Episode #6:

Ladders and Bridges

I’m so excited for this week’s step in the transformation process because it’s my favorite one! As a coach and as a surgeon, I love the “how” of things. And in this step, we get to dig into the “how” of shifting our thoughts and moving from where we are to where we’d like to be.

Today we’re talking all about ladder and bridging thoughts, and there is a slight but important difference between them. Ladder thoughts are sequential and build on top of each other. We can use these to move step by small step toward our goal. Bridging thoughts are active thoughts, usually using words ending in “-ing”, that remind us that we are progressing steadily toward our goal.

In this episode you’ll learn how to use both of these thought tools to get closer to your virtuosa self. You can use ladder and bridging thoughts no matter where you are in your process of transformation, and I’ll share some examples of how to apply them in this episode, too. After you listen, I want you to come up with some ladder and bridging thoughts for your own virtuosa goal.

WHAT YOU’LL DISCOVER

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What ladder and bridging thoughts are and how they work.

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How we can move from our current thoughts to the thoughts we’d like to think.

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An example of how ladder thoughts can help us think differently about our bodies.

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How bridging thoughts can remind us that we are constantly learning, growing, and transforming.

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Why it is a gradual, daily, and sometimes painful process to transform into the next version of ourselves.

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 six, Ladders and Bridges. This episode is dedicated to Starley, because she asked me this past week how to get there from here.

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 and my VITs, virtuosas in training. Isn’t that cute? One of my friends posted on my timeline this week that she was a virtuosa in training and I just thought that was awesome. So I’m going to use that from now on. I’m your host, Dr. Susan Crockett.

I am a physician but on the show here, you can call me Sue because I’m not actually being your doctor. So here it’s girl talk. Get yourself a cup of coffee, put your feet up, and let’s have a little chat. So it is a little bit past 7am and I’m sitting here with my little dog Ollie curled up behind me on my chair like he usually is.

He wasn’t so quiet a couple minutes ago. He always greets me as I come in the door and he jumps into my arms and kisses my face and is always so happy to see me. It makes me so happy. So what was he doing welcoming me coming in the door at 7am, you might ask? Funny you should ask.

So I was up this morning at 4am doing a surgery for a patient that had an emergency ruptured ectopic pregnancy. So as cool as that is to be able to go in and take care of somebody like that, it’s kind of disruptive on what I was planning on doing this morning, so we’re rolling with the punches.

I also wanted to take this as an opportunity to give a shout-out to my OR team. So I get up, take care of one case, but my OR team, the scrub techs, the anesthesiologists, the circulators, the pre-op, the post-op people, they had all been there all night long saving lives. They were doing emergency surgeries all night long last night, and they just do not get enough credit.

So here’s my shout-out guys, at Northeast Methodist, y’all rock. Thank you. Alright, let’s get on with the show.

Today, we’re talking about one of my favorite topics. This is so exciting. This is going to be my best podcast ever. So we’re talking about ladders and bridges. Ladder thoughts and bridge thoughts.

The reason this is one of my favorite things to talk about is I am all about the how. So I love to fix things. As a surgeon, I have a mindset where there’s a problem, you go in and fix it and you move on. And I find that really satisfying and really fun. As a life coach, it’s not always that great.

So some of you know I certified as a life coach through The Life Coach School last year, and as part of our training, we have to go through these practices where they listen to us do coaching and we have to do it in a specific way. And one of the things that we’re trained to do is to - I mean, the basic premise is we’re trained to help people see their thoughts and their brains and to adjust their thinking.

And one of the things that is required is that you have the patience to sit there and let them take the time to let what they’re thinking and feeling and doing actually sink in. And I had the hardest time with that because I just want to move on to like, okay, we figured that out, now let’s fix it. How do we fix it?

So I had to learn to be more patient and kind of rest in that and learn a different way of thinking and being as a physician, which is a good thing. But the how is still my favorite thing. So today we get to talk about my favorite thing, which is the how you get from where you don’t want to be or the thoughts that you’re currently thinking, to where you do want to be, the I am or the virtuosa thoughts.

So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. And the way this came about is I had a meeting with my friend Starley this week. So much fun to be able to dedicate a podcast to a friend, right? I love that. So my friend Starley is helping me with developing my marketing and stuff. She’s amazing.

But she was talking to me about an interview that she had done earlier in the week where the person she was interviewing was this very accomplished person who you would think would have a lot of self-confidence and self-care and in fact, they didn’t. And we started talking about how a lot of times, we, especially as women, take care of everybody else. We sacrifice ourselves. We don’t always put our self and our own priorities first.

We’re taught that that’s selfish or inconsiderate or whatever. As women, we’re told so many things. So her question to me was how do we give ourselves permission to take care of ourselves, to love ourselves, and have self-compassion? How do we learn to appreciate ourselves and our bodies for the talents and the skills that we have?

And so the how, how we get there is what we’re going to talk about today. Now, in case you’re just tuning in, we’re actually in the middle of a series. This is the fifth step in a series of something that I call the transformation tool, and if you go to my website called virtuosacoaching.com and you go to virtuosacoaching.com/transformation, you can actually download the PDF file where you can fill in the blanks and this is a tool that you can use over and over in your life to help you manage your thoughts and look at your thoughts and where you want to go in developing yourself for growth.

You don’t have to do that, but that’s where we are, and if you want to catch up, if you’re just starting with this podcast, you can go back and listen to the other podcasts but I’m not going to review everything in detail today. So in today’s show, just like all of my shows, we’re going to have a little lesson and then there will be an exercise.

We’re going to talk a little bit about how ladder and bridge thoughts show up in our own story that we’re telling about ourselves, and we’re going to help you apply this to the one thing that you’re working on transforming about yourself as you become your virtuosa self.

So let’s just talk about what ladder thoughts and bridge thoughts are. So if you have a thought that you’re in one place, say, let’s just take something that’s pretty neutral and pretty universal, very common, which would be struggling with weight. Struggling with being overweight.

So this is something I see in my office all the time. Women coming in, not happy with their bodies and their weight. So that’s the circumstance that you’re dealing with, the thoughts you may have, or a lot of times we see patients that have thoughts about disliking their bodies or not being able to love their bodies or themselves.

And a lot of times, the problems with overeating stem from those thoughts, so we can go through all kinds of diets and lose the weight, but the reason it doesn’t stay off is because the thought pattern about how we think about ourselves hasn’t changed. So if we want to change those thoughts, we have to think about what we want to be, the I am thoughts, the virtuosa thoughts.

So if we want to think I am a strong and healthy body, or I am a strong and healthy weight, but we don’t really believe those thoughts yet, we have to get some thoughts in between the where we are now, where we don’t like ourselves very much, to where we want to be.

So ladder and bridge thoughts are two different ways to do that. Ladder thoughts are sequential thoughts. So ladder thoughts start and build on each other. For instance, if you don’t believe that you have a strong and healthy body, because all you see when you look in the mirror is the parts of the body that you don’t appreciate or don’t like, the first thought that you can believe is the first rung on the ladder.

And sometimes, that starts with something as basic as just, “I have a body.” So we move from I dislike my body, or I dislike a part of my body, to just I have a body. And we neutralize that. And then we practice that thought. We go about thinking that thought over a time. And once we are able to inhabit that thought, then we choose the next rung on the ladder.

The next ladder thought, which may be, “I have a body that moves well, or I have a body that can tolerate a level of exercise, or I have a body that can do things that other people can’t.” There’s lots of people that can’t walk or can’t run because their bladder leaks or whatever it is that you’re dealing with.

So the next rung on your ladder may be, “I have a body that can function in a way that is beneficial to me.” And we inhabit that for a little bit and we focus on that in a very neutral, non-judgmental way. And then we choose another rung on the ladder, like start to think about maybe there’s some wonderful things or beautiful things about that body part or that body that you’re having trouble with, until we get to the point where you can actually inhabit the final goal, which is the I am a healthy and strong body.

That would be an example of a thought ladder and bridging thoughts are a little bit different. Bridging thoughts don’t build on each other like that. Bridging thoughts are often action words or -ing words. Actually, the title of this podcast is a bridging thought or a bridge thought.

So the example of becoming virtuosa, you can say, “I am becoming virtuosa.” So if you want to move from the level at which you’re functioning to the higher level, or your virtuosa self, and you don’t quite believe that you are that virtuosa self yet, then you can use an -ing word in the middle like I am becoming that, or I am learning how to be that, or I can do hard things, or I’m confident that I can choose good choices, I am learning to choose good choices, or I am moving in the right direction.

So those are bridge thoughts. Usually, in this podcast, we have a segment at the end of the podcast that talks about my favorite things that I’m listening to and my favorite books. Some of the time, I like to use music to illustrate the lesson of the day, and this is one of those really cool days.

So the music that I chose for this podcast is called Forever Country, Artists of Then, Now, and Forever. It is actually a song that you can look up on YouTube. There’s a video. It was made by about 30 CMA award-winning artists in celebration of the 50th annual CMA awards, I believe in 2016.

So the interesting thing about this song is it’s actually three songs and it starts with John Denver’s Country Roads, and then it ends with Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You, and in the middle, there’s Willie Nelson’s On the Road Again. So the difference between this song and a medley is that a medley would be a piece of music where a whole bunch of songs were put back to back to each other, so one after another.

But this song doesn’t. This one transitions much in the way that a bridge thought or a ladder thought works. It’s so cool. So it’s based on a one-four-five chord progression, which you don’t have to technically know what that is, but it is a chord progression that takes a lot of grief sometimes for musicians because it’s very simple, very basic.

Like I think about 80% to 85% of our hymns, or rock music, our pop music, country music is founded on these three chords. You find the main chord of the song, you go to the fourth progression, the fifth progression. So when you’re listening to music, you may not even know it, but this one-four-five is kind of a thread that connects a lot of music.

And that’s why this transformational song works. So what they’ve actually done is started with the twangity-twang-twang of the Country Roads song in one-four-five, and then they’ve overlapped I Will Always Love You and On the Road Again and then in the last minute before the end of the song, they’ve actually got all three of those songs overlapped on each other, and then it ends with the beautiful classic Dolly Parton I Will Always Love You.

So I think this is amazing how we get from twangity-twang Country Roads to the soaring vocal, sweet, beautiful Dolly Parton voice that is so similar to how we go from having our thoughts that we’re starting with to the thoughts that we want to end with. And this mish-mash in the middle of it is often what happens when we start on a transformational process.

Like, it is almost never a straight line. And we have the theme of ourselves moving through it. We have our theme of our self, no matter where these thoughts are, but it is not a straight line. It’s often a mish-mash. I like to give the example of Star Trek.

So the transporter, like, beam me up, Scotty. You get all mish-mashed and fade in and out a little bit and in fact, a lot of times when I’m coaching with my coach and I’m working from going from one set of thoughts to a newer set of thoughts, I tell her that it feels like I’m shifting back and forth, like I’m caught in that transporter and I’m not quite in either place.

The other example is a butterfly. So a caterpillar going to a butterfly when they’re in the chrysalis, it’s not linear. They don’t go from being a caterpillar to sprouting wings. They actually go from being a caterpillar to being a mash of DNA, just completely deconstructed, and then god puts it all back together and this beautiful butterfly emerges.

And that’s how we are when we are transforming, being transformed from glory to glory, into the image of our better selves that are more aligned with god. So back to this Forever Country song. So if you listen to this song, and I encourage you to go look at it on YouTube, what you’ll see is this mish-mash again of starting with one theme, or one song, using the thread of the one-four-five chord progression and ending up in the other place.

So back to my conversation with Starley. So we’re talking about how do you give yourself permission to love yourself and have self-care or self-confidence in yourself, and my answer to her initially was, “Well, you just do. It happens in an instant.” And she was kind of taken aback a little bit and looked at me and then she’s like, “Well yeah, but it takes time too. It happens in an instant but then inhabiting that decision takes time.”

And I said, “Yes, it is a gradual transformation. It is a gradual practice every day of choosing where you want to be, practicing your newer thoughts and your way of being, and it’s not always difficult.”

Sometimes this is really painful. Learning to have new habits to not overeat or overdrink or smoke or learning to be financially secure with your money, or confident in yourself to be able to manage your money or your business or your life or have confidence in yourself as a woman, those things take time, just like the caterpillar going through the chrysalis, just like this transformation in the Forever Country song, just like Star Trek beaming us up.

So in fact, when we think about going through this transformation, we want to think about it being so great on the other side, like when I get to the end of it, it’s going to be awesome, but in between where we are and where we want to be, I have a friend who calls this the river of misery.

So one thing we can think of is that we’re building a ladder or a bridge to take us across the river of misery. And sometimes, that really takes a long time. Like, I’ve seen people who made a decision to quit smoking, especially when they had a strong motivator, like a pregnancy, and they just make the decision to quit smoking and they never smoked again in their whole life.

And then I’ve seen lots of patients who just struggle, and they try and they struggle and they fall back, but the interesting thing is the ones who are successful are the ones who look at each step along the way of going from being a smoker to a non-smoker as being stair steps towards improvement. They don’t just do an all or none and then give up on themselves and fall backwards.

For instance, moving from being a smoker to thinking about quitting smoking is a step. And then from thinking about giving up smoking to actually cutting back or skipping a day of cigarettes, even if there’s a regression, there’s still development in that person in being a step closer to being a non-smoker.

So it doesn’t always happen just in a minute. It can be something that takes years to transform into the new state of being. So in this exercise that we’re doing with the transformation tool, I’ve asked you each to pick your one thing that you’re working on in your life that you want to transform, that you want to grow into, and so this time what I’d like you to do is take out a piece of paper and I want you to think or come up with some ladder or bridge thoughts.

One example I heard recently was we were dealing with somebody that had grief. So if you’re dealing with a tragic loss or grief or depression, you may be sitting down there at a place where life is really, really hard. And I want to encourage you, if you’re sitting there, that there’s number one, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. There’s also a life at the end of the tunnel.

And a very nice first ladder thought when you’re sitting in that place and believe me, I’ve been there, a good thought to hang onto on that bottom rung is well, I’m still here. And there must be a purpose for me being here. So I woke up this morning, I’m still here. Very easy to believe, even if you’re having trouble seeing that there is a life of joy and abundance at the top of the ladder or across the bridge. So I would encourage you if you’re there to start working your way up the ladder.

So take a minute, write down your ladder or your bridge thoughts and fill them into your transformation tool if you’re following along with this on that. So in summary, what I’ve shown you today is the fifth step towards transforming yourself and creating a life of abundance that you truly love. I’ve shown you the how, which again, is my favorite part. Like, fix, it, right?

The bridge and the ladder thoughts, and that sometimes the process of transformation can happen in an instant, but often it takes lots of time and perseverance, and I just want to encourage you in that. So of course what I was listening to this week was the Forever Country, Artists of Then, Now, and Forever, from the 50th annual CMA awards.

And for the book that I chose this week, it’s kind of an old book. It was published in 2003. But I really love it. It’s called Thinking for a Change by John C. Maxwell. And it is a classic. It doesn’t specifically talk about ladder and bridge thoughts, but it’s a classic book that helps you teach you how you think on all different kinds of levels.

And I was looking at my copy, I have it all highlighted and bookmarked from about 15 years ago. So I hope that would be something fun for you to read. Let’s talk a little bit about next week. Next week we are going to talk about how to embody your new virtuosa state of being, and all your badassery self.

That’s what we’re going to be talking about next week and I’m going to be giving away our first set of virtuosa wireless earbuds. We’re going to do our first draw next week, so I’m really looking forward to that and I know you are too.

So the challenge for this week is to practice creating bridge and ladder thoughts when you catch yourself sinking back into your old negative thought patterns. Of course, the first step is that you start to notice that you’re slipping back into negative thinking patterns or notice what your brain is doing.

And then when you notice that, I want you to replace those thoughts of I’m not good enough or I’m so fat or I’m so - whatever those negative thoughts, I want you to replace them with a bridge or ladder, like I’m becoming better or I’m becoming a new person, or I can do hard things. 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 and my virtuosas in training, I hope you have a wonderful week. I hope you’ve enjoyed this lesson as much as I have and I will see you next week in episode seven. Can’t believe we’re already at seven. 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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