43. From Stuck to Unstoppable: The Art of Change

We change over time. Sometimes in dramatic ways where we make a big life change, and other times we change intentionally in small ways that lead to something big later on. And we're always just changing naturally. To live our life is to evolve, and if we try to avoid changing, we really get stuck. It leads to a whole different kind of usually unwanted sorts of change. When I think about the mechanisms of change, I'm referring to the things that actually move us forward into a place of change 

Transcript

Once I learned to like me more than others did, then I didn't have to worry about being the funniest or the most popular or the prettiest. I was the best. Me and I only ever tried to be that. This quote from Issa Rae starts off today's podcast. 

Welcome to the modern Creative woman exploring the art and science of creativity. This is the podcast for women who want to elevate their creativity and start applying creative thinking in their everyday lives. I'm your hostess and creativity expert, Doctor Amy Backos I'm a licensed psychologist and a registered and board certified art therapist with almost three decades helping women live their authentic lives at the modern Creative Woman. We are obsessed with helping you build your creativity and self leadership. Through our conversations and creative insights, I'll provide simple tricks and practices that will update the mystery out of the creative process so you can start each day feeling empowered, creative, and ready to take on whatever comes your way. Let's get started! 

I've been thinking a lot about the ways that we change as human beings. We change over time. Sometimes in dramatic ways where we make a big life change, and other times we change intentionally in small ways that lead to something big later on. And we're always just changing naturally. To live our life is to evolve, and if we try to avoid changing, we really get stuck. It leads to a whole different kind of usually unwanted sorts of change. When I think about the mechanisms of change, I'm referring to the things that actually move us forward into a place of change. 

And when I work with women inside the membership or during their creativity weekends. I'm always asking the women to create their own model of change, the method that suits them, to help them overcome their barriers, to challenge their stuck points, and to persevere when things get challenging or difficult. Change is defined as an action or an instance of making. It means we're becoming different or we're doing something different. It also refers to replacing something with something newer or better. We can substitute an old behavior for a new behavior. We can begin to change our habits. Change includes choice, a lot of choice, and it means choosing what we want to look for in our mind and in the world. If we're working on becoming more optimistic. We have to shift our perspective to see the positive in our relationships and in the world. The big advantage of this is in choosing your future. You give yourself a direction, a way that you want to move, and you can start to assess yourself based on did I take forward action towards what's important to me? And it gives a lot of relief when we focus on making value based actions, because we're not left to the whim of what happens in the world. It's a real hedonic treadmill. If we feel good when something good happens and we feel bad when things we don't want happen, we end up on this treadmill where we're looking for pleasure outside of us. And that's a losing battle for sure. 

Another important aspect of conscious change. Is not allowing time to just pass you by. It means really taking advantage of your time, using your time in a way that pleases you. How it shows up on the outside is a slightly different matter. If we want to generate something on the outside, we want to change our income, change our job, change our appearance, our relationships. It shows up on the outside, but it really comes from this internal, conscious choice to act on what's important and to make something show up on the outside really requires work failure. It requires a lot of discomfort, and it requires creativity and commitment. And the advantage of committing to yourself in this way is that creativity yields confidence. When you can imagine something better for yourself or different for yourself, and you start taking action on it, that's how you build confidence. The problem shows up for many people when they start changing the outside, without changing their relationship to their thoughts first. Now we can wish and dream and hope for a positive future that doesn't require any different kind of work on the inside. But when we're ready to take action to put those. Dreams into reality that requires creativity, both internal and external. If we focus too much on dreaming and taking action towards the dream without understanding our why and changing our relationship to our thoughts, it can lead to a lot of really unproductive action. No change, frustration. And I think this is where creativity and creative thinking plays a really big part in being successful in making changes. One important part of being creative and moving towards change. Either the change could be accepting ourselves more, being more authentic, or it can be making an outward kind of change that has a specific kind of goal in mind graduate, get a job, etc. regardless of the type of change we're making, we can expect some degree of non movement or non success or even going backwards and failure is really considered like a lack of success or the omission of our expected or required action. If we're not taking the required action then our goal doesn't come to fruition. But I wanted to get a little more nuanced for those of us who are on this journey of self-discovery and shedding away the things that are no longer serving us, that are a part of maybe what society or our family thought we should be. 

As we shed what is not ours and move towards our authentic selves. We can expect something a little more subtle than failure. We can expect relapse to happen, and relapse is defined as a deterioration in our progress after some degree of improvement. So we make a few steps forward. We speak. Our mind doesn't go so well when we start to get quiet again, that's a relapse. It is inevitable that there is ebb and flow in our progress. It is a necessary part of change. And relapse also helps us know that we're moving in the right direction. It's like one last little test to see if we can take it to the next level. It's a huge part of understanding what's important to us. So if we're in touch with our why the modern creative, why that keeps us going forward. It can really help us make use of a relapse. There's no reason to beat ourselves up. It is a tool that we can use to unpack what's happening during a relapse. 

When we do have a day that doesn't go so well or a momentary setback, it's important that we think of it in those terms. This didn't work today, or I just had a little setback. We need to focus our mind on the language of change. It's respectful. It's empowering. It's curious. So change talk is all about speaking gently to ourselves through our art, or writing our self-talk in a way that's respectful about change. And it thinks of the big picture. The whole picture is we're on a journey. The small picture is what happened today. There are a few things in the literature and in common sense that. 

They kind of give us a guaranteed lack of success. One is we don't start. That seems obvious, but another one is that we don't take the required action consistently. So consistent small steps will get you so much further than trying to take large steps or work on many things all at once. I think the gym is a perfect example here. It requires going to the gym many, many, many days for 30 minutes to build some muscle. It is not possible to go to the gym for one day for eight hours and half muscle. The same holds true for our psychological changes. The small, consistent movement yields the big results. Great big leaps tend to not stick. 

Another challenge that can guarantee a lack of success is trying to change too much at once, and this holds true for internal and external changes. We have to be disciplined enough to choose the one thing that we're working on and focusing on, and so many women tell me they want to change so many things, and they need to change them all. And how could they choose which one they're going to start with? Well, the act of deciding is a really important internal discipline that actually helps us change. So decision making and then sticking with it makes a big difference. And finally, another thing that will guarantee our failure is quitting before we succeed, or we reach a stage where we're able to maintain our progress. And there's piles of research on this, and it really relates to the valley of despair and the emotional stages of change. The trans theoretical model of change. I talked about all of these in other episodes. And it means getting stuck in a place where we want to give up, and we don't talk to ourselves in a way that allows us to keep moving forward. 

Now let's shift to the other side. Possible success happens when we start. So many of us have trouble starting. Remember, a rocket takes 85% of its fuel to get off the ground, and then after that, it doesn't need so much fuel. It's the same for us when we're making a change, when we take required action, you know, one goal at a time. Being consistent in our daily practice. Success becomes possible. Many people fail to link their change with their why, their value, why it matters to them. And when motivation has run dry as it always will, your why is what keeps you going. And sometimes I can't even remember why I started something. And I tell myself I trust that this was a good idea when I started and I'm going to finish. I trust myself that I made a good enough decision and I'm going to finish, so try that next time. You can't remember your why. Another action that's necessary for success is you keep going past failure or relapse. That stopping when it gets difficult or challenging, or we take three steps back sends us a terrible message that we can't do it. So it's really important to keep going. 

Growing up, my mom would say, got to get back on the horse. If you fall off a horse, you have to get right back on so you don't get scared. It's essential that you just get right back on. Stick with your goal and you quit. When you decide you want to quit for a good reason, not because there was some failure. 1s Neuropsychological Research has also told us more about why we tend to stop when we have a relapse, a setback or a failure. So do you have thoughts that are keeping you from pursuing or completing your value based actions? And when I say value based actions, I mean the things that are really most important to you might be family, friends, work, health, spirituality, nature, creativity, anything that really matters to you. If you have thoughts that are keeping you from pursuing what's important to you. This is called chatter. And chatter is essentially using words in our mind to create these thoughts and stories and really repetitive statements about ourselves and our circumstances. And this kind of self-talk chatter has been known about and understood since the 1930s. 

We essentially we use this self-talk coming from neurons in the Broca's area of the brain, and that's the center of language and speech. If you're following along in a brain textbook that's located in the left inferior frontal gyrus. But the brain loves chatter and we're often like, seduced into believing that we think therefore we are, or that what we think is true because our brain is just heavily influenced by the chatter originating in the Broca's area. It just seems to overpower much of our experience. And the truth of the matter is, we're really unable to avoid or stop or control our thoughts. The brain's job is to think thoughts just like our hearts job is to pump blood. We often find ourselves trying to push away negative, unwanted bots and memories, and that leads to more pain and suffering. There's simply no way to push aside these uncomfortable thoughts. 

So what can we do, you ask? Well, how about for decades worth of research has given us some really pretty good answers on this. And it's hopeless to try and stop or control our thoughts. So it then leaves us with the possibility of creating a new relationship with our thoughts. It's one way to prepare for unhelpful thoughts is to really cultivate a realistic and compassionate relationship with our thoughts. Essentially, we have to stop assuming that our thoughts are facts, but we can notice them and accept them without judgment, without trying to push them away. And the different relationship is about dropping the struggle with our thoughts. Stop trying to control them. And I think it's a then a task over time to develop this softer way of relating to ourselves. If you practice meditation, you've observed your thoughts go by. That's a mindfulness meditation. And that's really different than a guided meditation or a guided imagery. Mindfulness meditation does not try and control what you're thinking about or how you're thinking. It's simply giving yourself the time and space to reflect on your thoughts. Let them go by and you observe them. 

You just notice your thoughts. And once you've reached a point where you can observe your thoughts going by, oh, there's another thought about that childhood memory, or there's another thought about that problem I'm having at work. Once you reach that level of observing your thoughts, you know what to do. That's all it takes is to have a relationship with your thoughts. That is observing. We are not our thoughts. We are not the content of our thoughts. So I want to talk to you about cognitive diffusion. 

And I've mentioned this before. It's a core tenet of acceptance and commitment therapy, where we're able to see our thoughts just for what they are. Thoughts one neuron firing across a synapse to the next neuron and then spreading out like a wave in the brain. That's what a thought is. And when we're able to observe our thoughts instead of believe them to be true, or believe that our thoughts are facts, then we've moved into this space of cognitive diffusion. I've been really focused in on acceptance and commitment therapy for the last 16 years, practicing it on myself, teaching it to my clients. And I still discover all kinds of thoughts that I thought were true, but really, they're just thoughts. And I was fused with them. They're not true to everyone else. They were just something I believed. Once we discover that these are beliefs and not facts, then we can decide what we want to do with them. Do we want to pursue our focus in that area, or do we want to change our relationship to that part? Our thoughts and the corresponding feelings that come from our thoughts are really just our interpretation and our judgment. 

They might be thoughts about what's happening outside of us. They could be thoughts about ourselves that we assign to other people for wondering what someone else is thinking about us. That's just us thinking about us starting to see the truth of the thoughts. That's a great metaphor that I use a lot, is my thoughts and feelings are like the weather, but I am the sky. So imagine that for your soar. You are the sky. You're always there. But sometimes there's storm clouds, sometimes there's fog, sometimes rain. And the weather comes and goes. But you're always there. So thoughts and feelings will change. I have five practical steps for you to consider when you're working on making a more gentle relationship with your thoughts. The first one is to be in the present moment. To make contact with the present moment requires a little bit of practice every single day. You can do it in just a couple of minutes in the morning. You can do it throughout your day. One simple technique is to. Pick up a colored pencil in each hand and just draw some circles at the same time. Both hands go up and down. Draw some circles in each direction. It's a really fast way to anchor you into the present moment. 

The next step is observing your thoughts. It's about noticing both the content of your thoughts. I'm having thoughts about my dinner today and then noticing the process of your thoughts. I'm having some uncomfortable memories about a past dinner I went to. It's making me think this next dinner might not be so enjoyable. That's the process. Once we can move into that place of observing both the content and the process, we have a lot more flexibility in our mind. The third step is about creating psychological distance, and that's observing your mind from a little bit of a distance. I think the fastest way to do that is to draw out your thoughts. You can do it as a mind map with some words and little doodles, or you can make it something much more involved. Taking the thoughts out of your head. Putting them on a piece of paper is a really powerful tool to externalize and gain perspective. Another way you can do this is ask yourself what was your best friend think? What would a woman you admire think? What advice would she give you? The fourth step is focusing on your values. What is most important right now? Is it important that you're angry, or is it important that you focus on parenting? Is it important that you get somewhere as fast as possible, or is it important that you drive safely? 

Focusing on what's most important gives us incredible clarity, so you can ask yourself what's most important right now? And the fifth step is making a commitment. Committed action is taking an action step, something external that you can observe or others could observe. That's in line with what's most important. So if what's most important is driving safely, then you would maybe take your foot off the gas pedal. If what's most important for you in that moment is being a loving parent, then maybe you need to go take a break for a minute. These kinds of personal commitments to act according to your values really helps us get off the treadmill of looking at things outside of us to inform how we feel and what we do. I have one more tool I want to teach you today, and it's a diffusion example. 

So it's a way to gain perspective on your thoughts and start by writing down a thought that you're having, and you can think of the ones that you have a lot. Pick one of those. I often hear people say, I don't have enough time to do that. There's too many things going on. I'm so busy. Does any of this sound familiar? So if you write down I don't have enough time, that thought functions to give us a little bit of anxiety or disappointment or resentment. So it doesn't have a good functional purpose in our mind. So those are the kind of thoughts that we really need perspective on. So the next line on your paper you would write, oh, I'm thinking that I don't have enough time. I'm thinking that I don't have enough time. Right. You become aware of your thinking process and then finally ease yourself into the highest level of awareness. And you would write, I'm aware that I'm thinking that I don't have enough time. So the content of the thought is about time and time anxiety. The process is becoming aware that these are thoughts. They're not facts, they're neurons firing. 

Now, you may have overscheduled yourself. That might be true, but the fact that you don't have enough time pops into your head is not about over scheduling it. It's a like a time anxiety thought that you can relate to differently. You can make art about this to really externalize it so that you are aware this is a reoccurring thought. And then prepare yourself. That thought will come again. You can prepare yourself with awareness. Oh, there's that thought again. Oh yeah. I'm familiar with this old thought. I'm familiar with what comes next. A little bit of frantic ness or worry. So see if you can use that three step process in writing and in art. The sentence that you think of over and over, then the awareness that you're thinking about it, and finally, just total awareness that this is your thinking process. I feel really different when I'm able to diffuse from intense thoughts. Maybe the notice that this is a process in my head and I can continue to think about it, or I can change my thoughts around it. I want to wrap this up by inviting you to make a commitment to yourself. And commitment is like a noun. You could think of it that way. 

It's, you know, being dedicated to something, but it's also a verb. I am committed means I am going to do this. Committed action is behaving in a way of your choosing that helps you continue towards your value. You can persist in something that helps you get there or change course if there's something interrupting your value based actions. If you're committed to being a loving partner and you find yourself being irritated a lot, you can observe that and see what you might change not for the other person, but for you to just notice what's happening in your mind and make conscious choices that help you persist in your value based behavior. You know, in a relationship, it goes back and forth between you and the other person. But what I'm talking is about is you feeling good about your choices and your actions. If I'm feeling happy with my partner, I want to continue in that route. If I'm feeling unsatisfied, I want to figure out how to be more satisfied. 

And once we're clear about what's happening in our own mind with our own soul, then we can show up authentically. Have a conversation with our partner. I would love to hear from you. You can find me on Instagram at Doctor Amy Backus and let me know what you think about these ideas of taking a step back, observing your thoughts to art, and writing the three thoughts that I gave you related to. I think I'm aware that I'm thinking, and you can take anything that pops into your head and put it into that formula and start to feel a little bit of relief and change your relationship to your thoughts. So do let me know which parts of this you find helpful. My contact is in the show notes. 

Have a wonderful rest. Of your week. Now that you know about how to use your creativity, what will you create? Want more? Subscribe to the Modern Creative Woman digital magazine. It's absolutely free, and it comes out when some men and I know you can get a lot out of the podcast and the digital magazine. Yet when you're ready to take it to the next level and want you to know you have options inside the membership, and if you're interested in a private consultation, please feel free to book a call with me. Even if you just have some questions, go ahead and book a call. My contact is in the show notes and you can always message me on Instagram. Do come find me in the Modern Creative Woman on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest at Doctor Amy Backus. If you like what you're hearing on the Modern Creative Woman podcast, I want to give you the scoop on how you can support the podcast. You can be an ambassador and share the podcast link with three of your friends. You can be a community supporter by leaving a five star review. If you think it's worth the five stars, and you can become a Gold Star supporter for as little as $3 a month, all those links are in the show notes. Remember to grab your free copy of the 21 Day Gratitude Challenge. The link is in the show notes and you can find it at Modern Creative women.com. Have a wonderful week and I can not wait to talk with you in the next episode.