Today, I just needed a nap.

 

It’s been a whirlwind week. I went to Asheville with my daughter to a church women’s retreat. It was her first retreat and we enjoyed the mountains, catching up with old friends and meeting new ones, and just spending time together. It was such a good experience with my big girl, I came back and called my own mom.

But when you travel all weekend and hit the ground running at work first thing Monday morning, it can feel like you never stopped moving! And that’s how the week has been – nonstop, busy, lots of activity, and very little down time. So when I planned my day off, a nap was definitely on the list!

The funny thing is that I’m not so sure that all the busyness is really the source of my fatigue. Even though I’ve been running, I’ve been sleeping well, getting some yoga in most days, and I’ve been loving all the patients I’ve seen in the office. It’s been a good week. More than the activity, my brain is tired. Why? Let me catch you up…

 

 

Lately I’ve been following a couple of coaching podcasts, studying and learning from a couple of master coaches who teach a lot about mind management. Ideally, when you listen to a podcast on a coaching topic, you spend some time practicing the concepts before moving on to the next one. But since I was excited about the concepts and was in the car for about 7 hours altogether, I sort of binge listened. The only thing that saved my brain from complete meltdown was that many of the concepts aren’t new to me and I was already practicing some of them. Still, it was a lot.

 

 

There was one concept that I learned that changed the tone of my week. I’ve had heavy and busy weeks just like this in the past and just barely dragged myself through to the end. This concept made all the difference, and while it builds on other concepts, I’m going to share the idea with you so that you can try it out for yourself.

Here’s the basic framework from Brooke Castillo at the Life Coach School: All the results in your life start far earlier than when you do the thing that gets the results. Actually, everything that happens in your life stems from the thoughts you have about the circumstances you face. Circumstances are the neutral facts in your life – they are not going to change depending on who is looking at them. Circumstances are not, “My husband is so thoughtless because he didn’t make his side of the bed this morning.” The circumstances are that he didn’t make his side of the bed this morning. Your thought about it is that he’s thoughtless. The next part of the thought model is the feelings that come from the thought you had. How does the thought that your husband is thoughtless make you feel? Then based on that feeling, you will take some sort of action – complaining, yelling, criticizing, sulking, ignoring, being resentful, or whatever you choose. The result you get will come from the action you take. But really, the result you get originated from the thought you had about your circumstance.

Here comes the concept that helped me. When I was listening to Brooke run though one of the thought model examples on the podcast, she asked one simple question: How do you want to feel? That one question stopped me in my tracks. So often, I’m hurt or angry or disappointed or aggravated or frustrated and I think that it’s because of what’s happening – the circumstances. So I feel what I do because of what’s happening to me, which I have no control over. Then I feel powerless and subject to the situation. The truth is that I feel what I do because of how I think about the circumstances. Now, I can hear you arguing with that idea, “No, sometimes he does stuff that really is inconsiderate or thoughtless. That’s just fact!” But is it? If any other person on the planet wouldn’t think that way, it’s not fact. What if you were the kind of wife who didn’t care if the bed was made up in the morning? It’s all how you think about it.

 

Nah, I don’t like it...

 

That’s really good news, because now you are in control of how you feel about your circumstances. Now don’t get me wrong, you may not like the circumstances. You can always express what you think and make requests of anyone. What they do about it isn’t for you to control. Where you do have control is over what thoughts you choose to entertain. That’s where the power lies. When I realized that if I didn’t like feeling angry and irritated, and that I could go back to how I was thinking about them and change my thoughts, that was the magic. I didn’t have to be annoyed by the errors in my schedule at work. I didn’t have to be irritated that the dishes were left in the sink again. If I wanted to feel peaceful, I could choose to think that my day was going to go smoothly, that I enjoy my patients and my nurses, that I have a good job and I’m honored that people choose to come see me year after year. I can choose to believe that the dishes are in the sink because I’m not the only one who’s busy, and I rather not get upset and make it a big deal because I feel better when I don’t.

 

What am I making this mean?

 

Now don’t get me wrong: This isn’t a matter of thinking yourself into sunshine and rainbows. I’m not asking you to manufacture thoughts you don’t really believe, because that’s not going to work. Your brain will make sure you don’t hold on to those thoughts. But if you feel a way that you’d rather not, you can ask yourself how you’d like to feel and see if you can capture the thought that led you to the feeling you’re having. Then ask yourself if there’s a different but believable way you could think about the circumstances. You’ll be surprised at how you can change how you’re feeling even when the only thing that you change is your thinking. It sure did change my week!

 

Did you know that your feelings come from your thoughts? Try asking yourself how you want to feel when you meet circumstances in your week and see what happens. Tell me about what you learn in the comments below!