Ep #196: Oranges In, Orange Juice Out

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, episode 196, Oranges In, Orange Juice Out.

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, the only podcast that offers a proven process to help you work through your grief, to grow, evolve, and create a future you can truly look forward to. Here’s your host, Master Certified life coach, grief expert, widow, and mom, Krista St-Germain.

Hey there, welcome to another episode of the podcast. I’ve got a good one for you today. Have you ever had a moment where somebody says something and you hear the words that come out of their mouth and then your world kind of stops for a minute because what they said resonated with you so much? That’s the basis of this episode. I’ll tell you a little bit more about that in a minute.

Before we get into it though I want to remind you in case you have not registered, the Dating for Widowed Moms masterclass is now available for you. You can register. We’re going to kick that off March 13th. And I’m going to teach live March 13th, 14th and 15th. Don’t worry it will all be recorded if you can’t make it live. It is absolutely free. If you want to upgrade you can choose the VIP package and upgrade and get a bundle of goodies. But the basic teaching I really want it to be free.

I know how much angst there is around dating. There’s a lot of angst around dating, there’s a lot of drama in our brains around dating. I get it, I had it and it’s optional. It doesn’t have to be as difficult as our human brain wants to make it. And a lot of us are feeling insecure and frustrated and anxious and we’re not particularly enjoying the idea of dating, if we’re doing it or dating again if someday we think we might. And I want to make it easier. So that’s the purpose of this masterclass and you can register, coachingwithkrista.com/datingmasterclass is where you go to register.

I’m just going to chunk it into three concepts that I want to teach you. I’m going to go live three different times and if you can’t make it live you can catch the recording. I’ve got worksheets. It’s going to be good. And it’s just going to help make dating easier. So even if you’re not dating yet and some day you think you might want to date or you’re trying to decide if you ever want to date again. I think it’s going to be something that you actually really appreciate and enjoy. So come and check it out coachingwithkrista.com/datingmasterclass.

Alright, today’s topic, oranges in, orange juice out. I make myself laugh sometimes. Okay, so I’m in this training. I love learning. I love learning new coaching tools. I love learning new ways to help and a coach who I really respect and who I consider a friend, Simone Soul, created a program that I joined and she created it along with one of her teachers, Melissa Tiers. And it’s coaching in a way that – Simone and I actually both studied at The Life Coach School so we speak a similar coaching language.

But what they are teaching is much more focused on coaching the unconscious mind and I am loving all of it. And in a training the other day Melissa said something and she didn’t say it like it was any big teaching, it just kind of rolled out of her mouth but it stopped me in my tracks and inspired this podcast episode and here it is. She said, “The way you think about another person is the best they can ever be in your presence. The way you think about another person is the best they can ever be in your presence.”

And when she was talking about that she was talking about it from the perspective of being a change worker, from the perspective of if you don’t think your clients are unlimited and fully capable you shouldn’t be their coach. Because the best they can never be is the way that you think of them in your presence. This is not a new teaching to me by the way.

And if you’re in Mom Goes On, or you’ve done Mom Goes On you know we literally have two months focused on how we see ourselves and how we see other people. The relationships that we have with ourselves and the relationships that we have with other people. And so you already know that I teach that the relationships that we have with other people are based on the quality of the thoughts we have about them. But for some reason the way she said this resonated with me differently. I heard it differently than I have heard it before. I love when that happens.

The way you think about another person is the best they can ever be in your presence. So now, for me as a coach and for you as a client, if you have a coach or you have a therapist that doesn’t hold you in a space of unlimited possibility, stop paying them immediately. They are not for you. If you are a coach and you are listening to my podcast, I know a lot of coaches listen to my podcast. If you don’t think better of your clients than they think of themselves, change your thinking or let them go because you’re not the right coach for them.

Now, let’s think about how you, assuming that you’re not a coach, how does this affect you as it relates to how you see other people and the quality of the relationships that you have with other people and maybe more importantly the way you think about yourself. Let’s talk about that first actually. The way you think about yourself is the best you can ever be in your presence. Let that sink in for a second. Other people can experience you as a work of art, divinity in the flesh, but your own experience of you is limited by your thoughts about you.

I realize this now as I look back on how my late husband saw me. And he knew all the darkest parts of me. He knew all the things I wasn’t proud of. He had a very clear view of my imperfections. He knew my humanness. So it wasn’t that he thought I was perfect and I never made mistakes or that I was somehow a unicorn and yet he created this experience of me for himself of genuine admiration.

One of the most common things I heard from my friends after Hugo died was that they would always remember the way that he looked at me, they could see it. Maybe you know that feeling. Maybe you know what it’s like to be in the presence of someone who held you with such reverence that you thought you fooled them. They thought so highly of you that your brain answered with, “But if only they knew the real me. Well, they don’t really know, if only they knew.” That’s how highly they thought of you.

They got to experience you in that way because of the way they thought about you. So what do you think about yourself? Do you think of yourself as being capable and maybe moderately capable? Do you think of yourself as being capable of creating whatever you want? Or do you think of yourself as something less? And I want you to notice that this isn’t binary. This is not one or the other. This is not either or. This is a spectrum that I’m talking about. And at one end of that spectrum is in no way able, unable. And at the other end of that spectrum is completely unlimited, capable of miracles, other worldly.

And I’m not saying you need to see yourself or others as other worldly or capable of miracles. I just want you to know it’s an option. I want to open up that possibility for you. And I want you to get honest with yourself. Where are the limits that you place on yourself with your own thoughts? Where are you on that spectrum? Do you like the limits you’ve given yourself? Mike Dooley is famous for saying that thoughts become things, choose the good ones. And it sounds cute and it would be easy to think that it’s semantics, that’s nice to have, hairy fairy woo woo but it isn’t.

This is how the brain works. This is neuroscience. The filtering system in our brain will only let data into our awareness that aligns with our thinking. So looking for how you get close to your goals but never quite reach them will give your brain the assignment of showing you how you get close to your goals but never quite reach them. Looking for how you always put too much on your plate will give your brain the assignment of showing you how you always put too much on your plate.

If you’re thinking that being a solo parent holds you back from what you want, that’s what your brain is allowed to show you, nothing else. If you’re looking for how unfair it is that you’re a widow, how trapped you are, how it shouldn’t have happened, that’s what your brain is allowed to show you and PS you’ll feel like crap. It’s not that there’s something wrong with you. It’s not that you’ve done anything wrong. It’s that you have a filtering system in your brain that is designed to show you information that lines up with how you think.

So the way that you think about yourself, the quality of the thoughts that you have about yourself is the best you’ll ever be in your own presence. And expecting it to be otherwise is like putting an orange in a juicer and expecting something other than orange juice to come out. It doesn’t work like that. That’s not how juicers were made. Oranges in, orange juice out. This is how it works. Think about how this affects you and other people.

If you’re looking for how that person is a jerk, for how that person doesn’t understand you, for how that person can never do it right, for how that person always screws it up, guess what your brain is allowed to show you. Think about your kids, if you don’t hold their best and highest in your mind you will never be able to experience it. To the degree that you think of them as amazing is to the degree to which you will experience their amazingness. You don’t make them any less amazing based on how you think. You don’t make yourself any less amazing based on how you think.

You just limit your experience of their amazingness, and of your own amazingness. You limit your ability to experience the truth of their amazingness based on the quality of your thinking. Is that sinking in? Is your brain exploding? I swear, sometimes it’s the great coming home for me when I do this work. This is how it feels to me and it’s been this way for a long, long time, and I mean since I was a teenager. I read something, I hear something, I learned something from a teacher and it resonates with a part of me that has always known that it is true.

And it’s like coming home. It’s like a coming home where I go, “Oh, yeah, I knew that. Yeah, that is true.” And it’s an unlearning of some other garbage that I picked up along the way. This feels like that to me where it’s like, yeah, of course, of course. The best I can hope for in someone else is the way that I see them, the way that I think of them. And that’s so good because that means that we’re the ones in charge. That other person doesn’t need to change.

You don’t even need to change but you need to think about yourself differently if you want a different experience of yourself. And you need to think about them differently if you want to be able to experience them differently. Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world, the same world. It’s such a brilliant Wayne Dyer quote. So what do you want to do with this information? Is there a person in mind? Are you thinking about yourself?

Where are you limiting how you want to experience them or how you want to experience yourself based on the thoughts in your mind and what if you change them? What if you change them? Which by the way, is what I love helping people do because you aren’t your thinking. Thoughts are just sentences. They aren’t the truth of who you are. You can choose any thoughts you want. And if you have some crappy thoughts about yourself you can put them down, you can choose new ones.

And if you have some crappy thoughts about someone else and you want to spend time with them and you’d like to have a better experience with them you can choose to think differently about them, you have that capability. Alright, that’s what I have for you this week. I hope it broke your brain like it broke mine. I love you. You’ve got this. Take care and I’ll see you next week, bye bye.

If you like what you’ve been hearing on this podcast and want to create a future you can truly get excited about after the loss of your spouse, I invite you to join my Mom Goes On coaching program. It’s small group coaching just for widowed moms like you where I’ll help you figure out what’s holding you back and give you the tools and support you need so you can move forward with confidence.

Please don’t settle for a new normal that’s less than you deserve. Go to coachingwithkrista.com and click work with me for details and the next steps. I can’t wait to meet you.