I was talking with someone earlier this week about mindset work and she said, “I don’t really get ‘mindset’ stuff.”

This is a woman who does marketing for a lot of coaches and she was still not familiar with what ‘mindset’ work is and why it’s so important…

… I was thinking, if she’s not familiar, most people probably aren’t either.

So in this week’s episode, I really slow things down and share what we REALLY mean when we’re talking about mindset, why it’s important, and how to do coaching work on yourself.

I’m also sharing a lot of things people get wrong in their own self-coaching work – which leaves them feeling frustrated and stuck.

Even if you’re familiar with mindset and the coaching model I use, this will be a great episode to help you brush up on your skills!

I’ll see you inside! xo, Janeen

>> CLICK HERE to Watch on YouTube

If you’re interested in joining me for my 6-month, Becoming the CEO of Your Life Mastermind in October, APPLY HERE: janeenalley.com/breakthrough.

TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Janeen: Well, hey you guys. Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. I am Janeen, you are listening to how to become the CEO of your life today. And I know some of you who have been longtime listeners are wondering where my jaunty little intro tunes are that introduce the podcast. And I have to say, if you’ve been wondering about that, My intro is coming, not that anybody is really missing it, I’m sure, but my intro is coming.

[00:00:28] I want the marketing language to kind of settle in and I wanna get the intro just right, and so I’m giving myself time to kind of play around with a lot of things in a lot of different areas before I come back and make it very succinct intro to the podcast that’s going to be explaining what it is that we do here.

[00:00:48] But if you are brand new, I talk to women who would like to become the CEOs of their lives so that they can really reignite their passion for life and make an impact in the [00:01:00] world. And they’re usually women who are in kind of a transitional phase. They are moving from raising kids and doing littles to now having more free time and feeling like there’s a call, there’s like a mission that they want to fulfill in their lives, and they’re not exactly sure what that mission is, or they don’t have the confidence to pull it off yet. And so we talk about all those things on the podcast. So today we are talking about why mindset.

[00:01:27] What does that actually mean. I was talking with the woman who does marketing for me. Her name is Chelsea and she is amazing. If you’re looking for somebody to do marketing for you, she is absolutely phenomenal in what it is that she does. Well, after we had finished talking about my business. I was asking her about her business and she was telling me that she was afraid to get something going in her business.

[00:01:51] This is super relatable. You can, I’m sure you can relate in your own way, whatever it is that you’re working on in your own life, it’s all of the mind chatter that [00:02:00] we are all very familiar with.

[00:02:02] But when she was talking about this fear, my little coaching ears perked up, and I knew why she was feeling stuck because of the way that she was thinking about this thing that she was launching out into the world. And fear for sure keeps us playing small. It keeps us procrastinating, it keeps us avoiding, it keeps us doing all the little things that keep us busy, but not actually moving the needle forward.

[00:02:27] Right. So I circled back around to this topic of coaching. I wanted to offer a coaching session with her so that she could really move forward and put this out into the world. And she says to me, I don’t really get mindset. And I thought that was fascinating cuz this is a woman who is brilliant, who does a lot of work with a lot of coaches.

[00:02:52] I think she might only do marketing for coaches and she was still not super familiar with mindset. It kind of felt like this [00:03:00] intangible kind of thing. And she’s like, I’m not exactly sure how this works. And so I thought that was fascinating. So I actually brought my board around and I, I have to tell you, if you were just listening to this podcast on a podcast app somewhere, I wanna encourage you to actually go to my YouTube channel.

[00:03:16] I don’t really talk about my YouTube channel very much. I don’t have a lot of followers over there, but I actually video record every single episode that I do, and today might be one that’s worth watching just because I am showing a diagram of what it is that I’m talking about. I’m not sure if it’s really a diagram, but I am kind of illustrating the model here.

[00:03:36] And so if you are more of a visual learner, that might be something that you check out at some point in time when you have a second. But when you’re familiar with something like I’m familiar with coaching and the model and things that I use every day. Sometimes I forget that people aren’t as familiar or they’re not as well versed as somebody else who’s a coach or somebody else who I’ve been coaching [00:04:00] for a really long time, and I forget sometimes to slow myself down and really explain.

[00:04:04] I sometimes go through these concepts pretty quickly on the podcast, and so what I wanted to do today was to really slow everything down. Really explain what is mindset and why is it so important, and introduce you to the coaching model that I use to coach myself and to coach my clients. So like I said, if you’re listening to this, it might be a good idea for you to go watch

[00:04:28] on YouTube if you want to. So just go ahead and find my channel over there on YouTube. You can find the podcast. YouTube actually has podcasts. I know some of you don’t really realize that, but YouTube actually has podcasts and their video podcasts, but they’re over there and this show is on there. So no matter how familiar you are with the model, I know some of my current clients are tuning in today.

[00:04:51] I want to encourage you to stick around because anytime I go to coach trainings or anytime that there’s like an intensive that I’m, [00:05:00] that I am at, we always start with the model, and even when I do trainings with my clients, like kind of more of these intensives, like the wellness retreat that’s coming up in September, I always start with the model.

[00:05:10] By the way, if you guys wanna join me for the wellness retreat in September with me at my house, I would love for you to come and be with me. So if you are interested, reach out to me. You can find me on social media, you can send me a dm, you can contact me off of my website. Anything, just reach out and I will connect with you.

[00:05:29] But we start with the model because this is kind of the foundation or the basic understanding of coaching and paying attention to our thoughts and seeing how our thoughts get us results. So that is what mindset is. It’s paying attention to what it is that you’re thinking, noticing how your thoughts are generating results in your life, and this is why this is so important because once you start to see how this [00:06:00] plays out in your life, You start to see how powerful you are in your own life to create results that get you really, really excited. Results that you think are not available or achievable for you right now.

[00:06:15] So your thoughts are something that you definitely have control over and you can get more control over your thoughts the more you practice becoming aware of what it is that you’re thinking. The more aware that we are of what we’re thinking, the more we can consciously direct those thoughts to think on purpose, to get what it is that you want. Or even avoid what it is that you don’t want, which is also really powerful.

[00:06:42] So this coaching model that I keep alluding to, I’ve got this kind of broken down right here. I’m actually gonna switch back to my Zoom screen super fast because I wanna make sure that y’all can see this. Okay. So this is the model. This is the coaching model that I use, and you can see here that there are five different elements to the model.[00:07:00]

[00:07:00] Okay? We know that from the model that circumstances generate thoughts. We think certain things based off of the circumstances that we’re living in, and these thoughts generate emotions that we feel, and actions that we take and results that we get in our lives. So I’m gonna actually go through each one of these pieces because I’m gonna talk to you about

[00:07:22] what some of these things are and what they are not, because that’s really key. A lot of people get some of these steps mixed up. Um, particularly the first two, which I’m gonna share with you right now. Okay, so let’s start with circumstances. Circumstances are experiences that we have or things that we witness that we could deem factual. Okay? So oftentimes what happens is our circumstances get confused with our thoughts because our thoughts feel really true to us because they’re things that we’re believing.

[00:07:52] But circumstances you wanna remember are facts. So let me give you an example of this, okay? If I told you she [00:08:00] was so mad, Do you think that that would be a circumstance or do you think that that would be a thought? She was so mad. It’s actually my thought about her, right. This actually happens quite a bit with my kids, where I’m like, okay, calm down.

[00:08:14] You don’t have to be so mad. This is what I tell them. And they’re like, I’m not mad. Okay. So , the way that they’re talking to me I’m interpreting that as they are mad. So if I get it wrong, then I’m totally fine. Like, okay, I’m, that’s fine. You don’t, you’re not mad, but just let’s just talk about how you’re feeling right now.

[00:08:30] I was feeling so frustrated. They’ll tell me or something. Something like that. Okay. So what I could say as a circumstance was she told me she was mad, or she told me she was frustrated. Okay. Words that other people say are facts. The words that we say are also facts. Okay? So that would be an example of a circumstance.

[00:08:50] Here’s another one I have so much to do is actually a thought. Oftentimes, we think this is our circumstance. I have so much to do, but that is our [00:09:00] thought about the things that we have on our list. The list itself is actually the circumstance. Okay?

[00:09:07] You wanna get really clear on what your circumstances are. They are facts. Okay. So that moves us into the thought line. And the reason why this is so important to understand about the model is because our circumstances are often outside of our control. They’re things that we would take quite a bit of effort to change, like our job or where we live or how many kids we have.

[00:09:31] Like all those things are gonna be circumstances, right? And then we have thoughts about those circumstances. And the best news that I can tell you today is you can change your results in your life without changing your circumstances, and most of the time that’s what we need to do. We need to change our thoughts.

[00:09:48] We need to move from a disempowered state to an empowered state just by changing the way that we’re thinking about something. So thoughts that we have are our beliefs and they are [00:10:00] not factual. Okay. When you’re doing a model, you can write out a sentence here of what it is that you’re thinking, and the best way that I can tell you to get your thoughts,

[00:10:09] because our thoughts happen so fast, they’re moving through our brain so rapidly it’s hard for us to sometimes catch the thoughts. So the best way that I can tell you to catch thoughts is to just write down your story. Let’s say yesterday you went out for a bike ride and you got in a bike accident.

[00:10:25] Okay, so there’s, you’re gonna be kind of sprinkling in facts with your thoughts, right? Your circumstances with the thoughts that you have about that. You might end up thinking to yourself, I am never getting on a bike again.

[00:10:37] That is your thought, right? But you’re sometimes it’s hard to catch those things unless you write the story out. And I do have to tell you, after doing thousands of thought downloads for myself and also my clients, most of the time the things that we’re putting on paper are thoughts. That is the tricky part.

[00:10:53] Okay? We think they’re true because we’re believing it. But you wanna be asking yourself, would everybody believe this? [00:11:00] What if this was not true? Is it possible that they could not be true? If you start asking yourself questions like that, sometimes you are able to identify thoughts versus facts. Okay, another little key here with the thought line is you wanna keep your thought line a statement.

[00:11:15] You don’t wanna put a question in there. So if you’re asking yourself something like, why is this happening to me? That is a thought that you’re having, but instead, I want you to change that into a statement. I can’t believe this is happening to me, or something along those lines. Like I said, most people really struggle to differentiate between circumstances and thoughts.

[00:11:35] These are things that people get mixed up, and as a coach, I’m able to see people’s thoughts a lot more clearly than they can. This is actually why I have a coach. It’s because it’s really tricky to see our thoughts for what they are, which are something that is subjective and something that is optional.

[00:11:54] Okay, so when you’re trying to see your own thoughts, one of the things that I tell my clients all the time, it’s like you’re on the inside of a bottle [00:12:00] trying to read the label on the outside. And so this is why a lot of coaches have their own coaches because it’s so easy for us to see other people’s thoughts, but it’s still tricky for people to find their own thoughts because like I said, they feel so true.

[00:12:17] They feel like facts because we are believing them. So that’s the key thing there, the differentiation between circumstances and thoughts. Okay. The next line, I told you, your thoughts are gonna generate an emotion, right? So one of the things that I like to keep in mind when I’m doing my own models here is I wanna keep my models super clean.

[00:12:38] So, So I have one thought, one statement or one sentence on that line, and then I get crystal clear on what my emotion is. Sometimes I have more than one emotion, but if you have more than one emotion and definitely more than one thought, you’re gonna have more than one model. Okay? So keep your feelings super clean.

[00:12:57] Your feeling is going to be an adjective, like [00:13:00] scared or worried, or happy. You know, those all could be feelings that go on your F line on your model. And you wanna remember that your emotions are just energetic vibrations that we have in our bodies. So you want to drop into your body and you wanna feel.

[00:13:19] So name the emotion. You can even describe the emotion if you’d like to. Sometimes that’s one of the coaching tactics that I have with my clients is I slow them down and we just practice feeling whatever it is that they’re trying to resist. So, People make mistakes with feelings when I ask them, okay, so how does that, how does that feel when you think that way?

[00:13:39] And they’ll give me another thought download. They’ll tell me more about their thoughts. They’re staying cerebral instead of getting into their bodies and describing what that emotion is. Okay, so emotions are gonna generate actions. They are things that we are doing or not doing, and I like to put a lot of verbs [00:14:00] in this action line.

[00:14:01] So you wanna stay with the model. One of the things that I want you to understand is we’re always living in more than one model at a time. And so it’s easy to put different actions in a model that you’re not currently working on, they’re like outside actions that you wanna include in your model.

[00:14:18] So when you’re working your model, you wanna stay right here. You wanna keep this super clean and super tight. So your circumstances generate thought, which generate an emotion, which generate actions or inactions. So you could be thinking to yourself, I have so much to do. And you’re feeling stressed about that, or you’re feeling overwhelmed again, pick one emotion.

[00:14:39] I have so much to do. I’m just gonna stick with stress. If I’m stressed out in this model, I’m gonna be procrastinating. I’m gonna be eating, I’m gonna be buffering my emotions. I’m not sleeping well. I’m spinning. I’m stewing in my brain. I’m finding all kinds of things to do. I’m not focused and I’m not connecting with other people, [00:15:00] so that’s what I could put down on my action line.

[00:15:02] There’s a lot of things that could go in a model on your, we call it your a line or your action line. Okay. And then of course, actions are gonna drive your results. What results are you getting from your thought in your model? I have so much to do and I’m not getting to any of it. That’s gonna be the result.

[00:15:21] You’ll have so much to do, but I’m not getting to any of it because I’m stressed and I’m doing these things. I’m procrastinating, I’m eating, or I’m buffering. I’m on my phone. I’m not sleeping well, I’m spinning. I’m stewing in my brain and I’m finding all kinds of other things to do. So of course, I’m not getting to the thing that’s on my list for the day.

[00:15:41] Okay. The result that I have is I’m not getting to any of it. Things start piling up. I’m feeling overwhelmed and I’m not enjoying my life because things are looming. Okay? That is all part of your result line. Okay? So one of the tips that I have with analyzing and, and just watching your result here is you wanna keep other [00:16:00] people out of your result line.

[00:16:01] This is particularly important when you’re doing models about your relationships with other people. This happens all the time when I take a look at my client’s models, they’ll have their husband in their result line, or they’ll have their kids in the result line, and other people are not your results.

[00:16:18] So you wanna make sure that your result line has everything to do with you because that is what you have control over. It’s really hard for us to control all the rest of the people, right. Okay, so I’ve given you quite a bit about the model. Again, if you need to go back and watch this video. The model is a brilliant tool.

[00:16:38] It is simple and it is also super powerful. I’ve kind of taken you surface level on the model. Hopefully you’ve been able to stay with me on some of these examples, but you can start anywhere on the model and you can fill in the rest. So you can start at the top like we just did, talking about circumstances and then thoughts, and then on down the model, or you can start at the bottom.

[00:16:59] You can actually [00:17:00] start with the result that you’re currently getting and you can think about what are you doing and how are you feeling, and what are you thinking? So. And what is your circumstance? Or you can start somewhere in the middle. Oftentimes when I’m coaching a client, I’m just listening for emotions or thoughts.

[00:17:17] That’s usually where we start. And then I will go in either direction from there to get an entire model. Sometimes I’ll share that model with them, and other times I’ll just keep it to myself. But as a coach, what’s important for me to do is to show people what their thought is, what their belief is about themselves.

[00:17:39] My job is not to change their thoughts. It’s not to change their mind. It’s not to change their circumstance. It’s only to show them what it is that they’re thinking and how that is getting them a specific result in their lives. Now the model is, like I said, it’s really simple, but it’s also there’s layers of nuance with the [00:18:00] model as well.

[00:18:00] Sometimes we can put emotions or thoughts on different lines, depending, like if we’re already feeling overwhelmed. Sometimes we have thoughts or we have judgments about those feelings, and so we can actually put an emotion on our C Line. Okay? I have actually put worry probably on every line of the model.

[00:18:19] I’ve made it a circumstance. I am worried as a thought, right? I’ve put it for sure on my feeling line. I worry, and so that can also go on my aline, and then I’m worried. Can go on my result line, so you can kind of see how you can move things around to just show you what it is that you’re thinking and how you’re getting results from your experience of being a human being.

[00:18:44] So now I wanna talk about the biggest mistakes that people make. Okay. The biggest mistakes that people make when they understand the model and they know that they have control over their thought and their emotion and their action and their result. These are things that we have control over, and like I mentioned [00:19:00] in the very beginning of the podcast, this is the best news ever because you can see, if you don’t like a result, you need to start believing a different thought.

[00:19:10] Okay. That’s hard to do, to change your thoughts, particularly these thoughts that we have on autopilot or kind of default mode, and we just think, well, this is just the way that it is. When so often it’s not the way that it is, you’re just believing that to be true. So it feels that way. Okay. So the best news is, is once you understand this, you’re just like, oh, okay.

[00:19:30] So I can just think any thought that I want to and get a different result. What people do is they try to get themselves into an empowering thought too soon. They haven’t processed their current model or their current thought and emotion all the way through.

[00:19:45] They haven’t taken the time to really explore what it is they’re experiencing. They’re in a hurry to change. They wanna get a result that they want, and they are resisting their current thoughts and emotions. Well, what [00:20:00] happens when we resist? It’s like we pour gasoline on a fire.

[00:20:04] Right? One of the things that I had one of my clients tell me at one point was, the emotion will go down to the basement and it will start lifting weights. That’s exactly what it is that happens, right? If we’re feeling really anxious and we’re just like, okay, I don’t wanna feel anxious today. So I’m gonna try and feel more calm, or I’m gonna try and feel more confident about something and we haven’t processed anxious all the way through.

[00:20:26] Guess what? That anxiety starts to ramp up. It’s like, listen to me. You have not processed this emotion all the way through. Okay? So I was actually on the phone with one of my one-on-one clients the other day. And she was trying to practice a new thought. So it was funny because she was almost like marching her around her house, chanting the new thought, kind of like a mantra, and feeling so frustrated that things weren’t changing. Her mind and her emotions were still in this, we call ’em the unintentional model or the model

[00:20:55] that’s kind of our default model that we wanna move away from. But she hadn’t processed that model, so she was like [00:21:00] chanting something that she wasn’t ready to believe yet. So when we do this, we’re using our conscious mind to try and manipulate or force the subconscious. It doesn’t work like that. It’s like trying to convince a two-year-old to do something that they don’t want to do.

[00:21:14] We wanna spend some time exploring our models and what our thoughts are and what our emotions are. We wanna take the time to really process. Because truth be told Emotions are neutral.

[00:21:24] And I know some of them are really intense and they’re painful sometimes, but they’re just energetic vibrations that we feel in our body. And anytime we’re trying to squash down emotions, they flare up and they become even more of a difficulty or more of an obstacle for us. So you wanna get to this place of curiosity and compassion and non-judgment when you’re paying attention to your models.

[00:21:50] As somebody who teaches yoga and meditation, this is something that I practice with my students. All we’re doing is just focusing in on the breath without judgment. It is [00:22:00] amazing to me how much I used to judge myself.

[00:22:04] I still do it from time to time, but I’m much better at catching that conversation. And when I started meditating, I noticed how much I was judging the way that I breathe. And like your breath is too shallow. You need to pull it down into your belly a little bit more. There’s something wrong. You’re feeling tight.

[00:22:20] Why are you feeling tight? And I would judge tension and I would judge my shallow breath and I would think to myself, I’m not doing this right. Okay. We need to let all of that go. And so we can even watch the judgment as we’re judging ourselves in whatever emotion or whatever thought that we’re thinking without being in a hurry to change.

[00:22:44] That’s the trick. One of the things that I remind myself and my clients all the time is that this life is not about being happy all the time.

[00:22:53] That’s not what we’re here to do. Emotions can feel so difficult and so deep [00:23:00] and so painful that we wanna run away from them, but what I do is I help my clients process and feel emotions so that I can move them out of a reactive state so that they can become more empowered. Like I said, my job as a coach is to show people their thoughts are getting results.

[00:23:17] It’s up to them whether or not they wanna change. It’s a very empowering experience for people. Thoughts and emotions and circumstances are neutral to me when I’m coaching. Someone might feel humiliated or super frustrated, or they might be grieving, and my job is just to hold space for them to have a human experience. This might seem kind of callous, but this is what people pay me to do.

[00:23:42] They don’t pay me to be their friend. They have lots of friends. They pay me to help them get their power back. I help them to see why it is that they’re stuck and sometimes, I help them choose a new thought. Most of the time they find one on their own. Sometimes I [00:24:00] encourage them to sit with a thought and emotion for a little while

[00:24:03] because they’re not ready to move on. Either way, it’s fine. Whether they move on or they stay in their current model. So there is a difference between understanding concepts and understanding this mindset work that I’m talking about and really applying the information.

[00:24:21] So I’m going through this and you’re probably like, okay, yeah, that makes sense to me, and then you’re gonna try and coach yourself and then you’re gonna feel really stuck. The best way to do this and to really understand this is to work with a coach who is trained to coach using the model.

[00:24:38] Coaches can help you see what’s going on in your brain so much faster than you can, and oftentimes just working with a coach and the delivery of their material is going to help you get where you wanna go much faster than you could on your own.

[00:24:53] I wanna encourage you to find a coach that you like and specializes in what it is that you need help with. Whether it’s an addiction or whether it’s weight [00:25:00] loss, or whether it’s a faith crisis, or relationships there is a coach out there for you. I am so impressed sometimes when I listen to coaches and I’m like, man, that is such a phenomenal

[00:25:10] market or a way to help people. And so, I promise you, whatever it is that you’re stuck with right now, there is a coach to help you through that. So if you are a woman who is interested in becoming the c e o of your life, I am the coach for you so that you can accomplish a really big dream or a goal or a mission that you feel called to fulfill in you’re life.

[00:25:31] That is totally my gig. I love it. I love helping people with this. I help people get really clear on their dream so that they can clarify what it is that this next phase of life is encouraging them to step into whatever that looks like. I also help women to put specific systems in place to help them get there without burning themselves out.

[00:25:54] I help them find the freedom to do the things that matter most. I’m amazing at time management and [00:26:00] systems, and I help women to build the confidence and belief in themselves to make it happen through coaching them. So if you want to join me for this mastermind that I’m putting together in October, I would love for you to be with me.

[00:26:14] There is magic when you’re in a room full of people who have similar passions and similar goals and ideas that you can kind of bounce off of each other and help to build one another up. So there is magic in that. Also, with that program, you get one-on-one specific help working with me. So I am super excited to be rolling this out and rolling this forward.

[00:26:38] If you are interested in joining me for that, go to janeenalley.com/breakthrough. There is a brief survey there. We will hop on a call and I will help you to get where you’d like to go, whether it’s working with me or working with somebody else. All right, my friends. Have a beautiful rest of your day today.

[00:26:55] I hope this was a helpful episode for you. We will catch [00:27:00] y’all next week. See ya. Bye.