovering from soccer.

It's nice to just hang out with you guys on a Saturday. I really love this topic that I'm doing today because it's something that I have been working with on myself and I know many of my clients are working on the same thing. The terminology I'm going to use for it is thought loops, and what a thought loop is is basically a thought error that happens in your brain, so that's what we're going to talk about today. I'm going to tell you guys what they are, how they present in your life and actually some techniques on how to overcome them. Before I do that, I want to have a heart-to-heart with you all.

I very often get emails from people who want to advertise on the podcast. I actually just had one of my colleagues ask me why I've never advertised on the podcast, and the truth is I don't really like ads. I don't like it when I'm listening to a conversation or I'm listening to a teaching and then all of a sudden there's an unrelated ad right in the middle of it. It's annoying to me, so I don't want to add ads to the podcast. I want to leave the podcast like it is, but here's the thing. When I looked at the number of downloads I get on this podcast a month, I'm not really into statistics, somebody had asked me about it or something, I can't remember what it was for, but a hundred and fifty thousand downloads a month is what is currently happening on this podcast.

That's a lot of y'all downloading a lot of podcasts and I love that and I know that there's a lot of really great stuff happening because of this podcast. I'm very proud at what I have been able to create for so many of you in terms of results without ever having met you. I've been able to give you the tools that you can create the results you want in your life. It's so fun for me to hear from you guys in the comments or through an email or when I run into you at a training and to just hear that the podcast is really benefiting you.

Here's what I'm going to ask. I am going to ask that each of you, I know that you don't think I'm talking to you but I am talking to you, if you haven't written a review, I'd really like to get to a thousand reviews on iTunes. I think we're about at six or seven hundred reviews and I really appreciate, if you've already given me a review, I really appreciate it. If you love the show and you listen to it and you just haven't gotten around to giving me a review, I would really appreciate it if you would do it today, if you would just take the time and get me a review and we'll get to a thousand. Here's how I feel. If I get to a thousand reviews and you guys are raising your hands saying, "I want to review you. I want to support you. I agree. I don't want to have ads. Let's do it," let's have a little agreement here.

If we get to a thousand reviews, and let's try and do it by the end of the year, if we get to a thousand reviews by the end of the year, then we won't ever put an ad on this podcast. Now, what I am going to do, and this is starting in 2017 and I'm super-excited about this, so most of you know that I have The Life Coach School and I train coaches and I have all my alumni certified coaches that have come through the school and there's so much talent and so much that they have to offer that one of the things that I offered for them to do is to record a twenty minute segment of a valuable lesson, so they're either taking some lesson that they've created based on what I have taught them or they've created something based on the work that they do with their niche.

What I'm going to start doing in 2017 is on some of my episodes, once the episode is done, you can stay on the episode if you want and listen to an additional teaching by one of my coaches. Now, if you're not interested in that, that's totally fine. You just end, we end the podcast as normal and there's no harm done. If you're interested in hearing some of their magnificence, then you jump on or you just stay on until the end and get an extra bonus twenty minutes of content. I'm really looking forward to that.

I have been reviewing some of their submissions for podcasts, and they are really, really exceptional, so I'm excited to share that coming up in 2017. Let's do reviews. We get me up to a thousand reviews on iTunes, and you can just Google how to do a review on iTunes. I wish it was a lot more intuitive than it is but it's not, so it's going to take a little bit of effort on your part, but I feel like it's worth it. I spend this time recording this stuff just for you. Hook me up with a review. That would be amazing!

All right, so let's move on. Let's talk about thought loops and thought errors. I've talked about thought errors before on the podcast and I've talked about how I love that terminology. I got that terminology from some books I was reading on OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, where the brain gets caught in a thought error and the compulsive thought error where your brain is basically telling you, "If you don't do this really irrational thing, someone will probably die," and it makes no sense and it's completely illogical, but the thought keeps repeating and it's compulsive, so it sends energy into the body to an unanswered loop that makes you want to complete it, like people washing their hands or people tapping on certain things or saying the word "seven" or counting the word "seven" or double-checking that their door is locked.

All of those things are really significant thought errors and chemical imbalances in the brain. I've done a lot of research and read about it and I think it's really fascinating. There's a different form of that. It's like a lighter version of that, a prequel to that so to speak, that all of us go through. They're what we would call more minor thought errors that we can actually control pretty easily. OCD is very difficult to control. People will say all the time, "Oh well, just stop washing your hands. Well, you don't really need to go back and check and make sure the door is locked," but it's so much more complicated than that. It's not just a matter of, oh, it's like saying, "Well, just stop overeating. Well, just stop overdrinking," right? Once your brain gets locked into it, it's much more difficult to just simply stop doing something.

I want you to think about a thought loop that you may have sometimes that creates a minor obsession to focus. Some examples are when you do something that's cringe-worthy. I love that terminology. So when you've done something in your life that's cringe-worthy and you can't stop playing that loop in your brain, you're like, "I can't believe I did that. I can't believe I did that. I can't believe I did that." You may feel like you need to apologize or talk to the people or constantly be talking about it and trying to figure it out. It's like your brain won't let you stop thinking about it, is basically what a thought loop is, like, "Can you believe you did that? I can't believe you did that."

Sometimes when you get obsessed with, I've had clients that have gotten obsessed with looking at other people's Facebooks. It's almost like this person is no longer in their life anymore. Maybe it's an ex-boyfriend or an ex-girlfriend or a friend, an ex-friend or even someone that you don't even know that well but you're obsessed with constantly looking at their Facebook, constantly looking at what they're doing, if they're having parties without you. It's like, you don't want to look at it but you can't help yourself. You keep looking at it. You keep pulling up, seeing what they're doing. For some of you, that may turn into checking your phone constantly, seeing if they text, seeing if they call, seeing if they text, seeing if they call, see if you can find out where they're located on your phone.

I have lots of clients that I work with that have these thought loops about food and about binging. The thought is, "You got to get some food. You got to eat some food. You got to get some food. You got to eat some food and it's got to be a lot of it." It feels imperative to follow through on this thought, feeling, action process. If we're talking about drinking, it's like you have a thought about drinking. You have an urge to drink and then you drink. You have a thought about binging. You have the urge to binge and then you binge. It's that process and that loop feels like it's not within our conscious control. It's something that is, it's almost like our brain has taken us over.

Now, that's never the case, but it sometimes feels that way. I've had clients who obsess in thought loops about what other people think about them, "What are other people thinking about me?" and trying to control what other people think about them and wanting to make sure that they think a certain way about them but obsessing that they think a different way about them. Sometimes, for people, it's like stats, so I've had clients that are obsessed with looking at their stock market portfolios or looking at their stats on Facebook. They're looking at their stats for their businesses and their income, and they are just constantly thinking, their brain is compulsed to be focusing on that. Even if you already know what those numbers are, it's like continuously looking at them.

Worrying. We talk a lot about these in my private coaching groups. Eckhart Tolle talks about how worry pretends to be necessary and this constant fixating on the future and what can happen and the brain going there and wanting to focus on it. We talk about how the brain likes to obsess about things that are dangerous. I was joking the other day with some of my students and I was basically saying, "Your brain would prefer that you just stay in the house and never go anywhere. Every time you want to venture out into the world, your brain is basically saying, 'We're probably going to die. We shouldn't tell anyone anything. We shouldn't expose ourselves to the world because then we will probably die.'"

People-pleasing thoughts for a lot of clients is, "How can I make this person like me? How can I please this person? What can I do for this person? Did I not, did I offend this person, did I not?" and then obsessing over something that you said or something that you did that may have not been pleasing to that person. This is that milder version of OCD and thought loops, but if you guys have been in this, it's irrational. I think about, I had this boyfriend when I was in college and I got on this thought loop with him. We had broken up and all I could think about was him and I felt compelled to drive by his house and to check my phone to see if he'd called me and to call him constantly.

Even though I recognized that this wasn't logical, and I recognized that, "This isn't who I wanted to be," it was so compelling to do it that I just kept doing it. There was some sense of indulgent relief when I did, so those associations that you make, and then of course whenever you get that indulgent relief, then you want to just keep doing it, keep doing it, keep doing it, okay. Try and think about how this applies to you maybe in your life because what happens is you have this drive to do this thing, whether it's check your Facebook or check your phone maybe, check and see if you've got any emails. That kind of energy that comes from that is really powerful actually.

It's like nudging energy from within is the way that I like to describe it, like, "You'd better figure this out. You'd better make up for that thing that you did. You'd better make sure this person likes you. You'd better see what's on Facebook. You'd better not miss out. You'd better not miss out. You'd better check this out," right? Those kind of messages that are going on in our brain, those thought errors create feeling energy behind them. It's like this anxiety that needs to be answered. Most of us have experienced this. It's like, "No, I've got to do it right now," and there's always a sense of hurry. You know that you're in one of these thought loops because you need to fix something that's going on immediately. You need to eat immediately. It's not like, "Oh okay, I'll eat that next week. Okay, well, I'll check my Facebook and see if they posted anything tomorrow."

It's always, "I need to check it right now. I need to see what that is. I need to read all the comments. I need to see how many likes I got." Right? It's that compulsion, that hurry to it. Sometimes, for me, this is like obsessive research, like, "I have to figure out who these people are and what they've thought about me and what they've done," right. It's usually ... I have an example of this when I was buying my current house. We were going through a negotiation based on some feedback from the inspection. There were some cut trellises, I think they were called, in the ceiling. In the inspection, they were like, "Yeah. That is not good. This is a problem," and so I started obsessing about it because I really wanted the house.

I started doing research on this, on all the construction. I started doing research on the people that had owned it. I started doing research on the builder that had built it. I wanted to see if any other houses had the same issue. I was like, the way that I'd like to describe it, is like a dog with a bone, like I had to get to the bottom of this mystery. Now, it was completely fruitless, all of that effort to do that. The basic bottom line is, and I can always gauge myself against my husband because he doesn't normally get this way about these types of things and so he's like, "Well, they're either going to give us the news that we have to have it fixed or that we don't." That's the bottom line. Researching it obsessively isn't going to solve anything.

Now, sometimes I have to say that obsessive research and being obsessive had some positive benefits but rarely, and rarely at the cost, worth the cost of the obsession and getting all freaked out about it. I think for you guys, you know, and you may have a much more milder version of this, but one of the ways that we try and deal with this is by resisting it, and as you know, in all of my teachings, resisting anything makes it stronger and makes it bigger. It gives it energy, so if you think about somebody trying to move towards you and you put your hands up and resist them, you're pushing energy into your hands and into that thing that's coming towards you which actually makes it easier for them to push against you because you're creating that resistance. I think that's true with most things in our lives and any time we're trying to argue with reality.

This is the process I follow. I remind myself when I feel this type of buzzing, hurried, frenetic "take action" and repeated loops energy, I acknowledge, "Whoa. This is a thought error. This is a thought loop, and resistance won't work and I need to relax into it and be present." It will become consuming. It's repetitive and it requires anxiety, that striving action. As soon as I take a breath and recognize, "Okay. This is a thought error. This is a thought loop. My brain is telling me that it makes sense to drive by my ex-boyfriend's house to see what he's doing. I need to know what he's doing. I need to know if he's dating someone else. I need to know if there's a girl."

Even thinking it through logically without trying to understand any of it, it doesn't matter. You're past the point of reason. This unconscious loop has taken over. One of the things that I like to do is ask myself, "Okay. What do you think has gone wrong here?" There's usually something that I have done mentally that has created the thought error, and so when I'm able to say, "Wait. This is the thought error. What has gone wrong here?" the answer for me is usually that I am obsessed with controlling the uncontrollable. I'm arguing with reality and I'm trying to control the uncontrollable.

With the ex-boyfriend, I didn't want him to date anyone else. I didn't want us to be broken up and the situation that we were broken up. I couldn't believe that it had happened. I thought that something had gone terribly wrong and I was trying to correct that wrong. Now, when I wrote that down, when I understand that, I can see so clearly that those are incorrect assumptions. I always recognize when I'm trying to control what someone else is thinking about me or what someone else is doing, that's when you can get in that compulsive thought error because you can't actually have an impact on those things, and especially if you've tried and been unsuccessful, that can ignite a thought error. The next question. The first question is, "What do you think has gone wrong here?"

The next one is, "What are you really wanting?" That'll blow your mind. Let's say, for example, you posted something on Facebook and you are compulsively checking to see how many likes you got and what your comments are. I've seen a lot of clients do this. I ask them, "What do you really want?" The truth is they don't really care ultimately how many likes they get. It's not so important for them to hit a certain number. It's not like this huge meaningful thing to them when they think about it logically, but until I ask them the question, "What is it you really want? Is it a thousand likes? Is it love and appreciation? Is it acknowledgement? Is it praise? Is it attention? What is it you're really looking for?" Then, you can provide that for yourself and stop trying to create it artificially with compulsive action because compulsive action will never get you that ultimate result that you want.

Then the next question that's helpful. The first question was, "What do you think has gone wrong?" The second question is, "What are you really wanting?" The third question is, "How are you trying to justify this illogical action?" It usually involves some weird kind of lying. Let's say I'm sitting with a friend and we're having lunch and I'm compulsively checking my Facebook likes. I'm not on Facebook but I know a lot of you will post something to your group of followers and you'll want to make sure your friends have liked it. You'll want to make sure that they've seen it, they've commented, they've acknowledged, but you don't want the person that you're at lunch with to know that that's what you're compulsively checking, so you're just like, "Oh, I'm waiting for someone to text me" or "I want to make sure my kids are okay."

It's like you hear yourself lying about something that's not even worth lying about. That's how you know if you're trying to justify the action. Asking yourself how are you trying to justify taking this action when ultimately, what it is you're looking for is attention, is acknowledgement, okay. Now, by the way, if you're looking for attention and acknowledgement, my suggestion is not that you try and get it from Facebook or that you ask someone to give it to you, but that you give it to yourself because that can be immediate and that can be so relieving in that moment when you're able to acknowledge what it is you really want. Now, once you've done that work, you will be able, I think, to separate yourself from the thought error.

One of the visualizations that has been extremely helpful to me is to visualize my prefrontal cortex separate from my primitive brain, my human brain separate from my animal brain. The idea that the human brain was not started from scratch, that it was basically, we just took, evolution, I should say, just added on so the primitive brain is still there but it just added on evolution. I'm going to talk about it just being like a thing that created our brain just to make it simple. The prefrontal is just overlaying that primitive brain so we have to accommodate it and we have to manage it. It's almost like a parent and a child is one of the ways that I like to think about it.

Once I've recognized that my primitive unconscious brain is on a thought error loop, then I can tap into my prefrontal to observe it and manage it. The visualization that really helps me is I recognize, "Okay, this is a thought error. This is driving me to be a little bit compulsive and a little bit obsessive about this thing. I'm just going to be willing to observe it and then gently let it go, gently separate from it. This is a primitive thought error. I'm just going to gently separate it. This is not something that's true. This isn't something that I need to do. I'm going to notice it." I like the idea.

Pema Chödrön talks about how our mind is like the sky and our thoughts are like the clouds, and you can focus on one specific cloud or you can focus on a cluster of clouds or you can focus on the whole sky. One of the best ways that I know how to release thought errors is to focus on the blue sky and let go of the clouds and let them drift away. It really helps for me, helps me, so I'm able to see, "This is a thought. This is me. They are not the same thing. This thought that I should go drive by my ex-boyfriend's house and that I need to do that is just simply a thought error. It's something that feels like it's necessary. It feels like it's important. It feels like it will serve me, and it's my primitive brain that has been designed to create motivation within me and to accomplish and to believe that if I don't do these things, I will die."

There are so many thoughts in our life that compel us to take action that keep us alive. You need to go eat. You need to bathe. You need to take care of yourself. You need to drink water. Those are all very important things, and if you don't do those things, you will get urgency to do them, and that's a beautiful thing. Sometimes, that beautiful energy and that effective energy and those effective thought loops are attributed towards things that aren't useful, and that's when we can get into a little bit of trouble with ourselves where we're spending our energy being compulsive instead of spending our energy on something else.

One of the other ways that I like to think about this is that when you get a really compelling thought error, you get something that feels immediate and urgent and you need to fix something and you need to change how people are thinking about you or you need to change what's happening with the reality and you need to control someone else, that is really compelling energy and it's forceful energy. Have you ever felt like you need to write someone a letter right away so they understand that they're wrong and you're right, or that there's a misunderstanding and they need to fix it, right? Have you ever felt that like, "I got to do this right this second?"

That energy is actually really valuable useful energy. That energy is the energy your body produces so you can stay alive, so that immediacy, "You'd better get food," that immediacy, "You'd better get connection," that immediacy, "You'd better accomplish this" has kept us alive for thousands of years. It's no longer necessary when it's associated with things that don't depend on our survival, and yet that thought loop is still there. One of the things I've learnt to do is to take that energy, recognize, "Okay. This is a thought error," instead of spending my energy writing crazy letters and driving by my boyfriend's house and checking Facebook seventeen hundred times, I'm going to take that energy and put it into a project, put it into something else. It really does work.

You can shift your focus by releasing the clouds into the sky, releasing the thoughts, releasing the focus on the ex-boyfriend or on the Facebook or on the worry about the future or on the worry about the past or the worry about what someone else is thinking. Take all that worry energy, take all that fixated energy and flow it into a project that you're creating. Flow it into cleaning your house or working out or going on a walk or building a business or doing the work that you need to do, de-cluttering your house, which I highly recommend, that is, it's literal physical energy that you now can expend.

Here's the biggest piece that I think is so fascinating is if you don't utilize that energy, it feels like you're going to explode from the inside out. Anyone whose ever wanted to binge or overeat, you know what I'm talking about. There is this urgent energy within you. It is compelling you to eat, and it's compelling you to eat fast and it's compelling you to eat now. If you do nothing with that energy, it just seems to get bigger and bigger and more immediate and more important. It's totally looping through a thought error program in your brain. It's almost like a virus in your brain.

If you take that energy and you recognize, "Hey, I'm producing energy by mistake here. It's not that important that I eat an entire bag of Oreos. My brain seems to think that it is imperative, and if I don't do it, I'm going to die, but I recognize that that's not true. This is a thought error and I'm going to take that energy and I'm going to put it into building something, creating something, writing something, writing a novel or writing a book, going on a walk," whatever it is you want to do, but expend the energy, the mental and sometimes physical energy from yourself because otherwise it just builds and it's almost like it eats you from the inside out.

That's where you can really start resisting and compulsing, resisting, compulsing, and creating even more energy that then at many points, it feels like you're unable to manage it. I like that about a thought error. I had this happen to me recently where I was spinning, I call myself a spinning energy on illogical thoughts, on my kids and that they should never be in pain and, "Everyone should always think they're amazing. Nobody should ever have a negative opinion about my child," which is of course ridiculous. This energy was spinning around.

The illogical thought that felt logical at the time was, "Go speak to all of these people and tell them what they should think. Right? Go talk to all these kids. Go talk to all these people in the world. Talk to all of their listeners on Facebook or their friends on Instagram or whatever and make sure that everybody changes their mind," which of course is totally illogical and makes no sense and it would be very mortifying for my children. Then I can take that energy and put it into creating a podcast for you guys, or I can take that energy and put it into writing or coaching my clients.

That energy is available to me, so just because it's produced from a primitive energy, this primitive energy to be motivated to do something, just because it's an error doesn't mean that it's not useful. I found it to be very, very useful. The trick is, and this is something I've been spending a lot of time in my "Stop Overdrinking" course teaching my students is that you have to recognize the difference between allowing that energy to be there, understanding why that energy is there and utilizing it versus countering that energy by resisting it. That's a very different thing. Here's what you'll know if you're resisting energy because you will be exhausted. You will have no energy to do anything. When you allow that energy and you refocus that energy on something more important to you, you will feel energized by it.

That's how you'll know if you're doing it. Ask yourself, "Am I resisting this? Am I hating this? Am I mad about this? Am I pushing against this, or am I just saying, 'Oh, that's a thought error. I see that it's illogical. I'm going to utilize this energy for something else.'" Now, I want to be clear that when you're in a thought loop, it actually feels in a very weird way pleasurable. It's like, "I'd better check Facebook" and then you check Facebook and there's relief and then you're going to check Facebook and then, "You'd better check it" and then you check it. It's something that's quite easy to indulge in because it feels important. It feels like you're doing something good, and your primitive brain thinks you're doing something good.

Even though we get wanting alcohol, wanting food, all those things bring up that desire feels a little bit good. I don't want you to think that this is one of those things where you recognize that you're having a thought error and it feels so awful that you push against it and you never want to do it. A compulsion means you want to do it. You're driven towards it. What I do and what I've been doing when this happens to me is I just say to myself, "It's okay to let it go. Just release it. It's okay to let it go. Don't sit here and spin out on it, even though you're tempted to do that. Just let this spin, spin off into the sky. It's okay to let it go. It's okay to let it go." That, when you can do it properly, is even more pleasurable than spinning and then you can still utilize the energy of that, okay.

Pema Chödrön talks about how we can just come back to the breath, come back to ourselves, and a lot of times, what I say to myself is, "None of this matters in the big picture. None of this is important as you're making it, and you're allowed to let it go. Worrying solves nothing. You're allowed to let it go. You can't control what anybody thinks about you and that's okay, and you're allowed to let it go," and you breathe in. "You can't control what anyone thinks about your kids or what they say about your kids, whether they lie about your kids or tell the truth about your kids, none of it, let it go." Then you can make that separation so you let the cloud float away and then you put your brain on to something more important.

It may still be buzzing in the background. It may still feel like it's trying to be heard and be important, and you can just say, "I see you there. I know that you're there. I know that you think you're important. I know that you think it's really important that I eat all of these Oreos right now. I feel how nervous you are about it. I know that you think you should call your child again to make sure they're okay. I know you think you should call your husband again to make sure he's okay. I know you think he's going to get killed in a car accident." Those are all illogical thought errors. Thinking that is not serving any higher purpose.

Then go through your questions. "What do you think has gone wrong? What is it you really want?" Really ask yourself, "What is it you really want?" and then give that to yourself because all we really want is always your feeling. Then, notice how you're trying to justify the actions, the compulsive actions that you're taking and redirect that energy into something more productive for yourself. I have built my business, so much of the work that I have done has just been redirected energy. It's then taking the energy from thought errors, from anxiety, from worry and doubt and compulsion and flowing it into something productive and useful for myself and for you. That is available to all of you.

I just want to give you a heads-up that I have heard from all of you how much you want to do coaching with me, and I currently only work with Stop Overeating clients and it's a very high end, small group coaching program and I'm so, so proud of it. I'm so proud of the work that we've done in there and how many people have changed their lives and how much weight they've lost. I am going to be adding some very few opportunities for this type of coaching for helping people get through their thought errors, for helping people manage their emotions, helping people really understand how to use the model in their life. I just want to let you know, so many of you have been asking me, I am going to be offering that before the year is up.

I probably have six spots in that. If that's something that you're absolutely, it's a very high end program, it's very hands-on, a lot of direct work from me, and let me just offer, coaching with me is very intense, but we get results very quickly. If you're interested in maybe being in that small group and working on your mind with me, send an email to my assistant, [email protected], and just raise your hand and then when I have details, you'll be the first to hear about it.

Okay. That's what I have for you today. I really hope that you guys will practice working on your thought errors. I know that most of us have them at certain times that are stronger than others, but if you're somebody that is suffering with this right now, I want you to know that that suffering is really optional. The pain that comes from thought errors and the experience of them, I don't think are optional. I think we're still trying to reconcile our prefrontal with our primitive brain. It doesn't mean something's gone wrong with you at all.

It means you're a human being, and I'm really hoping that some of these ideas applied to your life will make your suffering a little bit less. Back to Pema, she says, "Suffering is optional and pain is inevitable." When you're willing to feel the pain and manage it in the way that I've offered here, you can move through it a lot more quickly and with a lot more ease. I hope you guys have a beautiful, amazing week. Don't forget to leave me a review, especially before you listen to the next podcast. All right, you guys. Have a great one. Talk to you later. Bye, bye.

Thank you for listening to the Life Coach School Podcast. It is my honor to show up here every week and connect with people that are like-minded, wanting to take their life to a deeper level with more awareness and more consciousness. If you are interested in taking this work to the next level, I highly encourage you to go to thelifecoachschool.com/howtofeelbetteronline. It is there that I have a class that will take all of this to a deeper application where you'll be able to really feel and experience how all of these concepts can start showing up in your life. It's one thing to learn it intellectually. It's another thing to truly apply it to your life. I will see you there. Thanks again for listening.

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