You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo, episode number 157.
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, my friends. Hi, how are you guys? I want to give you a squeeze.
A lot of you guys are going through it right now. And I just want to remind you that that's what humans do. We go through it.
Doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. Doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the world. You know what it means?
It means you're a human. You gotta love the humans, right? Even those of us who do you wrong, even those of us who do horrible things in the world, even those of us who murder and get confused and are mentally ill, all of that is part of the human experience.
I think a lot of us tend to think that everything in the world is supposed to be rosy and unicorn-y and lollipop-y. And we want it to be that way all of the time. But the problem is without the negativity, without the negative emotion, without the challenges, without the imperfections, there is no goodness.
There is no goodness without badness. It's that contrast that we have to have in order to create the goodness. So when you're going through it, like so many of you are right now in your personal lives, in your self-doubt, in your frustration, I want you to remember that this is part of the deal.
It's okay. Today, we're going to talk about thought creation. And we talk a lot when we use the model, we talk a lot about uncovering, the first step really being uncovering what's going on in our minds, and uncovering our current thought patterns that are creating our current feelings, that are driving our actions and creating our results.
So many of us think life just happens to us, we think we're at the effect of our lives. And what the model teaches us is that we're really at the cause of our lives, we are the ones creating it, whether we recognize that or not. So step one is always recognizing it first.
And then the second phase is to then create on purpose and to think deliberately so we can better manage our emotions, our actions and the results in our lives. And that's as simple as it gets. We uncover what we're currently thinking and then we change it.
Now, hopefully you guys had a chance to watch my three part video series because I go into depth into this concept. I will review it here, but I want to recommend that if you haven't checked it out, you go to thelifecoachschool.com, click on Coach with Brooke, you'll get opted into that video series. And what I recommend you do is you don't have to watch it.
If you don't want to, there's a couple things you may want to see in terms of what I display in terms of the model. But if nothing else, just plug in your earphones, just like you do a podcast, and listen to that video series. Because I feel like I was able to articulate these concepts in a way that I haven't been able to before.
And I go into some really in-depth detail. So let's just, I want to give you a quick overview before I get into the meat of this podcast. I want to get into a quick overview.
So we're going to kind of look at the forest before we get into the trees. And here's what I want you to consider. There is a point in our life when our brain is kind of like a clean slate, right?
We don't have neural pathways developed yet. We haven't learned anything yet. We're just basically open for programming.
And when we are young, our neural pathways develop at such a rapid rate. Any of you guys that have kids, you see how quickly children can learn things compared to us. It's like a brain on fire, constantly learning everything at such a rapid rate.
And it's in that growing stage, right? The body is growing, the brain is developing, everything is happening at such a quick rate. Whatever you program into your child's brain, whatever you teach your child, whatever your child learns, becomes their neural pathways and becomes their efficient thinking, which is of course what we want to have happen.
We want them to learn how to walk and talk and brush their teeth and function in the world in a way where they don't have to deliberately think about it all of the time. It just, if they have normal brain development, it will happen automatically to become an unconscious programming. Walking will become something that we don't have to deliberately think about.
It's a beautiful thing. But we also learn a bunch of stuff during that time. And inadvertently, we don't even aren't even conscious that we're learning it by observing.
We learn so much by how we observe the world and imitate the world and listening to the world. And so we develop a lot of belief systems. We develop a lot of thought patterns as we're growing up and developing that we may not even realize that we have.
Now, as we grow into adults, what our brain likes to do is be super efficient. It likes to just keep doing what it's always been doing. It likes to keep driving the same way to work and getting up on the same side of the bed and pouring a glass of water the exact same way.
Because it doesn't have to use any effort to rethink anything. It just basically uses the old thoughts that are already programmed. This is great for pouring a glass of water.
This is terrible for belief systems like I'm not good enough. Your brain prefers to do it the way it's always done. So if you were programmed to believe that you're not good enough, you were programmed to believe that the world is a dangerous place, you were programmed to believe that money is hard to earn, any of that thinking will be automatic and easy to think.
And it will be our default momentum. We will rely on thoughts that are easy to think rather than put energy into thinking new thoughts. When you are faced with what we call the blank canvas, which is basically your future is currently a blank canvas, what is the easiest thing to do is just to project your past onto your future.
And that's what most of us do. It is actually very difficult and requires effort to project something new onto your future. It's much more challenging to use our imagination to create new thoughts than it is to just rely on the old ones.
It's much easier if we have a structure on that blank piece of paper where we just color in the lines than it is to come up with something brand new to color, or something brand new to draw. We want to, when you have a blank piece of paper, I don't know about you guys, but I cannot draw very well. And when I have a blank piece of paper, I still draw a house with a door and two windows and a chimney and a tree.
No garage. From when I was a kid, that's like the last time I ever was like drawing on a blank piece of paper. And so I immediately don't know what to put on that paper if I have to draw something.
So I immediately go to my past to find something to draw, which is really fascinating when you think about how long ago that was. So that's also true for many of us when it comes to thinking, when it comes to projecting our lives onto our future. Our future is that blank canvas.
And so we have to access a new skill set in order to create a new future. We have to literally create new thoughts that we've never thought before. In order to create a new future that we've never created before.
And when you notice yourself dreaming, you will notice your brain wanting to go to your past to find evidence of possibility. It will want to go to your past for the how. It will want to figure out what do I already know how to think that can create this.
And if there's nothing there, your brain will want to shut down. Because your brain is programmed for survival, and so it wants to use all of the things that it's learned in order to continue to stay alive. What your brain doesn't realize is that you're good.
You don't need to focus so clearly on those survival things. And now it's time, really, in the human evolution for us to thrive and to use our creativity and our imagination to create things that don't yet exist. That is how we evolve.
That's how we create solutions to any of our current problems, thinking in a new way. People will say thinking outside of the box, right? Thinking brand new thoughts that you've never thought before.
What got you here won't get you there. Those kind of ideas are what we're talking about in this podcast. And what we've been working on in Self-Coaching Scholars is, first of all, what do I want to create in my life?
What do I want to believe? And then, how do I believe a thought that I don't yet believe? How do I create a thought that I don't yet believe?
So in my work with the model, there are some tools and structures in place that we use to manage our lives, our emotions, our thoughts. So remember, thoughts create our feelings. We change our thoughts and therefore our feelings, our actions, and ultimately our results.
The secret to everything is in that brain of yours, in those thoughts you're thinking. The process starts by finding out exactly what is creating our current results. You are the cause of your current results.
It's a process of noticing, naming, and feeling our feelings. Then finding the thoughts, causing those feelings. Then noticing how those feelings are creating our actions and our results.
We can do this in any order, but awareness of all those components is what begins the process. Once we understand our patterns and the thoughts causing them, we will inevitably want to change our thinking. Here's something I want to give to you.
Just being the witness, just being aware, just being the watcher of your current pattern, inevitably starts to change it. When you observe something from that witness, from that compassionate witness, you automatically are subtly changing yourself, and you don't even have to put any effort into it. Observation changes the object of your observation.
So as you shift from being at the effect and believing you're at the effect of your life to noticing it, you're already in the process of changing it. One of the most common questions I get is, how can I change my thinking rapidly? I want to feel better now.
My answer is always this. You have to start with awareness. You have to understand that your thinking causes your feelings, not intellectually, not just intellectually, but really understand it.
This means that you don't try to feel better about a negative situation, but rather you recognize that the only thing making it negative is your thinking. This is the biggest mistake most beginners make with a model, is they understand intellectually that their thoughts are creating their feelings, but they don't really understand that the circumstances in their life are completely neutral, that none of those circumstances have to change at all in any way in order for you to change your thinking. Most people want to change the circumstance in their mind in order to feel better.
The circumstance stays the exact same. The only reason it's negative is because of you. That is a hard pill for most of us to swallow.
We have abdicated our responsibility and felt that we are at the effect. I'll hear clients say to me all the time, well, it feels like that's true. It feels like that hurt my feelings.
The reason it feels that way is because of your thinking, not because of the circumstance. As I train coaches, this is a huge sticking point that we need to pay very close attention to. Once this is established, the next step is to create a new thought.
Thought creation is actually a skill. We talk a lot about creating things in our lives, but everything is always created in our mind first. Anything created in the world, humanly created in the world, is created in your mind first.
There's an idea, and then there's the creation. There is the thought of it. So I want you guys to recognize that you actually create the thought of something before it manifests, okay?
And that thought of something is always a choice. Learning how to create thoughts is the skill I most want to teach all of my clients and coaches and students. Because if you can create it in your mind, then you can manifest it in the world.
If you can't create it in your mind, you won't be able to manifest it in the world. When you believe it with all of every part of you, that's when you will manifest it in the world, literally. So here's how it works.
You find your current thought causing your current pattern. You decide what you want to think and feel instead. You create a new thought.
You go through the process of committing to believing the new thought. This is something we go into detail in self-coaching scholars and in my coach training. We rehearse it, we practice it, and we believe it ahead of time.
So let's talk about the creation part specifically. There are two things to remember when it comes to a new thought you want to believe. You have to believe it, and it has to feel better.
Now, it doesn't have to feel like a lot of times you'll come up with a thought that sounds good, but you don't believe it and it doesn't feel better. That will not be useful to you. So I say all the time, you can't go from I hate my body to I love my body if you don't believe that.
You have to go from I hate my body to I have a body. Now, I have a body feels better than I hate my body and it's believable. Now, it's not to rainbows and daisies yet, but that's okay.
We've made that shift. We've created new thought. We've believed it.
We've shifted our paradigm a little bit. When we talk about believing new thoughts, there's a process to believing. And the better your new thought is, the easier time you will have believing it.
The idea is that when you completely believe it, then you will create the result to reflect the belief. Language can help as you're creating the new thinking from the old. Remember, without language, we don't have thoughts.
We think in language. So being careful about the words that you choose and the language that you choose will be really helpful in coming up with new thinking. For example, if you have a thought that says, I can't stop drinking, I drink all the time, then you're gonna go to, there are times when I don't drink during the day.
Notice the first thought is, I can't stop drinking, I drink all the time. Okay, notice how that feels. And you change it to, there are times when I don't drink during the day.
There are times when I don't even want alcohol. I want to not want alcohol. Someday, I will stop drinking.
Someday, I won't even want to drink. It's possible I will decide to stop drinking someday. It's possible there will be a day when I stop drinking.
I will stop drinking. I don't drink anymore. I don't ever drink.
Notice how I just went through the ladder of thoughts. We started with, I can't stop drinking. I drink all the time.
We didn't jump to, I don't ever drink. It's not believable. But we could go to, there are times when I don't drink during the day.
Now, that I can believe. That is true. And I did this when I was working on my own drinking.
I went to, I never drink in the morning. I never wake up wanting a drink. I can control my drinking in the morning.
Now, in the evening, for some people, they feel like they can't control their drinking. That's never true. We're always in control.
We're always the one that picks up the alcohol. It just feels like we're out of control. But when we can shift our thought to, I do control my drinking, I'm the one that decides to drink or not, that's a subtle shift that we can believe, especially if we change the time of day.
So notice how we shift from a thought that really causes us to feel out of control to one that helps us see that we're less out of control. And then we move all the way down to a thought that's very, very empowering. And that process can take days, weeks, or months depending on how consciously you decide to think new thoughts.
Notice how thoughts go from easier to believe to more difficult to believe. Sometimes when we try to jump from, I can't stop drinking to I don't ever drink, we can't even come close to believing it, so it actually feels even more negative. Notice how I bridge the current thought to the new thought.
Believing in going through this process can be quick or it can take several months. Coming up with new thoughts is a skill that takes practice. You can change a thought by sometimes adding words to the current thought to soften it.
This is one of the techniques that you can use. A lot of you have asked me questions about this in scholars about how do you take a current thought that feels so true. It's hard to let go.
You can add modifiers to that thought. So like for example, my brother annoys me. This is one of my sons, right?
My brother annoys me and that's okay. You can add and that's okay to the end of any thought. And that will soften it for most of you, for many people.
My brother annoys me and that's okay. Now, my brother annoys me is a thought that feels annoying, that feels awful. But going to my brother doesn't annoy me is a big leap for my son, right?
He doesn't believe that at all. But going to my brother annoys me and that's okay is a good first step. My husband keeps forgetting my birthday and that's okay.
I have a hard time being vulnerable and that's okay. So for some of you that are having a hard time letting go of certain beliefs, just add on to the end and that's okay. And see how that shifts it just a little bit.
I hate my body and that's okay. I can't stand my marriage and that's okay, right? Because it releases the resistance to it.
A lot of times we prevent our own awareness by pushing away thoughts we don't want to be having. As soon as we embrace those thoughts by adding and it's okay to the end of it, then we release that resistance and have a little bit more authority over the thinking and controlling the thinking. The other thing that we can do is add to the front of a thought, I'm thinking the thought.
Okay, so you just add this to any thought causing you pain to separate it a bit. I'm just thinking the thought. I'm not good enough.
I'm just thinking the thought. My brother annoys me. I'm just thinking the thought.
I can't get any new clients. I'm just thinking the thought. I'm not losing enough weight.
I'm just thinking the thought. I don't like my marriage. I'm just thinking the thought.
I can't do this very well. I'm just thinking the thought, right? So you're acknowledging that it's just a thought and it's not reality.
So the first one is adding and that's OK to the end. The second one is adding, I'm just thinking the thought to the beginning. So you would actually put that in the T line instead of your T line being, I'm not good enough, your actual T line would be, I'm thinking the thought, I'm not good enough, right?
So you're adding that modifier on to there, which really helps you understand that it's just thinking. And sometimes you can ask these questions around your thought that are inspired by one of my teachers, Byron Katie. So sometimes you can get the turn around what she calls the turnaround.
What is the opposite of this thought? I don't love my husband, the opposite is I love my husband. Is that equally true?
I hate myself, I love myself. I hate my life, I love my life. Sometimes we can see that polar opposite as being equally as true.
And there's been many times where I've been able to turn thoughts completely opposite and seen the truth in both sides, and that's really helped me. Another question that she inspires is, who would you be without this thought? If you literally didn't think the thought, how would your life be different?
If you didn't think the thought, I have to lose weight. If you didn't think the thought, I'm unacceptable, I'm not good enough, I can't do this, I'm not strong enough, I don't have what it takes. Whatever that negative thought is, imagine your life if you couldn't think it.
What would be different about your life? That's a really fun one to explore. What would you be thinking instead?
You can always explore this. I might be wrong about, and then insert your thought there. I might be wrong about not being enough.
I might be wrong about my brother being annoying. I might be wrong about not being able to lose weight. I might be wrong about not being able to make $100,000, whatever it is.
When you add that clarifier on the beginning, of the sentence, similarly to how we did, I'm just thinking the thought I might be wrong about, you give it a little bit of wiggle room. I might be wrong about this idea that I can't be a life coach. And then all of a sudden, you open up a new thought and a new possibility on to your future.
And finally, when you ask yourself the question, how would you like to think instead, you might come up with something you don't yet believe. So if, for example, you want to believe the idea that you can make $100,000 as a life coach, you want to believe that you can lose weight, you want to believe that you can buy that new car, move into that new house, or meet the man of your dreams. You add the modifier to the beginning.
I'm open to the idea that I can meet the man of my dreams. I'm open to the idea that I can lose weight. I'm open to the idea that I am an amazing human being that's going to make a huge contribution to my life.
It's possible that I could lose 100 pounds. It's possible that I could really learn how to not have so much anxiety. It's possible that I could quit drinking.
Add that to the front. I will someday stop drinking. I will someday stop overeating.
I will someday believe that I am good enough. Adding those to the front of your current thoughts can open them up to other possibilities. You get to task yourself with what you want to believe, and then ask yourself what you believe now.
Bridge the difference between the two thoughts by creating new thoughts that go in between. We are going to be practicing this a lot in class. But what I want you to do is if you're in Self-Coaching Scholars, make sure you go to page 33.
And what you're going to do is start with a thought that you want to believe, and then go through those questions to get yourself to the place where you can bridge from this current thought to the next thought from the thought. And remember, there's all those modifiers that you can add on to there. It's possible that it could be you may not be able to go to, I'm going to lose weight and keep it off forever.
But you might be able to believe it's possible that I could lose weight and keep it off forever. So have fun trying those modifiers and changing your thoughts and bridging from here to there. And telling you, your thoughts are everything.
Whatever you can do to shift from your current neural pathways that are all from your past, that are going to keep repeating the same results that you've always gotten. If you can shift those even just slightly, your life will start to shift slightly. And then if you keep at it, your life can shift tremendously, way beyond what your current capacity is to think about.
There's so much in your future that you can create if you're willing to let go of the neural pathways from your past and create brand new ones. We'll take a little bit more effort. It won't be as efficient as just repeating your past, but I think that's the point of our humanness.
That's the point of our evolution. All right, everyone, have a wonderful, amazing week, and I'll talk to you next week. And if you're interested, stay on through the outro and listen to Adrienne Nichols talk about emotional childhood, emotional adulthood, and her specialty, which is divorce.
So good, you guys. Enjoy. Hey, if you enjoy listening to this podcast, you have to come check out Self-Coaching Scholars.
It's my monthly coaching program where we take all this material and we apply it, we take it to the next level and we study it. Join me over at the lifecoachschool.com/join.
Make sure you type in the the T H E lifecoachschool.com/join.
I'd love to have you join me in Self-Coaching Scholars. See you there.
Hi, my name is Adrienne Nichols, and I work with people who are going through an unexpected divorce, and I help them use it for personal growth. Today, I want to talk about the concepts of emotional childhood and emotional adulthood, and how understanding them can help you when you're dealing with a difficult person or situation like divorce. You may have heard about them here on the Life Coach School Podcast before.
I'll start by reminding you of what emotional childhood is, how it's disempowering, and why it's so tempting to indulge in it during a divorce. And I'll give you a really easy tip for dealing with that. Then, I'll review what emotional adulthood is and talk about why it's so helpful when you want to get the best divorce possible and move on with your life.
Along the way, I'll give you some examples so you can see how each of them look in practice. Here we go. Emotional childhood is when we don't take responsibility for our feelings.
We blame our feelings on what someone else does or doesn't do. In a divorce, it can be very, very tempting to want to blame everything on your ex. Especially in those early days, everything is heightened and it can be a tumultuous time.
Plus, your ex might be doing things that you find exceptionally challenging or weird or difficult. Things that you really feel entitled to react to and be hysterical about. We're not arguing the fact that your ex may be behaving in ways you don't like.
It's actually to be expected because you are divorcing this person. Usually there's some kind of disagreement or a larger conflict. But we're just looking at the fact that basing your feelings and therefore your actions on what they do is the most ineffective and powerless place you could come from.
Emotional childhood is putting someone else in charge of how you feel. And if you're getting divorced, it's like handing over all of your power to the one person on the planet who is least likely to do what you want. If your intention is to get the best divorce possible and move on with your life, emotional childhood will derail you.
It can totally take your eye off the ball. I'll give you a silly example from my own life. When I was getting divorced, I was often really annoyed by some of the new clothes that my ex wore at the time.
Once we were at a meeting with a mediator and my ex was wearing something that I thought was very midlife crisis, and I was very fixated on it and very upset by it. At the time, I didn't know about emotional adulthood. I just felt very justified in being annoyed.
And I was probably texting a friend about it who was also annoyed. And what it did for me in that situation was steal my attention from where it needed to be. I was about to go into a meeting that related to something very important, like custody arrangements for my small child.
And my mind was running wild about something totally unrelated, something that was not useful to me. I was in emotional childhood, and I was completely handing over my ability to be focused and centered to someone's outfit. Now, eventually, I figured out this was not a good plan.
He's a grown up. He gets to dress however he wants. It is absolutely not my business.
If I decided to let that affect my mood, that was my problem. There's an added layer of emotional childhood that can go on when you're getting a divorce. And that is that some of the encouragement you may get from family and friends will be in the form of emotional childhood.
You can get into this habit of talking about your ex in a way where the underlying assumption for everybody is that, of course, you have to feel this way about it. And of course, you have to react this way about it, like it's the only option. And it's usually a very counterproductive option.
Let's take the example of your ex feeding your kids fast food a lot of the time. You get in a tizzy about how unhealthy it is, and then you talk to your friend about it, and your friend gets into a tizzy and adds on that it's not only unhealthy, but it's also super lazy and ignorant. Now you're both really upset.
And you just keep piling on more and more evidence about how idiotic it is. And you both feel justified about it. And maybe you get this great idea to send a mean or sarcastic text message to your ex.
What this does is it escalates everything. Now you're in a little texting war, and you keep getting more and more frustrated and angry. And so does your ex, by the way.
Pretty soon, you feel totally overwhelmed by negative emotion, and you for sure have made no headway on a real conversation about the fast food. Guess what else has happened? It's created some fresh bad will with your ex.
And this is over a fairly small issue. Can you imagine how badly this plays out when it's a bigger issue? Reacting like this when you're not in a place of being aware of or taking responsibility for your emotions doesn't work out well, and it usually compounds the problem.
Being in emotional childhood can often lead to making really crummy or impulsive choices that just makes things worse. And that's not your goal. You want to move forward.
You don't want to make a difficult situation worse. I do happen to think it's pretty normal to want to trash talk your ex sometimes, especially in the beginning. Your friends love you.
They want to protect you, and maybe bad things happened, and that's why you're getting divorced. But watch out for falling into that trap of incessantly bashing and then getting into reaction mode when you deal with your ex. What I suggest you do with that urge to trash talk is to do what Barbara Scherrer calls conscious complaining.
She wrote a great book called Wishcraft a long time ago, and lots of people have referred to this idea of hers called conscious complaining, which is exactly what it sounds like. You are complaining, but you're doing it in a conscious, purposeful way, and you give it a time limit. You're not making important decisions or taking actions based on on it.
You're just sort of letting off steam. Obviously, the best place to do this is not within your shot of your children ever, and only do it with trusted people. When I was going through my divorce, I definitely indulged in this with a couple of trusted friends, also a therapist and a coach, and I could make the craziest comments and cuss and cry and get it all out and then move on.
I tried to keep it very separate from the process of actually getting divorced and how I communicated with my ex. It definitely served me well and helped the whole thing from becoming really contentious and ugly. You need to be a rock star when you're getting divorced.
I hate to break it with you. I'm talking like Winston Churchill, and it can't just be you being impulsive and saying any old thing just because you feel like it. If you do that, you need to know that it can come back to bite you later.
Vent with your friends, a therapist, a coach, or journal, or write a letter that you never send. Get it out there. Emotional adulthood.
Now, that's when we do take responsibility for our feelings, all of them. We don't blame our emotional experience on what another person does or doesn't do. If we can be in emotional adulthood when we're going through a divorce, we have such an advantage.
You can see that there's so much trouble that we can get into when we're in reaction mode to the person we're divorcing. Be in charge of your emotions. Be in emotional adulthood whenever you deal with your ex.
What would emotional adulthood look like in that example I gave about the fast food? It's very simple. mainly, it would look like not texting or communicating from that frazzled, upset state.
Maybe all of the venting still happens. You still don't like it, but you clean up your thoughts about it so that when it comes time to talk about it with your ex, you do so without all of that negative emotion. You're really clear about what you want to communicate and you do it in a way that allows for an actual conversation and not just an argument.
That's a conscious place. This may be very new to you. Just keep practicing it.
It does get easier and it's better for everybody. It's better for you, your ex, your kids, and the whole divorce process. Remember, your ex may be doing all sorts of things you disagree with.
You may not like what they're spending their money on or who they're spending their time with or how they're treating you. Having a strategy for dealing with this is so important because it means you don't get bounced around emotionally by all of it. If you've decided that you're taking responsibility for your feelings, you're in the best position to do all the things you're going to need to do to get through your divorce.
While you don't get to decide how your ex behaves, you can decide how you want to go through this experience. You can feel how you want to feel despite what your ex does or doesn't do. You can be the person that you want to be in this experience.
It's not dependent on your ex behaving the way that you want. And that's the best news ever. Divorce is a huge job.
It's a huge to-do list. And many of the items on that list may be things you've never done before. They may be things you don't want to do, things that your ex did for the family during the marriage.
For me, reading legal documents falls into this category. It was so hard for me to take that on. I can't even tell you how many times I cried in the local coffee shop when I was reading over legal documents.
But when I incorporated emotional adulthood, I went from feeling really sorry for myself about it to being kind of excited about learning a new skill. If you can practice emotional adulthood and take responsibility for your feelings, you can take the steps you have to take with a lot more clarity and power and emotional stability. It's the best gift you can give yourself if you're dealing with a difficult person or situation.
And the more you practice it, the better it does get. Think of it this way. If you're dealing with someone whose behavior you really don't agree with, or maybe even hate, why would you put them in charge of you and your emotions?
You wouldn't, right? If you're getting divorced, you have an important negotiation to work out that requires your full attention and as much emotional security as you can muster. Adopting the concept of emotional adulthood and taking full responsibility for your feelings helps you.
And it puts you and not your ex in the driver's seat of your life and your future. Try emotional adulthood plus a little conscious complaining. It's a really effective combination, I promise.
Thank you so much for listening. I hope this was helpful. And if you'd like to know more about my work, you can find me at adriannickles.com.
You can schedule a free mini session there and grab my freebie about using divorce for personal growth. Take care.
