Asking the question "what if" can either spiral us into fear and hopelessness or catapult us into the life we want.
One of the ways we heal is by using our imagination. When we dream of what we can be, we will begin to move ourselves in that direction.
In this episode, we look at the following:
The Power of Asking a Question
How Asking "What If" Can Change Your Life
Engaging the Creative Mind in Healing
Switching From Fear to Faith
Engaging Your Brain: Write it and Visualize it
Stepping Out and Taking Action
I hope by the end of this episode, you start asking yourself, "What if I deeply healed," "What if my life was full of love," "What if you gave yourself permission to love yourself."
Asking the question "what if" can either spiral us into fear and hopelessness or catapult us into the life we want.
One of the ways we heal is by using our imagination. When we dream of what we can be, we will begin to move ourselves in that direction.
In this episode, we look at the following:
The Power of Asking a Question
How Asking "What If" Can Change Your Life
Engaging the Creative Mind in Healing
Switching From Fear to Faith
Engaging Your Brain: Write it and Visualize it
Stepping Out and Taking Action
I hope by the end of this episode, you start asking yourself, "What if I deeply healed," "What if my life was full of love," "What if you gave yourself permission to love yourself."
On May 6th 1954, roger Bannister did what most of the world thought was impossible up until that point he ran a mile and under four minutes. Now, since then, that story has gone on to be one of the most used stories when it comes to motivation, inspiration and overcoming mental barriers. And rightfully so, because not only did most of the athletic world think that that feat was impossible, much of the medical world thought so as well. They thought that the human body just couldn't actually accomplish that. But Roger Bannister asked a question that is a very important question when it comes to doing the impossible, or the perceived impossible. We're going to talk about that question today. Now, one of the things that many people don't know about Roger Bannister is he almost quit running Just a few years prior to that. He went to the Olympics and didn't win the gold medal, and afterwards he was gutted, he was crushed and he really considered abandoning running and just continuing his medical degree, his medical profession. But he asked an important question and it's the question that most people who do things of note or who accomplish things ask themselves. And it's a very important question in the healing journey. So stick around, because we're going to discuss that question today.
Jerry Henderson:
Hello everybody, it's Jerry, and welcome to another episode of the Permission to Love podcast. Guess what I'm grateful that you're here. As always, you know, this podcast is about healing. It's about healing our relationship with ourselves and with others, and the primary way we're going to heal our relationship with ourselves is learning to love ourselves. So I want to say thank you, thank you for being here, thank you for investing in your relationship with yourself and learning to heal by giving yourself the permission to love yourself.
Jerry Henderson:
Now, before we get into the rest of this episode, I've got a couple of things to share with you. Number one I've recently partnered with a group called Sleep Reset. It's a fantastic program. It's app-based and it's also coaching-based. It's designed to really help those who struggle with their sleep and to give you a better sleep routine with some accountability. So if you struggle with getting a good night's sleep, I encourage you to check out the show notes in this episode and learn more about sleep reset. It's a really effective program. Stanford and other universities have studied this program and it is highly effective, so I want to encourage you, if you need that, check out Sleep Reset Now.
Jerry Henderson:
The other thing I want to share with you about is my Patreon account. Many of you have asked for ways to support this show and the work of self-love and healing. In response to that, I started a Patreon page. You can find out more information by going to the show notes in this episode. Now you'll not only be able to support the show, but you'll get access to exclusive content, such as a free signed copy of my book, as well as 90-minute Zoom calls based on the level of membership that you choose. So I'm very excited about it and I want to say thank you once again for your willingness to connect with this work, to share it with others and to support it. So thank you.
Jerry Henderson:
So what was that question that Roger Bannister asked himself? What is that question that people who do extraordinary things ask themselves? What's that question that we need to ask ourselves if we want to get from where we're at, if we're feeling stuck and we want to get unstuck, if we're in the middle of a life that we really don't want, and how do we move to a life that we do want? Well, it's a simple question, but it's a very profound question, and the most important part of this question is how we ask it. And it's the question what if Roger Bannister had to ask himself the question? What if I could break that four-minute mile barrier? What if it's not impossible? What if the medical profession is wrong about the human body's capability of running that fast? It is an important question and it is one of the most transformational questions that we can ask, and that question can take us in one of two directions. So what do I mean by that?
Jerry Henderson:
Well, let me ask you a couple of questions to help drive home that point. Number one what are you afraid of? What is a fear that you have? And I'm not trying to trigger anything by asking that question, but I'm just wanting you to think about it for a second. Now, the second question I want to ask you is what are your dreams? What do you hope would happen in your life? What is like a big, audacious dream for you? Now, underneath both of those is the question what if? We might be asking the question like what if I never heal? What if things never change for me? What if I am fundamentally broken and flawed? What if that person doesn't love me? What if I lose my job or whatever that fear is? It's starting with a what if it's the same thing for your dream. What if I do heal? What if I am able to make that career change? What if I am able to reinvent myself? What if my marriage does work out? What if my children do become who I hope and dream that they can become? What if I fully heal and become the version of myself that really loves myself? See, all of that starts with what if, and by the end of this episode, I hope that you'll be able to see the absolute importance of that question what happens when we ask that question, and how to ask that question in a way that is life-giving to you and not life sucking for you. Now let's start by removing the shame around asking the what if?
Jerry Henderson:
Question in a negative way. You might be prone to do that and you might be beating yourself up for doing that. We don't want to do that, because that's just going to keep us in a negative cycle. So let's realize that asking what if? In a negative way is really biological. It is a way that we survive. We're trying to predict worst case scenarios and build strategies and prepare for it, and while that does serve us in some sense, the challenge is when we get trapped in it and you can go back and listen to one of the episodes I did about trauma and its impact on our ability to think positively, and it'll share some more about that. Because what trauma will do is it will get us trapped into constant survival mode.
Jerry Henderson:
Unhealed trauma or unhealed complex post-traumatic stress disorder can lead us to being stuck in a constant worry, constant fight, flight, freeze, fawn mode and constantly thinking about what if? In the negative. Now, that's something that if you're stuck in that it's very understandable. So don't shame yourself for it. But let's look at how we get out of it. Let's look at the possibility of what if we could change that way of thinking. What if we didn't have to be stuck in a life that caused us to think what if? In the most negative terms and we could start to think about it in the most positive terms? So don't shame yourself. Don't shame yourself out of this healing process.
Jerry Henderson:
So let's have some optimism here on this episode about what can happen when we learn to use the what if? Question in a way that serves us instead of harms us. So what happens when we ask that what if? Question? Well, it's really important for us to understand that it's engaging the creator part of our brain. You know we are creators. That's who we are. We create things and it's an expression of our very nature to create. And when we start asking the question, what if it kicks in, that part of our brain, our cerebral cortex that starts trying to figure out how to create that.
Jerry Henderson:
So if you're in a space where you're constantly asking what if? In the negative, what if I lose my job? What if this relationship doesn't work out? What if I don't heal, your creative center is actually going to start to gravitate you towards the thing that you're thinking about so much, that what if? Is. That question in and of itself activates that creative center within you and you're going to start bringing about the very thing that you fear. You're going to gravitate towards it because your brain is going to start getting that bias of looking for that everywhere in your life, looking for the confirmation of oh, what if I lose my job? It feels like maybe my boss is annoyed with me and maybe not happy with me about my project that I did. Then, all of a sudden, you've created a story in your head that then makes you more insecure around your boss. That then causes you more stress to try to get those projects done. And so, all of a sudden, you begin to fulfill your own prophecy around the what if?
Jerry Henderson:
So it's really important to understand that when you ask what if you're engaging your creative center and so that question whatever's, at the end of it you have to ask yourself do I want to create that in my life? Do I want that to become manifested in my life? Because there's just no getting away from the fact that where our attention goes, our energy goes. Where our energy goes, that's what grows. So make that somewhat of a mantra in your life where your attention goes, your energy goes. Where your energy goes, that's what grows. Do you want that thing to grow in your life?
Jerry Henderson:
Now you might be thinking you know that's a super over simplification, henderson. Well, in some sense, yes, but I do find that some of the most simple principles are the most effective, that a lot of things are not nearly as complex as we want to make them. So understanding where that attention is going is where your energy is going and that's what you're growing in your life can be a really effective tool to begin to ferret out Do I want to create that what if scenario in my life? You might be also thinking well, I keep trying to think positive, I keep trying to think about positive what ifs, and I just can't seem to do that. Well, that statement that just came at the end of that, I just can't seem to do. That is also a limiting belief that's holding you back, and those limiting beliefs got stored in us from the trauma. And so, yes, healing the trauma is a big part of this. We're not going to cover everything in this episode. All I'm going to try to do today is get us from a negative what if? To a positive, what if? Okay, and a big part of shifting it from a negative to a positive is asking that question do I want to create this Now?
Jerry Henderson:
I recently just went through a major transition in my life, several major transitions, but a big one is that I recently left a job after 17 years of working at a very incredible place. Now this has been a really big reinvention for me and it's really brought up a lot of things. It's brought up some insecurities and some fears, and I recently found myself trending towards the negative what ifs? And all of my energy had changed. It became depressed, it became frustrated and then it hit me the aha moment of you know what. You're stepping into a space of fear, and I want you to get back to a space of faith. I want you to stop being afraid of everything bad that's going to happen and stop asking like, what if? What if you shouldn't have left the job? Or what if this doesn't work out to a what if everything works out better than I've planned? What if this helps more people than you could have ever imagined? And instantaneously my energy shifted.
Jerry Henderson:
I went from this place of being really frustrated to this place of being hopeful again, and it really drove home the point to me of the power of engaging my mind in the creative mode of what I want versus what I don't want. I don't want to create a world that's fear-based, one that isn't fulfilling the dreams that I have in my heart. I want to create a world where I'm fulfilled and having as much impact as possible. So asking that what if? Question in the right way will either help me get out of bed or it'll keep me in bed, and I'm sure you can relate with that. So let's start learning how to ask that what if? Question in a way that serves us. So how do we do that? Well, understand this. It takes the same amount of time to ask what if in a negative as in a positive. I'm not going to say that it's going to take the same amount of energy, because it might take you more energy to ask that question in a positive way because you're so used to the negative way. We're going to talk about that here in just a second.
Jerry Henderson:
But understand that that time that your mind is using what's happening up there, you can either use that time in the positive or you can use that time in the negative. It's the same amount of time. It's just what you're choosing to do with it. Okay, so don't necessarily see it as a lot of extra work that you're going to have to do. You're just going to take that same amount of time and use it for positive.
Jerry Henderson:
So what we want to understand is we're using that time to move us from fear and despair to faith and hope. We want to change our thinking from one of fearfulness of the worst case scenario, a sense of despair that begins to happen as a result of that, to one of faith, which then produces a sense of hope. And the interesting thing about those two energies, faith and fear they're very similar. Fear is an energy that we're using to create something that we don't want, and faith is an energy to create something that we do want. They're both creative. It's just what do we want to create, okay.
Jerry Henderson:
Now the other thing that's important to understand and how do we switch from that space of negative or fear-based to faith-based is to understand that going towards that negative or going towards that positive is wiring. I talk about this a lot because it's a truth and it disempowers the thinking that there's something wrong with you, because as long as you're stuck in the thinking that, well, there's something wrong with me, I can't think that way, I can't think positive, I can't seem to overcome, and anytime I try to, you know, make a deal with myself that I'll think in the positive direction, all of a sudden I get sucked back into negative thinking and hopelessness. It's wiring. Okay, it's not you. It's not that there's something fundamentally wrong with you. It is a habit that has been formed. There's anything I want you to get in the healing process and journey?
Jerry Henderson:
It's this point that there is so much of what we experience and so much of what's going on inside of us that is wiring. Remember, trauma and painful experiences are events that have happened. Those are one-time events or repeated one-time events that then wired things in us. It caused that CPTSD to happen and get wired in a stored in our body, stored in our thinking. So if that's the case, then we can change that, we can rewire that. So what I'm trying to do in communicating that so often is to help once again disempower it, disempower the thinking that you can't think positively, okay.
Jerry Henderson:
So now let's begin to give our brains something to work with in order to make that switch, to make that transition from negative to positive. And the first thing is to write it out, because we need our brains to start seeing another potential, another way of thinking. So we want to write out what you want that. What if statement to be that hopeful? What if statement? What if I do heal? What if I have the life that I want? What if I do get that job? What if I have a healthy relationship with other people? What does that look like? I'm going to encourage you to write that out by hand.
Jerry Henderson:
I know that's old school, but there is a mind and motor skill and emotional connection that happens when we write things out. You're writing it, you're feeling it, you're connecting with it. So take some time, write out those what if? Statements and, as you're writing them out, try to connect with them emotionally. Try to connect with some sense of feeling of what that would look like if that begins to happen Now. I could probably just have you do that exercise right now in your head and you can feel that emotional difference. So if you start to think, as we talked about earlier, what if this fear comes true? There's a heavy energy, right, there's a hopelessness that starts. But I know for me and for many people, I work with it as soon as I can get you to start thinking towards well, what if it turns out better? Something happens emotionally, something connects inside of you that begins to make that transition towards a more hopeful path. Now, if it doesn't happen right away, that's okay and it doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. It can often take times to get us there, but that energy will start to feel different, it'll start to feel lighter and hopeful and it will actually give you energy to pursue it.
Jerry Henderson:
Now, in giving our brain something else to work with, we want to start visualizing what we wrote down. Right, we wrote it down and now we want to visualize with it. That's why vision boards are so effective for so many people, because they're able to see their what if? Scenario in a very visual, tangible way. And not only would I encourage you to have something like a vision board or some type of way that you can see it and it might just be what you just wrote out but to then visualize it.
Jerry Henderson:
And there's a lot of ways that you can do that visualization. You can just do it with eyes closed, seeing it, picturing it, connecting with it emotionally. You can do it through journaling that statement over and over and over until you really begin to connect with it. There's meditations that you can do. Dr Joe D'Espenza, his work around this space, is a lot in this rewiring of how do we move from that space of where we are to where we want to be, through that visualization and meditation process. So lots of ways for you to do this. But it's important for you to see where you want to be so that your brain can start to activate that creative center to try to get you there. So that what if in the positive that then is written out then is visualized, will then lead you to this last point, which is really important and cannot be left undone, but is often left undone and it is taking some corresponding action, at least three.
Jerry Henderson:
I want you to write down three things that you could do that would go along with that what if statement. Okay, this is the part where most people will fall down and they'll say well, nothing ever works for me. They got to think that Roger Bannister didn't just sit around thinking about the possibility of breaking that four minute mile. He didn't just try to visualize it, even though I'm sure he probably did do some visualization of seeing himself do that. He didn't just write down on the first person in history to go on record as breaking that four minute mile barrier. He actually had to get out and run, he had to get on the track, he had to put his shoes on, he had to go for it, right. So I'm sure it was a combination of writing things out, visualizing things and seeing himself doing it and actually taking the action. No action, no movement, no momentum.
Jerry Henderson:
So, for whatever your what if statement is, write out three real, practical things that you can do. If the what if statement is, what if I stopped beating myself up so much? What would be? Three corresponding actions to that? Well, I might write down things that I want to say about myself. I might sign up for therapy, I might get a book that teaches me about how to think differently. I might choose to reflect each night about the way that I talked to myself or the way that I treated myself, and so those can be just real, practical things.
Jerry Henderson:
Your what if? Statement might be what if I was able to find and be in a healthy, loving relationship? Well, your first action might be well, I've got some things to work on, so I need to figure out what are the things that are keeping me from being able to be in a healthy relationship and begin to address those through therapy or buying a book or coaching, or whatever that mechanism is for you to start learning how to have a healthy relationship with yourself. You might go to retreats that are focused in on single people learning how to have healthy relationships. You might take courses on healthy marriages, etc. Whatever it is that would help you.
Jerry Henderson:
But taking at least three actions is going to show your brain that you're serious about it and it's going to put you in forward momentum, and your brain is going to start looking for other ways to support the work that you're doing Just like your brain is trying to support your belief that something might work out negatively, as you begin to switch it and you begin to train it by taking action towards the what if that you want. That shows yourself that you're serious, and then that begins to give you the small wins, the victories that begin to put you over the top and give you momentum. We're trying to get some wind in the sails, and small wins build confidence and they put wind in our sails that then give us more wins. Okay, wonderful.
Jerry Henderson:
Now, as I close, I want to remind you to not give up on yourself in this process. I want you to even practice the what if language of when you mess up and when you fall back and if you have any setbacks, and to say what if I tried again? What if I got up and gave it another go? What if I didn't shame myself out of the process this time? What if I followed through on the things that I said I was going to do? What if I didn't beat myself up for every mistake that I made? What would that feel like? What would that look like?
Jerry Henderson:
Okay, that's going to support you in following through and making this switch from what if in the negative to what if in the positive. Because what if in the positive is where all beautiful things come from. What if you had a beautiful relationship? What if you had a beautiful relationship with yourself? What if your life was better than you could ever imagine? That's where dreams start, that's where the creator gets activated and that's where you'll start drawing yourself towards Okay.
Jerry Henderson:
Well, thank you for joining another episode of the Permission to Love podcast, and I want to ask you a small favor If you haven't had a chance yet to follow or to subscribe to this podcast, take a moment to do that, as well as rate it and review it. It'd mean the world to me, and I'd also love to hear about your journey and how this podcast is helping you in that journey. So you can reach me on Instagram at Jerry A Henderson, or you can simply email me at Jerry at JerryHendersonorg. And finally, I want to remind you, as always, you are worthy of your own love, and I want to encourage you to ask yourself this question this week what if you gave yourself permission to love yourself? What would your life look like?