Transcending Sameness: The Dance Between Comfort and Growth

Unlock the secrets of how 'sameness' might be both your safety net and your prison. Angie and I, April Sabral, delve into the paradoxical nature of our craving for consistency, challenging the very instincts that keep us tethered to our comfort zones. We share a riveting conversation about the biological and psychological urges that compel us to seek out the familiar, and how this deep-seated preference can be a double-edged sword—protecting our survival yet potentially throttling our capacity for growth and innovation. Angie's eloquence in storytelling illuminates her research on the brain's resistance to change, providing a fascinating backdrop to our debate on whether the security sameness provides is worth the potential stagnation it imposes on our lives. 

Ever felt like you've hit a plateau in life? We've all been there, and in this episode, we tackle the idea of elevating our goals to turn limitations into launchpads. Drawing inspiration from a Mindvalley course, we share strategies to help you visualize your aspirations and push past those imagined boundaries, whether they're professional targets or personal milestones. Listen in as we discuss how reframing our thoughts can lead to surpassing achievements we've only dreamed of. By mastering our mindsets and challenging the status quo of sameness, we can cultivate a life filled with positivity and purpose. Don't miss this opportunity to join us on Incurable Positivity, where we go beyond the surface to equip you with the insight to rewire your thinking and truly thrive.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey there, positivity seekers, welcome to another episode of Incurable Positivity, the podcast where we explore practical ways to shift your thoughts from negative to positive.

Speaker 2: 0:11

I'm April Sabral, and with me is the incredible Angie Costa. Together, we co-authored the award-winning book Incurable Positivity, and we're here to bring those pages to life in this uplifting podcast.

Speaker 1: 0:25

Absolutely, April. Our mission is simple to help you think and feel better. Life does challenges our way, but it's how we respond that makes all the difference. Today, we've got some tactical tips to share with you that can truly transform your mindset.

Speaker 2: 0:42

For more positivity, head to wwwincurablepositivitycom. Stay positive, stay inspired. This is incurable positivity. It's June 24, and we're really excited to talk about how to live positively in 2024. And we're just going to have a really great conversation this morning about sameness. I know I texted you yesterday. I was like oh, what's the topic for today? What have you been studying and working on this week and this idea of sameness? So I'm really interested, angie, to hear from you what like unpack, what that means and how we're going to kind of talk about this this morning. So I'm going to hand the mic to you.

Speaker 1: 1:23

Yeah, sure, well, you know I'm a ghost writer. So the clients come to me with their book ideas and it's my responsibility to first of all take what they bring me. And many of my clients are, you know, their leaders in their respective industries. So they've got, you know, they've got papers out, they've got TED Talks, they've got, you know, blogs or what have you, videos and things like that. But a lot of it requires me to do research, and I love research. It's one of the great things that I get to do.

Speaker 1: 1:59

One of my clients brought me a book idea about sameness and how we in general do try to keep our lives very much the same, and, in fact, people who don't do that. We call them thrill seekers, we call them adventurers, we call them explorers and trailblazers, and the only reason they stand out to us is because so many of us keep our lives relatively the same. And in my research about that and what my client has discovered is that that's a biological response that you know, in order to survive. You know, when back, way back when caveman times, we needed things to be very much the same Because there were so many threats, right, something out there was trying to eat you Trying to kill you, and so, when things were the same, it gave them. You know it gave them an advantage, an evolutionary advantage, and unfortunately, that brain that we developed way back then remains with us today.

Speaker 1: 3:09

We like for things to be, generally speaking, the same, and if you think about you know, even internally your physical body, you know you have a process called homeostasis taking place inside of you, where all of your physical responses generally stay the same. You know you have about the same temperature, about the same heart rate, about the same blood pressure, about the same sodium levels. All of these things in your body want to remain fairly consistent. You know, and you think of. Take temperature, for example. If your temperature goes up or down ever so slightly, just a couple of degrees, we call that fever. That's a problem. The body goes well, this is not okay, and the same thing if your temperature drops and all of your physical responses work that way.

Speaker 1: 4:02

The problem with sameness, though, is that your brain also tends to regard sameness, it tends to favor sameness, and when you want to make a shift in your life, your brain may work against you. Your thoughts, your patterns, your habits may work against that ability or that desire to make a shift, and so I really wanted to sort of unpack that today, because the practices that we're talking about when we talk about positivity are so important. You know, we talk a lot about meditation, we talk about being aware of your thoughts, we talk about being aware of your conversations, how you enroll people or how you are enrolled by other people. We talk about all of these things because those are the things that work against our ability and desire to shift out of the traditional sameness of negativity. And I remember, april, you mentioned that the other day on the book club about how we are generally programmed for negativity, right?

Speaker 2: 5:14

Yeah, yeah, it's so interesting because what you're saying about sameness in our body and homeostasis I don't know if I'm saying that word right.

Speaker 2: 5:24

I've got a lift, so some words right, some words don't, but that whole framework of our bodies and what you just shared. So, however, I was thinking, when you said this to me last night and sent the text, I was like, is it a positive thing or is it a negative thing? So I'm always like, ok, how do I find the positive in this? Like, is it positive? What's the positive spin on it? How do we turn it into something positive for us? And so I'm really interesting to see you know to further this conversation and go into it more. Because, yeah, is it a positive thing? Is it a negative thing? I mean, what you just shared it can stop us from shifting right, because I would say there's some really positive things about that, about our bodies and our like, our temperature and all of that kind of stuff, but then we don't want our bank accounts to say the same. So we're in a world of driving and shifting things to evolve and grow, and that's kind of going against the normal feeling of sameness.

Speaker 1: 6:31

But if you think about it, there is an element of sameness to our bank accounts. As much as we say we don't want our bank accounts to say to stay the same, how many times do you find yourself right back in a financial situation that you've been in so many times before? It's almost like you set a baseline for yourself, subconsciously, and you keep returning to that same spot. And you tried yourself and you say, oh my gosh, I said I was going to do better. And here I am it's the end of the month and I've done it again. I didn't budget, I didn't save, I don't have anything more than I had the month before. So we do sort of push ourselves back to what we know. I think you mentioned this to me the other day about ceilings and floors that we always seem to come back to our floor, right, yeah, we do, because that's the same, this, that's where we're comfortable and feel protected.

Speaker 2: 7:26

We do and that's because, angie, we have this repeated thought pattern right. So you bringing this up last night made me think about what I've been working on recently and it literally is like there is a sameness in processes to the way that we shift our thinking, like viewing, programming, writing affirmations, finding that subconscious, limiting belief. There's a question that you can ask yourself which is a process, which is the same process? Because there is processes that are helpful to us, frameworks that are helpful to us. However, when we apply these same framework and these processes that are repeatable into an area of life where we want to grow, we need to really be ready and ask ourselves am I ready to grow? Because it's going to open up and it's going to get uncomfortable for us when we start to want to shift these patterns Because, as you just said at the beginning, with the homeostasis in your body wanting to maintain a certain temperature, a certain routine things in our life being to protect us, it's like you will start to feel uncomfortable when you start to open up these questions.

Speaker 2: 8:39

And I was really thinking about thought patterns off my thought patterns that I am bringing into my awareness now, because they're patterns that happen to me over and, over and over again in certain styles and types of relationships. And so this sadness that keeps happening to me is it positive? Yeah, I don't know if it's positive, but it is pushing me to. Well, this is the positive spin on it I gave myself last night. It was like I'm ready to grow and I'm ready to shift this pattern. So that's a very positive thing because I've caught it, I've seen it, I've, like, perceived it, and now I get to put the frameworks around this pattern, these questions, these ways of shifting it that we talk about all the time to get a different result. But then I'm going to have to be open to it. I'm going to have to be open to this change and we only manifest what we tolerate. So we could tolerate the same things over and over again like you just said about your bank account every month. Somehow you ended up in the same place because you're manifesting what you're tolerating. And so, yeah, it's so interesting to me because it really does all start, I believe, in our mind, with our thinking, with the way that we think the same about things, and we have to start shifting that. And that's going to take work. That's going to take us being uncomfortable and yesterday I had to sit there and I had a bit of a day.

Speaker 2: 10:07

Yesterday was I was just purging and I was sitting there and it was journaling and some tears came up and all of this stuff. And you know I could have been like so depressed and like this is terrible, my life is so sad, I'm alone again, I'm in a new city. But then I was like, okay, I've been here before, I've had this pattern before. What am I supposed to learn and grow through this? What's the pattern that just keeps evolving? How can I shift this?

Speaker 2: 10:26

And I'm not a person that will go out and eat by myself, by the way, I'm just not that person. I'm going to call everybody I know down the street. I literally pushed myself to go out and sit at a bar in a restaurant to have dinner, to get out of that sameness, to do something different, to shift the energy, to shift my vibration and to see it as a positive thing that I get to change something in my life and interrupt some thought patterns, which goes back to right, like I'm thinking. It all comes back to the way that we think, but it's, it's going to feel a bit uncomfortable. I'm not going to lie when you're trying to get out of that sameness, even though sameness is so positive sameness is protective.

Speaker 1: 11:07

It keeps us feeling secure, and we need that. We need to feel safe in the world, and we we don't like when things are constantly changing. You think about something as simple as having a neighbor move out. That is a disturbing thing, right? Because you're like okay, this is what my neighborhood is. Suddenly, when your next door neighbor moves out, now you know the neighborhood has changed. I don't know who's moving in there, I don't know what the dynamic is going to be, you know, is it going to be good, is it going to be bad? And and so when we have uncertainty around certain things, we do tend to try to keep them relatively the same, as much as we are. We have the power to do so.

Speaker 1: 11:49

But you think about what you have done, which I think is tremendously remarkable. First of all, I think it's remarkable that you moved to the United States just just a couple of years ago. To make that decision to move to a new country is tremendous. But then to say, you know, new York is wonderful, it's exciting, it's it's, you know, it's electrifying, but this is not where I want to be, and pick up and move to Florida, I mean that is tremendous. That takes a lot of wow, it takes a lot of strength, it takes a lot of awareness and insight into who you are and what you, what you want and I always say this, I've been saying this for years people will complain about the place they live for 50 weeks out of the year and for two weeks out of the year, vacation in the place they want to be.

Speaker 1: 12:39

That's bizarre. That's bizarre Like, literally, why do you live where you live? You know, most of us don't think about that, and I understand family. If you're with family, that's, that's just priceless. But if you're not living with family and you're in a city you don't want to live in, you hate the weather, you hate the traffic, you hate the, you know the busyness or the lack of busyness or you know whatever it is and you don't do something about it.

Speaker 1: 13:04

That's a great moment for you to really dig deep and say who am I, what do I want, what works for me, what doesn't work for me and where would I like to be? You know, where do I go on those two weeks when I can go anywhere in the world? Where is that place? And ask yourself is that really the place you belong? And most people aren't willing to make that big, that big decision, but it starts with making small decisions to to evaluate your sameness. Is this sameness good for me? Is it protective? Is it, you know? Does it bring me security? Does it bring me peace? Does it bring me joy and excitement? Or is this same as something I'm doing to hide from the thing I really want to do?

Speaker 2: 13:50

You know I have I've been taking this manifesting course on Mindvalley. I love Mindvalley. They've got some really great courses on there and I've been doing this course and it really literally is like teaching you a lot of different techniques, but one of them and you brought it up earlier.

Speaker 2: 14:05

So I want to bring this back up because if you're listening to the repo, you'll be like, can you go back to that floor and ceiling thing that you brought up? Because I want to address that. But we create ceilings in our life. We create ceilings in our life because, again, we've only ever experienced something and we want to shift it and we want to have something different in our lives, like a different outcome, a different experience like me moving to Florida and however, we create these ceilings and so we need to make that ceiling the floor, because it's really I don't know if you've ever tried to break through a ceiling, angie, but if you ever tried to physically break through a ceiling, it's going to be really, really difficult and so to make. But once you break through the ceiling, now your ceiling becomes the floor that you're standing on and now you have a new ceiling. And so this is one of the concepts that's in this course that I'm taking and I really, really love it, because what she basically says is she says, when you want to shift and change and think about something, a different outcome in your life, look at the ceiling that you're creating. So you know, many of us 2024,. We've got these goals. We've got these things that we want to go after and change and shift and make an impact, whatever that is, financial relationships, everything, health and we're looking at this goal and it could become just a ceiling, and then we're just having the same experience where we just keep bouncing down from the ceiling, we keep headbutting it and we keep coming down. And she says that's because when we set those goals, we are wired to protect ourselves from them and because we've never experienced breaking through it before, we will literally just get stuck. And so what she had us do which is amazing is like envision the vision beyond the vision. So you have this vision, this goal, and this is your ceiling, but now you envision the next one, and now you're subconscious, your psyche, that protective wiring in your body that keeps you safe, is now focused on the envision beyond the vision, like the ceiling above the ceiling, and so this ceiling now starts to drop and your protective wiring in your brain, in your body, will not start focusing on protecting you from it. In fact, it will just go after the other one.

Speaker 2: 16:11

So let's say you know you had an income goal or a salary goal or a career move goal and you said you know, I want this. I've never experienced it before. But then you put, like, the goal after it on top of it, right on your vision board when you're writing out your goals, whatever that is. And now all of a sudden you've just alleviated the protectiveness or the frame. You know the resistance to that first one, and that now becomes your floor.

Speaker 2: 16:35

And that is so interesting to me because I used to do that when I used to set sales goals in retail, I'd sit with the CFO and he'd be like, okay, we need to deliver this this year. And I'm like, okay, well, let's go 25% higher and let's give the stores this goal, because I know that if we do that, then we're going to hit the one we really want, right? So that was that ceiling in that floor we literally just removed. We made the ceiling, the floor and they hit it, and so, but when I I'd never really thought about that in my personal goals, my personal life, it's like, no, I want to manifest X amount of clients, I want to manifest this amount of money or I want to manifest this kind of relationship, but I wasn't envisioning past it.

Speaker 2: 17:16

I heard lots of times be grateful. Script like you already have it, tell your mind, you have it right, like right. Act, like you already have it. If you want to be a millionaire, be a millionaire. But then I was like, yeah, but I've always had this, this. I don't know this kind of breakthrough, the ceiling can't happen, or this resistance. And now I get it.

Speaker 1: 17:35

I was like, oh, this is so good, because this really shakes up the sameness dealing with that ceiling and floor issue right now because I'm house hunting and you know I have lived in a three bedroom, two bath house. I live in a three bedroom, two bath house right now. The house I had in Fort Worth, or the apartment I had in Fort Worth, was a three bedroom, two bath. My house in Pennsylvania was a three bedroom, two bath house and it's like that's not going to work for this move that I'm making. And yet I caught myself last night look real scrolling through the real estate listings and stopping every single time on a three bedroom, two bath. It's like that's where my brain continues to try and keep me stuck, because that's what my brain knows. I've done it before. You know there's no shocks or surprises. You know, I know that whole process.

Speaker 1: 18:30

But what I want right now is an apartment complex. That's what I have been wanting for the longest time and I've never been able to execute on that because I keep on, you know, staying in that home of the three bedroom, two bath house. So now what April and I talked about last week? I love that I get to be your business partner and your student. That is such a gift to me because you mentioned to me a few days ago to go beyond, like if you had the three bedroom, if you had the apartment, the small apartment complex, what would you want next?

Speaker 1: 19:09

Well, I would want a multi unit, right, I would move from like a four unit to a eight unit or a 12 unit or a 20 unit. And you taught me this technique of do your meditation and your reflection from the small apartment complex, right. So that's, consider that done and now start doing your manifestation beyond, to the very next step and that breaks through the ceiling, and that is a constant awareness. I would have continued three bedroom, two bath house forever and probably would have moved into a three bedroom, two bath house, because that's home of the spaces working against me. Those are my thoughts not allowing me to expand and really make room for the bigger thing that I say I want. So that's feeling. And the fourth thing is it is absolutely golden.

Speaker 2: 20:09

Yeah, we really have to master our minds If we want to live this life of positivity and this life of what we truly dream of. And it really is a mind game every day. It literally is a mind game because you really do manifest what you tolerate, and what we tolerate is what we've already experienced and what we're experiencing is around us all the time as evidence. If we just stop, take the empty pause, step back and actually look at what's going on in our life and ask ourselves what's just not working right now and what do I believe about it? Those are two very important questions to ask yourself, to then start to really, kind of you know, think about, cultivate, populate these answers that you can then start to rewire and reprogram to positive ones that are going to work for you, because, at the end of the day, we get what we think about, and what we think about shows up in our life. And so we have 8,000 books a day. 80% of them are negative, and that's not to scare anybody, but that is an awareness that is so powerful when you start to do the work.

Speaker 2: 21:21

You know, I was with a coaching client this week and I said this is going to feel really different because we're going into mindset coaching now, not just business coaching and tactical coaching and leadership coaching, and it's going to feel a bit weird. It's going to feel a bit, you know, we'll spend 90 minutes together and we'll talk things out and at the end of it, we might just come up with one limiting belief. But that limiting belief, when you find it, it's like the needle in the haystack. You're going to be able to shift so many things because everything's connected. The way you think about this one thing is the way that you think about everything, and so you know I'm super excited. We started off this conversation with sameness such a good topic. Sameness can be really positive, but it can also hinder our lives, so I think it's just about coming back to awareness again, right as we start to wrap this up, because we're coming up on time. Angie, what else would you like to share?

Speaker 1: 22:17

Well, I just want to repeat what April says all the time, and that is that everything starts with a thought, everything. And you know I'm sitting here looking at my favorite chair. You know it's a really cool reclining chair and it's got like the theater lights and it's got like a place to plug in my phone and all this really cool, these really cool features. But before that chair was a physical manifestation in my living room, somebody had a thought, somebody saw that in their head and decided to sketch it out. And, you know, get a design going and get their patent and do all the things that were necessary, but nothing happens until a thought happens.

Speaker 1: 23:04

And I, you can look at that as a limiting reality or as an empowering one, and I would just encourage you to consider that an empowering idea, that your next move is going to start with you teaching and programming your mind to see that as your reality, to see that as the normal.

Speaker 1: 23:27

Here's the sameness, here's how the sameness can work for you, that you are already in that place. You are, that's already your norm, that new thing that you're reaching for. And so I just really want to encourage you to be aware of your thoughts. You know, even if you do nothing about your thoughts. If you are simply aware of your thoughts, you gain more mastery over your life and you move away from this autopilot. We all tend to live on to a place where you are creating, where you're innovating, where you're imagining, where you're allowing wonder and passion and desire all of those things to come to the fore. If you can move away from this, you know this sameness that we've been talking about in those places that are not positive for you, yeah, If you love this episode, be sure to hit that subscribe button.

Speaker 2: 24:25

Leave us a review and head over to incurablepositivitycom, where you can get access to lots more resources. The community and myself and Angie where we go live with Book Club and talk about everything positivity. We love you, we appreciate all of you and until next time, stay positive.