Episode #4:

Sorting It Out: Thoughts Vs. Circumstances

When you get upset about something in your day-to-day life, do you stop to consider what exactly is making you upset?

I’ll give you an example. If you’re driving to work and someone cuts you off in traffic, it might make you incredibly angry. In this situation, what’s making you angry? The other driver? Or your thoughts about the other driver?

That distinction is what I want to dig into today. As humans we have the amazing ability to tell ourselves stories about our lives. But those stories aren’t always accurate reflections of reality, and our thoughts can make life a lot more frustrating and difficult than it needs to be. Thankfully, have the ability to choose better thoughts – which means we can make life a lot better with our thinking, too.

Join me in this episode as I talk all about the difference between our thoughts and circumstances and why this is a crucial third step in your transformation process – no matter what your goal is.

WHAT YOU’LL DISCOVER

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Why our thoughts are so important for determining our outcomes in life.

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The key difference between our thoughts vs our circumstances.

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How you can start to identify the thoughts you have about your circumstances.

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An exercise for sorting out the story behind the events in your life.

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Why it’s so powerful when we change our thoughts before we change our actions.

FEATURED ON THE SHOW

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Check out more episodes of the podcast here!

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast, with Dr. Susan Crockett. You are listening to episode number four, Sorting It Out: Thoughts Vs. Circumstances. This episode is dedicated to Brooke because she’s my teacher who taught me this skill.

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, where women learn to love their lives. Do you find yourself frustrated by society’s expectations? Looking for practical advice on how to discover your talents and level up your life? You’ve found the right place. Here’s your host, US News top doctor, robotic surgeon, and certified life coach, Dr. Susan Crockett.

Hello, my virtuosas. I’m your host, Dr. Susan Crocket. And you can call me Sue while we’re here on the podcast, of course, because I’m not doing surgery on you or actually being your doctor today at least I hope not. I hope you’re all doing well. And I’m really grateful to be here. And I’ve got something exciting to share with you guys today.

So, I had a really weird day, really strange circumstances. And since today we’re talking about circumstances, I thought I’d tell you about my day. So, today is Tuesday. I was scheduled to be proctoring, or teaching another surgeon how to do some robotic surgery in Austin this morning. And this was all arranged. I went through all the hassle of getting all my credentialing done with their hospital as a guest coming in and blah, blah, blah.

Well, yesterday afternoon, really late in the afternoon, I got a message that the proctoring was cancelled. So, I had already moved my surgeries from Tuesday into Wednesday, so I found myself with what looked like a blank day, nothing to do except work on my podcast.

So, I thought, that’s interesting. And then later in the day I got a call that I had a family emergency. So I thought, well, isn’t that nice that I have a day free to deal with this? And then that night, I got a call from the ER, because I cover the ER at the hospital where I work. I got a call around 11 o’clock for a woman who was bleeding and I had to go in urgently and do surgery in the middle of the night. And I got home about two o’clock and I had not even gotten into bed, my head had not hit the pillow, and the ER called again and there was another lady there with an emergency who didn’t need to be taken care of in the middle of the night but she needed to be added on for surgery the next day.

So then I was like, “Well, isn’t that interesting? I happen to have a free day to be able to do that.” So I got up this morning and went to the hospital and discharged the patient that I took care of in the middle of the night and went to go do surgery on the second lady.

And she was youngish, in her 40s, healthy except for this ovarian tumor that she had that needed taking care of. And we went to go do her surgery and she had a heart arrythmia, like out of the blue. So we cancelled her surgery or postponed it. and I went home and I actually took a nap, which is something I never do in the middle of the day. But I got a nap, then I woke up, and then I decided to do this podcast.

But here’s the interesting thing about all of this; the circumstances are the things that happen around us in our lives. So I’ve had this 24 hours of just crazy circumstances where I finally just let go and was like, “Okay God, whatever you want me to do today I’m going to do because clearly my plans are not working.

And then I was thinking about what happened in terms of this podcast. And that could have gone very differently. I’m sitting here now being able to talk with you all and able to hash this out and think about it in good terms. It was a good day. I took care of everything I needed to and it’s all good and I’m moving into the next day.

But it could have gone a different way. I could have been really upset or frustrated because of all the changes because there was all this stuff that came up. It required some flexibility and patience and I just thought, you know, the difference between me feeling good about today and me being just a mess about the last 24 hours really doesn’t have anything to do with the things that happen.

The reason I feel okay about it is because of my thoughts about what happened. It’s just the way it was supposed to be and it’s okay and cool. So, today, we’re going to talk about sorting it out; sorting out circumstances from thought, how important our thoughts are, and how we move through life. And I’m excited to get started.

So, I have a little story about a patient of mine, a young patient. I had a teenager in my office who I’m taking care of for endometriosis. She has horrible pelvic pain and we’ve been using medications to help manage her pain. And on top of her teenage hormones, she was feeling like that medication may have been contributing to some mood disturbances.

And when I say mood disturbances, I’m saying that very generously because she was dealing with rage. She just turned into somebody that she didn’t like and was having trouble with her parents and kids at school.

So, I started asking her a little bit about this and figuring out how much of this was medication and how much was other things. And she told me this story about something that happened in her school that day where the students were all standing and doing the pledge of allegiance in the morning. And there was a group of students who weren’t paying attention and they were talking and not being respectful during the pledge of allegiance.

And her response to that was just like contained rage. She got so angry and it carried through the day for her. She was still very angry about it by the time she came to see me in the office.

So, here’s what I want you all to think about as we move through this talk today; what caused her to be so angry? So, ponder that a little bit. While you do that, we’re going to talk a little bit about the overall goals for the podcast and just review a little bit.

The primary goal of the podcast is for us to learn to manage our brains so that we can live a happier healthier life with intention and on purpose. I’m going to teach you how to build a lie of abundance and connection that is aligned with your true self. I want you to be able to have a life that you truly love.

We defined, in our prior podcasts what I virtuosa is, because almost everybody when they first hear it, they go, “A virtu-what?” So just in short, a virtuosa is a woman of excellence. It’s the feminized version of the word virtuoso. And as you know, or maybe you don’t know, a virtuoso is a term used most of the time to describe an artist or a musician who has reached a level of excellence in performance; a maestro or highly skilled.

And so, when we talk about becoming a virtuosa in your own life, we’re not saying that we are that. We’re saying that that’s the goal that we want to be. So, becoming a virtuosa in your own life is the practice of wholeheartedly pursuing your life with your individual gifts and talents to the best of your ability.

So, just to recap, in the first podcast, we introduced the transformation tool, which you can download for free if you want to. You don’t have to, to be able to listen to this podcast and follow along. But if you want to work on the worksheet or want a free tool, you can download it at virtuosacoaching.com/transformation.

We’re going through this tool over the next several podcasts with a specific thing in your life that you want to change. So, this tool is useful for us to up-level our life in whatever way we want. And the really cool thing about this tool is once you learn this skill, you can practice this and use it over and over and over again.

So, this is a process that I’ve used throughout my life as I’ve gone through multiple phases of growth in my life and I’m still using it. I gave the example of me moving from not being a podcaster to being a podcaster and using the transformation tool to help take me through that.

And this is also the tool that I teach my patients. So they don’t know that I’m teaching it like this because I’m not laying it out on a worksheet for them. But what I’m teaching you here on the podcast is the exact same process that I teach my patients and help them with their own personal growth as they work through their life issues.

So, in the last two podcasts, we talked about the first and second steps of the tool; the first step being become aware of your current situation or your circumstance to find what the problem is, or what you want to change. In my case it was I was not a podcaster. In your case it may be you don’t like your weight or you want to move up in your career, you want more money, you want healthier relationships.

You may feel stuck somewhere in your circumstances, so I asked you to choose one thing that you wanted to work on, that one thing is going to be the first step; become aware of your current circumstance and define that.

The second step is to become aware of other. We call it other awareness. And what that means is that you open your eyes and you see the world around you differently, not just seeing that there are other people in it, but that there are other ways that people live, like lots of options and lots of different ways of thinking and being and becoming aware of those differences is the first step towards having a desire towards changing your own circumstance.

So, I left you with a little bit of homework in the last podcast. I asked you to look around your life this past week and observe, become aware of, “Other,” around you. And I wanted you to think about what would you be like if you were functioning at your highest virtuosa level? What would she look like? What would she be like?

And then I asked you to write down your desired outcome, your specific desired outcome for your one thing in your transformation tool. So, in my example, the podcast, the desired outcome was to become a podcaster, which look at me now…

So, on today’s show, I want you to start with that one thing that you have in mind that you want to work on improving. And today, we’re going to talk about the third step on the transformation tool which is writing down our current thoughts about how we are now, our thoughts about our current problem or situation.

And we are going to work on how we’re going to define those thoughts and sort them out. We’re going to learn to distinguish our circumstances or the things that are happening in our lives from the thoughts in our brain because, like you saw in my story about my last 24 hours, I had very little control over the circumstances around me, the things happening that I needed to take care of and I didn’t cause them to be.

But the part that I do have control over and the part that makes a difference in how things turn out most of the time is our thoughts about it, and that’s the part that we can control. Our thoughts are optional and we can learn to become aware of our thoughts and we can learn to change the thoughts to give ourselves better results in our lives.

So, we’re going to have an exercise, like we always do in the podcast. We’re going to follow the story up about my young patient and carry her story all the way through too as an example of utilizing this part of the tool. And then we’re going to help you apply this skill to your one thing that you are working on transforming about yourself.

So, just to review the seven parts of the transformation tool, the first is define the current situation or problem, the second is define your desired outcome, which is moving closer to your virtuosa self. Third is to define your current thoughts. That’s the topic for today. The fourth line is new thoughts that you want to believe but don’t quite. Those are the I-am thoughts. That’s going to be next week’s podcast.

The fifth part are ladder or bridging thoughts, which are how you get from your current thoughts to your new thoughts. Sixth part is what will you imagine you’ll be like once the new thoughts are incorporated? And the seventh part is what does that look like on a sustained basis?

So, often, during this podcast, we’ll present a quote or word of wisdom and that may come from various sources. But today, I’m choosing a proverb. And the proverb we’re going to talk about today is, “As someone thinks within herself, so she is.” The actual proverb is himself, but we’re virtuosas here, so we’re going to feminize what we’re talking about here.

So, the interesting thing about this proverb is it doesn’t say, as someone is in their surroundings so they are. It doesn’t say, as someone is in their circumstances or as they are in their biology or the biologic bodies so they are. It is, “Someone thinks within themselves, so they are.”

So, you are not a victim of your circumstances. You are not a victim of your biology. You have a choice to create your own thoughts and to become what you want to become. Now, yes, we have limitations to the physical body that we live in. For instance, I can’t just go be an NBA basketball star. That doesn’t work. I have physical limitations

But I don’t think about that like a victim. I don’t walk around going, “I can’t be an NBA basketball star so my life sucks.” I have a choice about how I think about the circumstances in my life. And so having that idea in mind that you do have a choice to create your own thoughts that do help you create the life that you want, that is what Becoming Virtuosa is.

That’s what this podcast is. It’s the process of teaching you how to move forward in your life, towards your own best self. It all begins with the awareness of your current thoughts.

So, how do we do that? So, let’s start with the story. So, in the story of the young girl, we have a story about her watching her friends during the pledge of allegiance and the story about what happened in that and her reaction to it. And we’re going to look at this story kind of like we listen to music.

In fact, the music that I picked for today’s podcast really goes really well with this because in listening to music, one of the cool things about music is learning to discriminate, learning to listen to a song, learning to be able to pick out the different voices, the different instruments, the different rhythms, learning to appreciate the different parts of hat the music is and how they all fit together.

So that discrimination is what we’re going to apply to a story. So, we’re going to use this young girl’s story. You can apply it to your own story. And we’re going to separate the circumstances from the thoughts.

So, let’s talk a little bit about what those circumstances are. Circumstances are neutral. And it’s helpful for you to think about them as they could be proven in a court of law, like they’re not something that is subjective or that people would have different opinions of. It’s the undisputable what happened.

Like, in my case of the story of me being a podcaster to not a podcaster, the circumstance is, I was not a podcaster. There’s no debating that. So, often, we think that we’re controlled by our circumstances, like the story of my teenage patient.

She had anger rage in response to the other students not paying attention during the pledge of allegiance and when I asked her what caused her anger, she told me that that circumstance caused her anger, that the fact that they weren’t paying attention to the pledge of allegiance is what caused her anger. That’s not exactly true.

Often, we think that we’re controlled by our circumstances, but really, it’s our thoughts that are going on behind the scenes that we may not even be aware of. So, thoughts are what we think about the circumstances. In her case, she was thinking they shouldn’t be doing that, they shouldn’t be acting that way it or it’s disrespectful.

But we all have our own thoughts running, our own internal monologues in our mind, that we need to become aware of. So, when I was thinking about becoming a podcaster, I had all these doubt thoughts. So, “Who am I to do this? This is scary, what will people think? This sucks,” you know. We have thoughts about our physical bodies if we’re struggling with our weight. So, it’s not the circumstance of the weight or the actual physical part of our body that is causing us our pain. It is our thoughts about it.

Remember, as someone thinks within themselves, so she is, our thoughts drive our feelings and our feelings drive our actions, and ultimately our results in life. It’s very, very important work here.

So, for our exercise, I want you to pull out two pieces of plain white paper, or lined paper. And I want you to write out a brain dump about your story, I want you to think about what your story about what’s going on in your life is and just write it all out.

Even if you’re to going to do anything with it when we’re done other than crumple it up and throw it away, just write it all down and get it out. And then, I want you to take out a second piece of paper and I what you to make two columns. And at the top, on the left column, I want you to write circumstances, and at the top of the right column, I want you to write your thoughts.

And in your story, I want you to sort out what are circumstances, which are the facts of what happened. And then, on the other side, I want you to write out, as best as you can, your thoughts about it. I’m going to give you another example, which is this example of this teenage girl.

So, the circumstances in her story are she’s a student, there are other students. They were saying the pledge of allegiance. Students were not paying attention during the pledge of allegiance. But her thoughts about that were they shouldn’t be behaving that way, they’re being disrespectful.

Remember, we’re not debating about right or wrong. We’re only defining what’s thoughts and what’s circumstances. So, some of you may say, “But they were being disrespectful. That’s a circumstance.” Not true. Them being disrespectful was a thought that my teenage patient generated in her head. Not everybody would think that way. And that’s how you can tell the difference between a circumstance and a thought.

For instance, the boys who were not paying attention didn’t have that same thought about it. they thought it was cool and they maybe thought it was fun, or maybe they didn’t have a thought about it at all. But in any case, the thought that they were being disrespectful is not a circumstance because it can be seen from different points of view, it’s not an objective fact.

So, I want you to write down your current circumstances and your thoughts, and then I want you to take the thoughts from the right-hand column and you’re going to put those down on your transformation tool under your current thoughts block. So this becomes the third step in your transformation tool worksheet.

So, what I’ve shown you today is the third step towards transforming yourself and creating a life of abundance, that life of abundance that you truly love. The third step is sorting out your thoughts about what is happening around you from your circumstances. Becoming aware of thoughts versus circumstances and sorting it out is a very, very powerful tool. It helps you see the world very differently; not just your own world, but you’ll start to notice in people around you when they’re choosing thoughts and when they’re dealing with circumstances.

So, the ending of my story with the teenager is that I had a conversation with her and we kind of went through this process and got to the end of it and I said, “Okay, so what caused you to be angry? What caused you to feel angry?” and her brain, you could just see it, it was like a slot machine in Vegas.

And all of a sudden, she got it. She was like, “My thoughts about it.” And I said, “Yeah...” And I told her, I said, “I know that you’re dealing with all these emotions and some of it is medication that we’re using to help control your pain, some of it is being a teenager and hormones. But some of it is just learning to be able to look at your brain and what’s going on and realize that you do have control over that and you can choose different thoughts.” And you could just see the tension. It was like an a-ha moment. It just kind of melted away. It was really awesome.

So, that is the end of the lesson for today. Let’s talk a little bit about the next section of the show that I love to do, which is what I’m listening and reading to. And I’d encourage you guys to share with me also what you’re listening to and reading. I love new music. I love learning new things. And you can write to me at virtuosa@virtuosacoaching.com.

So, this week, what I’m listening to is Imagine Dragons because they’re just cool. They’re awesome. The first song off their Evolve album, ironically, is called Next to You. And I love this song. It’s such a beautiful song. But it’s really technically very, very challenging. It uses one of the hardest rhythms to do in all of music, which is a two against three rhythm. And that’s kind of what gives it that really cool vibe.

And when I teach you about sorting things out in your life and your story, like sorting out the circumstances from the thoughts, I told you it was kind of like listening to music. So I’m going to teach you how to listen to this music and what I mean about the two on three, what the music starts out with is a triplet rhythm, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three…

So, the rhythm of the music behind the song is a triplet rhythm. It’s like a waltz. And then the voice comes in and the vocals for this song are on a one, two, one, two rhythm. And so, what they do is they overlay a one, two on top of a triplet.

And if you want to see how hard this is, try tapping it out on a table yourself. Try doing a triplet rhythm with one hand and a doublet, or a one, two with the other. It’s a really hard thing to do. It’s kind of like that thing about patting your head and rubbing your stomach.

So, in listening to this song that is one of the really cool things other than just the music and the voices and everything are awesome. But listening to music like this teaches us to pay attention and to discriminate. And I just love this song. It just speaks to me too.

So, what I’m reading this week is a book by Dr. Carolyne Leaf, who is a communication pathologist and cognitive neuroscientist. She wrote a book called Switch On Your Brain: The Key to Peak Happiness, Thinking, and Health. And I think that is so fitting for today’s lesson.

She is also somebody who’s passionate about helping people see the power of the mind and changing their brain and finding purpose in their life. And she does it on the very neuroscience-y side of it and I’m speaking to you from a little bit more of a practical living life side of it, but I think you’d really enjoy her book and I’d encourage you to go find it on Amazon.

So, next week, we are going to talk about our new thoughts that we want to believe but don’t quite yet. They are called our I-am thoughts, like I am beautiful or I am a podcaster. I actually am now, it’s so cool.

So, your challenge for this week is to watch the people around you and their stories. See if you can start to sort out what is true circumstance from their thoughts or what they’re thinking about those circumstances. And I want you to also consider, what thoughts are you willing to consider changing in order to become the best version of yourself? Okay, my virtuosas, that’s all I’ve got today.

To celebrate the launch of the show though, I’m going to be giving away a pair of virtuosa wireless earbuds. Each week for the first four weeks of our podcast, I’m going to be giving away one pair to a lucky listener who subscribes, rates, and reviews the show on Apple Podcasts.

It doesn’t have to have a five-star review, although I sure hope you love the show. I want your honest feedback so I can create an awesome show that provides tons of value for you. You can visit virtuosacoaching.com/podcast-launch. That’s virtuosacoaching.com/podcast-launch to learn more about the contest and how to enter.

You can also take a peek there of a picture of these beautiful ear pods that will encourage you every time you use them that you are on your way to becoming your own virtuosa. I’ll be announcing the winners on the show in an upcoming podcast.

Okay, my virtuosas, be inspired. Have a wonderful week. I will see you next week on episode five. Love always, Sue.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming Virtuosa. If you want to find out more, come check out virtuosacoaching.com. That’s virtuosa - with an A - coaching.com. See you next week.

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