The single thing all women need in the world is inspiration, and inspiration comes from storytelling. This quote is from Zainab Salbi and she has spent her life advocating for marginalized communities. She is an Iraqi American journalist and a humanitarian, and she's used storytelling as a means of inspiring and empowering others. This quote about storytelling starts us off today as we explore holistic love and how we can tell stories to give us meaning and purpose.
Welcome to the Modern Creative Woman podcast 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 life. I'm your hostess and creativity expert, Doctor Amy, because the modern creative woman is obsessed with helping you build your creativity through her conversations and creative insights. I'll share simple tricks and practices that can help you take the mystery out of the creative process and start each day feeling empowered, creative, and ready to take on whatever comes your way. Let's get started!
Today's episode is all about storytelling, and I want to check in with you and see if you attended the Vibrant Vision Workshop and if you have yet to see. Send me a DM and I will send you the link. This was so much more powerful than I ever imagined, and I have been getting some truly incredible feedback from women who discovered that they, in fact, knew the change they wanted to make, and they've already taken action. Here's a few quotes from women who took the workshop.
“What a productive workshop for all ages and stages of life. The decision I had been mulling over for more than a year was resolved by the end of the three step meditation.” Wow. That quote comes from Marcia.
“What a powerful presentation! I gained deep insight and have some new, big, beautiful things to think about.” Thank you Sarah for that one.
And now that the webinar is out in the world, I hope you will take the time to watch it. Do some creativity and see what knowledge and insight you can come up with about your next steps, and if you are ready to take the lead. Aurora from Girlboss Paris and I are offering a total transformation package in Paris this September. This is not just a trip to Paris. This is five days of transformation and will be teaching you three incredibly powerful secrets that the French women know and we need to be reminded of on a regular basis about being your most authentic self. It involves paying attention to your style, your environment, your mindset. We'll be looking at neuro aesthetics. We'll also be talking about some of the secrets around French cuisine. We'll have a day market shopping with a chef. You'll have a culinary experience and less. Do you think it's too late for you or you're too old? We will have some really powerful lectures all around, seizing the opportunity at whatever your age. We'll be visiting a very gifted lingerie designer who understands the female body in a way that we all need to know. If this kind of experience appeals to you and you are ready to come back completely transformed from the inside out, your brand, your style, your mindset and how you view yourself and your next steps in life. Then hop on over to the modern creative woman. You can find the link in the show notes. I've got a special discount code for all my modern creative women. SOSI is your discount code. It saves you a big chunk of money.
Let's jump into a unique conversation about holistic love. Let me define what I mean for you. It's practicing self-love for every part of yourself. And we've talked here before about radical self-acceptance, and we talk a lot about making sure that we're in the present moment and we're living our purpose. Holistic love means taking care of all the parts of ourself your mind, your body, your spirit, and it's by nurturing all the aspects of your life.
Brené Brown notes that owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that will ever do. Now she's a social science researcher and she knows a thing or two about bravery. When you imagine taking holistic care of yourself and really loving all the parts of yourself, it means past, present, future, and even your creative spiritual self. This is not an exact formula. It's unique for every woman. But you might want to reflect on some of these categories as you think about where you need to give yourself some love. It's those areas that ache a little bit. The ones you most want to avoid that will help you grow the most. So it might be in relationships or your career, your creativity. Maybe it's your finances, your physical health, your mindset, your beliefs, some old beliefs about yourself and others, and past situations. It might be around your habits, your spirituality, your sensuality, or even your environment. Let's dive into a little bit of brain research. I want to talk about neuroplasticity and neurodegeneration. And then we will jump into learning theory, how we learn and how we ultimately begin to add more information to old schemas.
And this is really important in being able to tell a new, fresh story about ourselves. As you know, neuroplasticity is our brain's ability to change and adapt with new information coming in and with repetition. Repetitive actions tend to yield connections very quickly between brain cells. They begin to fire repetitively and together. Repetitive thoughts or habits or beliefs become stronger and faster with regard to that particular action or that piece of information. Neuroplasticity is extremely important. It gives us the direct ability to continuously learn over the course of our entire lifetime. And maybe 40 years ago, 50 years ago, researchers were unaware that this was a possibility for us, that we could continue to create new pathways in unique and powerful ways. Now there's two types of neuroplasticity. One is structural and structural.
Neuroplasticity is the brain's capacity to change the already existing neural connections. So we have some beliefs, some fundamental understanding. And we can start to add to it, shape it, mold it, and shift. Now functional neuroplasticity is permanent changes in the neurons because of learning and development. So that means with every lesson, every time you listen to this podcast, you're potentially connecting new neurons and rewiring your brain structure. Now, that also means every time you watch the news, you're also potentially connecting new neurons and rewiring your brain. It means every time you say something negative to yourself, or you're around a crowd of people who judge you and are not supportive, it's potentially that moment rewiring your brain structure. I hope this gives you pause to consider what kind of books you're reading, what kind of entertainment you're consuming. Now, the process of neuroplasticity is stronger in children. If you've parented or been around small children, you have a sense that children seem to be like sponges. They absorb everything. They can repeat things quickly back to you and they learn to copy what we're doing.
This process still happens as we age, but like most functions of the human body, it changes as we age. Neurogenesis, on the other hand, is the creation of new neurons or new brain cells. And again, old research used to believe that this wasn't really happening much after birth or it declined very quickly after birth. But we understand that neurogenesis does not cease after a certain age. Now, this is especially important when there are instances of injury or illness. And I worked at the VA in the poly trauma clinic, and the neuropsychologists and the neurologists were really focusing on helping people who had a traumatic brain injury with neurogenesis. And that was a real focus for the first two years after an injury.
However, neurogenesis takes place throughout our lifetime, thank goodness, and it simply slows down as we age. But it's still going on, and the more we use it, our brain cells, the more we have access to them and the more we're able to engage in neurogenesis and neuroplasticity. It is not too late to grow your brain, to engage in your life in a way that feels meaningful and purposeful. So just to sum this up, neuroplasticity refers to your brain's ability to reorganize itself by creating new connections. Neurogenesis is generating new neurons. What I've seen over and over in the neuropsychological research, as well as in clinical practice, is that change happens when we have something new to learn. And what I mean by that is some new thought that we'd like to think, a new story, a habit and action to practice. That's when change happens.
We can't just start making change by telling our brain, no, that's not true. Not true. It doesn't work that way. We have to have a new pathway. For our neurons to fire. I want to remind you that art and play make change happen so much faster. If you want to change a habit, it might take you a month or two months. If you use play, you're going to learn so much faster. Think about how kids learn. Play makes you learn faster. Creativity makes you learn faster.
Now let's shift into storytelling. I've talked before about the heroine's journey and telling a story in a way that gives us a little more ease. I want to talk about old and new stories, and how you can start to tell new stories about yourself, and slowly let some of those old, outdated stories fall by the wayside. And we practice diffusion to recognize our thoughts as just thoughts. Remember, diffusion is observing our thoughts and noting that they are just thoughts. They are not facts. Remember, you can think about a polar bear, but there's no polar bear here. Thoughts are just thoughts. And yet old stories still seem like facts in our brain. It takes time and patience to observe our old stories and be able to hold them in a way that we recognize them for what they are, which is neurons firing. Even memories are just neurons firing. The memory of an event is not happening now. It's a memory.
Let me be more specific. Old stories are neurons firing in a consistent, repeated pattern. They've fired so many times and so often that we believe them as facts. They're like a super highway. It's like driving the autobahn in Germany. And when we've heard that story so many times in our head, we think it's a fact. Because one repetition, remember, repetition is a very powerful way to learn and to because we keep hearing it, we think, oh, that must be true. I've heard that before. So even our metacognitive experience, we try and observe these old stories and we think, well, yeah, it's true. I must have heard that somewhere. Now our brain can believe these stories. We know that the brain will respond to these stories as if they were true and happening. But you can slowly step away from that. We don't have to believe these stories. Let me give you some examples of learning and how we develop as little learners, and how we can use that.
Now I want to talk about two kinds of learning. One is assimilation and one is accommodation. Assimilation is when we learn something and we get to apply it all over the place. We think this is a true schema. It fits everywhere. For example, when you learn the word dog, you maybe saw it in a storybook. Maybe you had a dog. I reinforced my son learning about dogs in this way. Oh look, there's the dog in the book. Oh, there's a dog walking by us. So then what happens is it's almost an overgeneralization. Kids will start to call all the four legged animals dogs. They'll turn the page. There'll be a picture of a cat, and they'll say dog. And you say, no, that's a cat. So this assimilation, is this over generalization. One thing seems to be true. So I'm going to apply it everywhere. That sounds an awful lot like what we do when we have a view of the world that does not serve us. What we see through our view and our schema tends to be what we look for, tends to be what we find now. Accommodation is the process of getting more specific and eliminating that over generalized learning.
So when my son called a cat a dog, I said, no, no, no, that's not a dog, that's a cat. And then we'd see in the book, oh, here's the dog, here's the cat. And so the schema for dog gets modified and it becomes restricted to only certain kinds of animals the dogs, the canines. And then there's a new schema for cats. You see how the young child's mind begins to expand their knowledge from this one data point of dog to understanding that all the different animals have different names. How could you practice accommodation?
Well, if you're like me, you probably still have negative stories in your head and some that you still believe strongly. We're always unpacking these stories. We tend to believe them until we become aware of them, that they are a story and not a fact. So you can start to use this idea of accommodation. So when you recognize an old story, and sometimes it takes a therapist to tell us, or a best friend or a significant other, you know, when they say, you always say it like this or you always see it this way. Pay attention to those, even if it feels like a criticism, because those are clues to where you might be over generalizing or relying on one schema instead of expanding. So when you embody yourself as this kind inner best friend, you can say gently to yourself, no, that's not a fact. That's an old story. You can even go a step further and say, no, that's not a fact. That's just a thought. And when you do that, the schema for the old story becomes open to some modification. Remember, your brain needs a new story to begin making a new neural pathway.
Now, we can't just tell our brain that old story is not true and expected to go away. It's still the Audubon Superfast Highway in our brain. We can't just say, nope, we have to have a new destination. We need an exit ramp, essentially, so that we can start directing our thoughts in new directions. And at first, that exit ramp might feel like a bumpy dirt road. Over time, we come take care of it a little bit more and we pave it, and then we come back later and put the painted lines there, and later we put up guardrails and pretty soon it's a very nice exit ramp. We don't have to drive down this path. We can take a new brain route. We have to give our brain direction.
So in addition to the direction that we want it to go, we point it towards what we want instead of letting it run towards what we don't want. It also needs a lot of repetition. I have post-it notes in my planner next to my desk of thoughts that I'm working on. That struck me. It really does require repetition and it reminds me of taking a yoga class. Take yoga enough. You're stretching feels like stretching. It feels like stretching for a really long time. And then one day it feels like you're doing yoga and you really ease into it. And I think that fits very well. What happens in our brain. We're just stretching. It feels uncomfortable. And one day we have a new thought and we realize that has become our new automatic thought. When I think about holistic love, I'm reminded how it all happens in the moment. Our present moment awareness is necessary. However, we can do little time traveling and stretch back to heal some of the uncomfortable, untrue stories from our past. If you want to know a little bit more about using time travel in your imagination. Definitely check out the Vibrant Vision webinar. It's time traveling in the other direction and imagining the future.
But with holistic love, you can apply it to the past hurts as well. Let me give you some examples. You may have said something to yourself negative about your intelligence, your body, your ability to relate to others. And then that thought stuck. Your mind was searching for some kind of interpretation, or a way to make sense of what was happening in the moment, and the terrible thought stuck in our head. And it will linger over time, get stronger and stronger and become automatic, and we'll start to believe it. So much so that we think it's a fact. We've all made financial mistakes and it doesn't mean we're bad at finances. I made a mistake when I was in college, and I had felt like I had really prepared for navigating my own finances. My dad helped me understand all the details of managing my checking account, all my banking. I made a mistake and I bounced a check and I felt so judgmental of myself. It felt like a such a big mistake. I was very unkind in my brain and I thought, oh my gosh, I can't manage finances. And that thought stuck for a really long time, and every now and again it pops up when I'm dealing with something financial and I can now say, oh, that's an old thought and that's not true. I've piles of evidence. And I've worked on that thought over and over again. I have little bumpers, I've got this guardrail around. I know how to exit when that thought pops up. So when we're imagining these new stories, remember we can't just stop that old story. It doesn't just go away, necessarily. It becomes less loud, it becomes perhaps less frequent, and we become less reactive to it.
Your brain has thousands and thousands of thoughts every day, and there's a few that kind of hook us, bother us, and we react to all those other ones were not responding to. And so over time, the more we respond to the new thought, I'm financially savvy. I know what to do with my money. We can replace the old thought almost immediately with the new thought and carry on. Here are my practical tips about telling a news story. First, we have to be totally okay with the old story being untrue, outdated, and flat out wrong. We just have to accept that we don't need to throw more after this old story. You know that saying, let's not throw good money after bad. And it means when we've made some kind of financial investment and we can't get our money back. So instead of admitting, oh, I should stop now and back out of this, we keep trying the same thing over and over again and putting more money in. The same holds true with our stories.
We have to be willing to accept that the immediate path away from where we're going is to admit that that story is no longer true. Does it mean more bad or wrong? It means that story is not serving however you want to phrase it to yourself. That allows you to back away from the story. It's outdated. It's untrue. It's just plain wrong. And I'm okay with the having told myself a wrong story. It's okay. Next, we really want to focus on growth mindset and that involves letting go of perfectionism. Fixed mindset is imagining that there is some perfection. There's a right way that the most important thing is a grade or getting it right and never failing. We want to avoid that. We want to go into growth mindset, where the point is to learn something new, not to do something perfect. The point is to experiment, try new ways of thinking and withholding judgment. And finally, making contact with the present moment is essential for you to tell a different story.
If you're unanchored and you're not anchored in the present moment and we start thinking about the past, we can really dive in there and feel like we're right back there. What I want you to do is anchor into the present moment when you think about these new stories, they're happening in the here and now. And when you heal a past hurt, or you become less judgmental about something from the past, your healing, your current self, all your memories are happening in the now. If this kind of work excites you, do join us inside the modern creative woman. Catch yourself a coaching package or come to Paris. If you are ready to tell the story and you want to make change that is long lasting and will impact every aspect of your life through creativity, presence, mindset and your purpose. Find the link in the show notes. Send me a message and I will see you in the next episode. 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 cannot wait to talk with you in the next episode.