There is nothing wrong with you

Welcome to This Daring Adventure podcast where we work on bridging the gap between where we are and where we want to be in order to live a bigger and bolder life. In this podcast, we will provide inspiration, tips, and skills you need to make your life the adventure you want it to be. Here's your host, mindset mentor, and life coach, Trista Guertin.

Hey everybody. Welcome back to This Daring Adventure. So glad you're here. So whatever you're doing. Thank you for joining me, and I wanted to start today with a question, and I actually want you to just give it a few minutes and, and sit with it. Have you ever looked in the mirror, not at your face, but at your life and thought, why can't I just change? Why do I keep doing this thinking, this, feeling this, repeating the same patterns? I know better, but it just doesn't seem to stick. If that sounds like you, then you're going to want to continue listening to this episode because today we are talking about something that I think is one of the most misunderstood topics in personal development, especially for women in midlife who are smart, self-aware, and honestly a little fed up with themselves for not being further along. So this is very normal. We tend to fall into these same patterns. But what I want you to know before we dive in is that you are not broken and you are not weak. You are not doing anything wrong, and you certainly are not incapable of change. Whatever patterns, whatever habits, whatever beliefs that you have been repeating over the past several years, decades even. Are not permanent. They don't have to mean anything about you or what you're capable of or what's possible for you in the future. So often I hear women saying, that's just who I am, and usually it's something. Not great, for lack of a better word. They think there's something wrong with them. They think that they're just not likable, that they're not good enough, that they're not capable, whatever it is, and I'm sure you can pinpoint in yourself what that thing is, but. I want to be very clear. There's nothing wrong. You're just running old software. Same loop, same pattern, same habits, same beliefs, and this is very normal. This is what we do, but this is how we can update it. This is what we can change and we can do that work. It's not simple. It may not be the easiest process, and it takes time and it takes effort, but it is possible. So let me paint you a picture. You've probably done the reading and listening to all the podcasts you've journaled, you've set intentions, and maybe you've even worked with a therapist or a coach. But there's this voice, this loop, this pattern that keeps showing up. The one that says you're too much or you're not enough. The one that makes you second guess yourself right before something good is about to happen. The one that has you shrinking in rooms where you deserve to take up space. Here's what most women believe about that voice. This is just who I am, and the subtext is I can't do anything about it. But here is what I want to tell you as directly as I know how. This is not who you are. That is who your brain. I was trained to be and there is a massive difference. Your brain is not your identity. It is an organ, a very efficient, very well-intentioned organ that over decades learned to protect you by automating certain responses. It took experiences, some painful, some confusing, some just repetitive and wired them into circuits. Now those circuits fire so fast, so automatically that they feel real. They feel true, and they feel like you. They feel like your personality, your truth, your limitation, but they're not. They're patterns. And patterns can be changed. The problem, and this is the part that nobody really talks about, is that most of the tools we've been given for changing our thinking, they work at the surface level and surface level tools cannot reach deep level wiring. And this is not a character flaw. This is just the way our brain works. So let's talk about what actually works. I'm gonna walk you through five things, five real shifts, and how you approach your own mind that will save you years of spinning your wheels. And when I say years, I mean it. I mean the difference between being 55 and finally feeling free versus being 65 and still waiting to feel worthy. Of what you want and going after it. The first shift you wanna make is to stop identifying with the thought. This is foundational. Everything else builds on this. When a thought comes up, like, I'm not confident enough, I always sabotage myself. I'm too old for this. Most of us grab it and wear it like a name tag, right? Like, yes, this is me, and you will repeat this over and over again to anybody who will listen. But that is a thought and it is not a fact. It's not even yours. Not really. It's a pattern that's fired so many times. Your brain just automated it. Like muscle memory, but for self-doubt. The moment you can look at that thought and say, oh, there's that old circuit again, instead of There's the truth about me again. You break its authority over you. This saves you so much energy, so much time spent in shame spirals, so many mornings lost to believing a lie that your brain just happened to tell really convincingly. The second shift is that we need to repeat, but with feeling, and this is everything. It's not just about thinking positively. Over and over and over again. We need to believe these thoughts and we need to feel them right. it's not just repeating mantras in the mirror. Your brain wires based on emotional intensity, not just a frequency. A thought repeated in a flat disconnected state will not register, but a thought. Anchored to a real feeling, hope, relief, excitement, even grief that gets wired in fast. And this is why the worst moments of your life changed you quickly. And why repeating? I am confident in aboard. Tone in your bathroom, hasn. So the upgrade isn't more repetition. It's precision and presence in the moments when you're trying to build a new thought pattern, feel it, be it, and that's a very different practice and it works. The third shift is. Interrupting the loop. And here's something most people don't know about how negative thought patterns work. They build momentum like a wave. The longer that thought loop is running, the stronger it gets and the harder it is to redirect. And so most of us try to intervene at the peak when we're already deep in the spiral, already feeling terrible. Already convinced that the story is true, but that's like trying to stop a freight train after it's already at full speed. The skill and it is a learnable skill, is catching it early, noticing the first flicker of that familiar feeling, that slight tightening that rise in your body, that first whisper of the old story and interrupting it there. Then before it has any momentum. Now this is trainable. You can learn this, you can do this, and this is something that you can get better at. And if we think about the process of change, you're not gonna be able to do it a hundred percent of the time when you're first starting, right? You build awareness, you catch yourself once, and then you forget a couple of times, and then you catch yourself again, and then you catch yourself. Twice in a row and then you keep building. When you do this, you will save yourself hours, sometimes entire days of mental suffering that used to feel inevitable. The fourth shift is to work on the belief. We wanna rewire the belief and it's not about the behavior so much. And this one is big because this is where so many of us get stuck. We try to change our behavior through sheer willpower. We wanna white knuckle our way through, showing up differently, showing up at the gym, saying yes to the opportunity, putting ourselves at there. But underneath, the belief hasn't moved. And it takes so much energy and it just exhausts us because you're rowing in one direction while the current of your own wiring is pulling you in another. And this is why we don't succeed 'cause we just get so tired. We just give up Real change. Lasting change happens upstream. It happens at the level of belief that's producing the behavior in the first place. Ask yourself, what do I actually believe about myself that's making this behavior make sense? I'll repeat that. What do I actually believe about myself that's making this behavior make sense? Because your behaviors always make sense to your brain. They're always in service of something. It believes to be true, and when you change the belief at the root, the be, the behavior changes naturally. It doesn't feel like effort anymore. It'll start to feel like relief. Finally, the fifth shift is to make the new way your default. It's not about a discipline. And this is the goal. It's not working harder at thinking differently every single day. Again, not the white knuckling your way to a better mindset for the rest of your life. The actual goal is to wire the new patterns in so thoroughly and so deeply that it runs on autopilot the way the old one did. This becomes your new identity. This becomes the wiring in your brain. The neuro pathways are built and start to fire automatically. And when that happens, right? It confidence doesn't feel like a performance anymore. Trusting yourself doesn't feel like a daily battle. Speaking up, setting the boundary, going after the thing feels like you. And we keep building on this and building on this and building on this. And I don't believe that there is a finish line. I feel like this is the work of our lives. This is what we want to do to keep growing and evolving and to see what we're capable of and what's possible for us in our lives. But this is the work we need to do in our brain. It's not just about going out there and taking action. The action is always important. But it needs to be done along with the wiring, the mindset in our brain and the emotions. So listen, five years from now, you will be somewhere, your brain will have kept running in one direction or another, and either you will have taken this seriously. And done the work and genuinely rewired some of those circuits, or you'll still be managing, you'll still be holding yourself back and holding yourself together with a combination of effort and avoidance and occasional motivation that fades and that story that you're somehow deficient, not good enough, that there's something wrong with you, that you're doing something wrong. That's too late, that it's too old. But those are just stories. We want to change, but it's not something that we just inherently know how to do. And so we get stuck. We get stuck because we're using the wrong skills and tools and. You don't need more information. You're not lacking in motivation. It's not about the discipline. You're not too old. You're not too set in your ways. There's not some fundamental flaw. You're not do anything, but this is the method that has to be learned, and it takes the time and the effort to do the work. But understand you can change your brain at any age because that is literally what neuroplasticity means, and that change at that level of belief, wired in through precision and emotional depth and early interruption is a completely different experience than what you've been trying probably for a long, long time. So. This is the work worth doing. You are worth it. You are worthy. Let's see what we can do. Let's see what's possible for our lives in midlife. We still have a long runway or a lot of runway ahead of us. All right everybody. That is episode 1 58. Thank you so much for joining me today. I want you to stay tuned over the next week or so because I'm going to be releasing more information about some of the products and the programs that I'm gonna be offering to help you do some of this work. I believe it's so important and it is so powerful that. I want as many women to experience this as possible. You don't have to stay stuck, and if you feel like you're meant for more, it's because you are. I'll talk to you next week. Take care. Bye-bye.