ABC’s to Rise Up

In this episode of the Joyful You Podcast, we tackling how to overcome pesky negative thoughts about ourselves, like self-doubt, insecurity, and dislike that often keeps us down, so we can rise up into the next best version of ourselves.

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WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER

• A fun and eye-opening activity to explore how easily we focus on negative thoughts versus positive ones about ourselves.
• Insights into why our brains tend to highlight flaws and how this affects our daily lives and relationships.
• Ideas for creating positive affirmations and using them in your daily life to shift your mindset.
• Why it’s crucial to acknowledge and appreciate your strengths and how that can transform your outlook.
• The ABC’s to Rise Up!

FEATURED ON THE SHOW

• Sheri Dew BYU Women’s Conference Talk 2001
• Ezra Taft Benson Quote
• Sticky Beliefs Podcast
• H. Burke Peterson Quote
• Patricia Holland Quote
• Sheri Dew BYU Women’s Conference talk 2008
• Would you do me a favor? Please leave a review on your preferred podcast platform — it helps me reach more and more people. Thank you!
• I’d love to hear from you with any questions or breakthroughs or topics you’d like me to cover. Send me a direct message on Instagram @ajoyfulyou or email me at rachael@ajoyfulyou.com
• Follow me on Instagram for more
• Website

TRANSCRIPT

This is The Joyful You Podcast, Episode 104, The ABCs to Rise Up Above Negative Thoughts of Self-Doubt, Insecurity and Dislikes.

Welcome to The Joyful You Podcast.

On this show, I talk all about the tools you need to cultivate a healthy relationship with food, your mind and your life.

I’m your host, Rachael Collins.

As an eating psychology practitioner, a certified life coach and a weight loss expert, it is my mission to show you how to work with your body, manage your mind, process your emotions and create supportive habits so you can live well, feel well and become your strongest, healthiest, happiest, most amazing self, a joyful you.

Hey there, welcome to the podcast.

Today, I want to start off with doing something a little bit different.

I want to start off with an experiment.

Okay, so I hope you all indulge me.

So here’s what I want you to do.

First of all, I want you to write down or think of 10 things that you don’t like about yourself.

Okay, go ahead.

I’m going to give you a couple seconds to name them.

Alright, now I want you to write down or think of 10 things that are awesome about you.

Again, I’m going to wait a few seconds for you to list them.

Ready, go.

Alright, could you do it?

And which one was easier, the things that you don’t like about yourself or the things that you do?

If you’re like most women, the list of 10 things that you don’t like about yourself is way easier than the list of 10 things that are awesome about you.

And there are a couple reasons why this is.

The first is that our animal brain’s job, okay, is to scan for everything that is wrong and that includes everything that is wrong with us.

It takes intentional focus and effort to zone in on the awesome things.

And most of us, we were just never taught to do that or taught how to do that even.

And the other reason is that we have an enemy that doesn’t want us to focus on our awesomeness.

The enemy’s greatest attack on women is through their thoughts, especially through their thoughts about themselves.

He knows that if he can get us to fill our minds with thoughts of failure and focus on all the negative things about ourselves, we’ll hold ourselves back.

And he won’t even have to lift a finger.

We will do it all on our own.

Ezra Taft Benson said, Satan is increasingly striving to overcome women with despair, discouragement, despondency and depression.

The adversary knows that if he can prevent us from recognizing our divine potential, he will have scored a major victory.

Satan loves when we are down on ourselves.

He loves when we are beating up on ourselves.

He loves when we feel like we are not enough, because he knows that we are miserable in those moments just like he is.

One of my absolute favorite people is Sheri Dew.

I just adore her.

Clear back in 2001, she gave a BYU Women’s Conference talk where she said something so profound, and I think about it all the time.

She said, Satan tells us we’re not good enough, not smart enough, not thin enough, not cute enough, not clever enough, not anything enough.

And that is a big fat devilish lie.

Don’t you just love that?

I love how she says that.

It’s a big fat devilish lie.

I believe that the biggest way the enemy is getting to us is through our minds, through our negative thinking about ourselves, because he knows that it affects the way that we interact with our families, the way that we live our lives, and the way that we commit to good things.

So today, on this episode, I want to share with you the ABCs of how we can rise up above the negative thoughts of self-doubt and insecurity and dislike that we have for ourselves.

So, let’s start with A.

A is for arise.

Now, psychology teaches, and I have been saying this here on the podcast for years, that our thoughts create our feelings and our feelings drive our actions or our behaviors.

So, when we’re thinking ugly thoughts about ourselves, we feel ugly feelings, feelings like shame and guilt and disgust and defeat and rejection, and then we act ugly.

We behave ugly.

We yell at our kids.

We get short with our husband.

We lazily lay around.

We scroll social media.

We overeat.

We criticize others and sometimes ourselves.

We compare and covet and all sorts of other things that we would rather not be doing, right?

On my fridge, I have hanging up this quote.

It’s by Alison Faulkner who was a podcaster.

I’m not sure if she still has a podcast or not, but it helps to remind me of the power of my own thinking, especially the thoughts that I have about myself.

And she says, it doesn’t serve anyone when you sit around thinking you’re a big piece of crap.

Don’t you love that?

It doesn’t serve anyone when you sit around thinking you’re a big piece of crap.

And I totally agree.

It doesn’t serve you.

It doesn’t serve your family.

It doesn’t serve your neighbors.

It doesn’t serve your coworkers.

It doesn’t serve anyone.

You know who the only person it serves is?

The enemy.

He loves it, right?

Because he knows the effect that it has.

So I want you to think about the things that you say to yourself.

Would you talk to a friend the way that you talk to yourself?

Would you say the same things that you say to yourself to your daughter?

If you wouldn’t, why?

Is it because it would totally ruin her self-esteem and your relationship with her?

If the answer is yes, what do you think you are doing to yourself?

You are ruining your self-esteem and your relationship with yourself.

And here’s the thing, we think it doesn’t matter what we say about ourselves, especially because it’s just inside our own head.

It’s just our own inner talk.

But I promise you, it does.

It matters because it affects your spirit.

It affects your state of being.

And that affects your story and it affects how you feel, which affects everything you do.

So if you have thoughts of self-doubt, being a failure, not being good enough, smart enough, not talented enough, nice enough, not special enough, whatever it is for you, please know that you are not alone.

But I also want you to know that it’s time to stop believing the lies.

The big fat devilish lies, like Sheri Dew says.

And it’s time to let them go because they are weighing you down, literally and figuratively, and they are keeping you from rising up.

So I want you to picture a hot air balloon.

And the way that they keep hot air balloons from floating up and floating away is by weighing them down with sandbags.

Your inner conversations are sandbags.

They are weighing you down.

They are keeping you from rising up.

Many of these inner conversations are just habits.

But it is time to lose the sandbags.

And the way that we do this, the first step in doing this is awareness.

It’s always awareness.

The first step is always awareness.

So take some time to write down all of the thoughts, good and bad, that you have about yourself.

We need to get them all out on paper, where we can then take a look at them, and decide what we want to do with them.

So start writing.

Once you’ve made your list, I want you to read back through it without judgment.

That is the ticker right here, no judgment.

Beating yourself up is not gonna help in this process.

Instead, I want you to get curious, and then I want you to replace the thoughts that you don’t want to keep anymore.

Like a Jenga game, we’re gonna take out one thought, we’re gonna replace it with a new thought, and we’re gonna place that thought on the top of your mind, where you think about it, and you practice thinking about it often.

So to practice and to make sure that I’m thinking about my new beliefs often, I like to write them on a little sticky note and put them up around the house, or on an index card.

I love index cards too, and I just hang them in places where I will look at them often.

On the fridge, on my bathroom mirror, I will put them on my vanity, I will put them on my computer screen.

Anywhere that I look often, and when I see it, I’m like, oh yes, that’s the new belief that I’m practicing thinking.

Sometimes I will even record them on the voice memo of my phone, and then I will listen to them as I’m going out for walks, or as I’m making sack lunches for my kids.

Sometimes it helps me if I rewrite the new belief.

I am just trying anything I can to practice the new belief enough that it just becomes autopilot and it sticks, because I would rather believe the new thought than that crappy old one that makes me feel like crap.

I have gone over this in a lot of detail in the Busting Through Sticky Beliefs podcast episode, so go back and listen to it if you have no idea what I’m talking about, or if you need a refresher, I’ll put a link to it in the show notes.

Alright, let’s move on to B.

B is for B-U.

Over the last few years, we have been told repeatedly to be distinct and different.

And to me, that means to be yourself.

You were created exactly the way that God needs you to be.

So, shine the light that He gave you so brightly that all the world can see it.

He needs you to be shining your light that He gave you to shine.

So, stop worrying if other people like you.

Do you like you?

If you don’t like you, go back to the letter A.

Hey, what thoughts are you thinking about yourself that maybe you want to change?

One of my other favorite speakers is H.

Burke Peterson.

He always has the best things to say, and here’s one of them.

He said, you were preserved to come to Earth at this time for a special purpose.

Not just a few of you, but all of you.

There are things for each of you to do that no one else can do as well as you.

Did you catch that?

There are things for each of you to do that no one else can do as well as you.

It is true, he says.

Some make higher grades or play basketball better.

Some are taller, shorter, heavier, or lighter than others.

And so we find ourselves thinking or saying, If I were only like Anne, then I could really do something fantastic, something others would notice.

Everyone would want to be like me.

One of the greatest challenges is to overcome the feelings that we are unimportant, that we are not special and unique.

Do you think for a moment Heavenly Father would have sent one of his children to this earth by accident without the possibility of a significant work to perform?

The answer is no.

So, do you remember that list that I had you make at the very beginning in our little experiment?

10 things you think are awesome about you.

I want you to add to it.

I am going to challenge you to make a list of 100 things that you love and appreciate and think are awesome about yourself.

And doing this is going to force your brain to stop focusing on everything that’s wrong with you and to start focusing on and finding all the positive things about you.

Once you have your list, and you can take days to make this list, you can take weeks, heck, you can take a month to make this list if you need to, but once you have your list, I want you to read it often.

The enemy is working very very diligently to try to keep you down.

So if you want to rise up, you have to intentionally cut off the sandbags that he is trying to weigh you down with.

And we do this by placing, lifting positive beliefs in our mind.

The brain was designed to find and look for evidence to prove true whatever we tell it to focus on.

So why not direct it to the positive so that it can find evidence and prove to you that all of those awesome things about you are indeed true.

All right, last one.

C is for courage to be imperfect.

Another one of the enemy’s lies is perfectionism.

We think if we are perfect and we have the perfect house and the perfect kids and the perfect bank account and the perfect marriage and the perfect figure, then we’ll be happy and we won’t ever think negatively about ourselves or our lives or others ever again.

Patricia Holland, she once said, if I were Satan and wanted to destroy society, I think I would stage a full blown blitz on women.

I would keep them so distraught and distracted that they would never find the calming strength and serenity for which their sex has always been known.

He has effectively done that, catching us in the crunch of trying to be superhuman instead of realistically striving to reach our individual purpose and unique God-given potential.

He tauntingly teases us that if we don’t have it all, fame, fortune, families and fun, all the yes sounds like, and if we don’t have it every minute all the time, we have been shortchanged.

That’s the end of her quote.

So remember, the goal is not perfection.

We are perfection pending, as President Nelson tells us, and this also includes our thoughts, okay?

Our thinking does not have to be perfect all the time.

We were taught that life is 50-50.

50% of the time, it’s gonna be amazing, and we’re gonna have positive thoughts about ourselves.

But the other 50% of the time, we’re gonna have self-doubt, and we’re gonna have negative thinking about ourselves.

But here is where we can make a difference.

We don’t dwell on that negative self-doubt thinking.

We want to make sure that we focus on the positive, because where our focus goes, energy flows.

So please don’t nag yourself with thoughts of failure.

Stop beating yourself up.

Remember, the goal is to learn and to grow.

And we do that by making mistakes, lots and lots of mistakes, and then learning from the mistakes that we made.

That is how we grow.

That is how we rise up into the next best version of ourselves.

I am just going to leave you with another Sheri Dew quote.

This one is from a 2008 BYU Women’s Conference talk.

She said, Every one of us has a unique opportunity to change the world.

It is time for us to wake up to the potential magnitude of our full influence as women, and then to arise and do what we were sent here to do.

I truly believe that you were sent here to do amazing things.

My challenge for you is to rise up and go do them.

Thank you for listening to The Joyful You Podcast.

If you’d like additional support, click the link in the show notes, and let’s chat about how we can work together to get you to your goal.

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If you want to hang out on social media, you can find me on Instagram, at A Joyful You, or on my website, ajoyfulyou.com.

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