Break Free From Self-Destructive Patterns | Dr. Nicole Lepera EP 374

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation show.

0:10I firmly believe that taking charge of your mindset allows you to be in the driver's seat of your life and unlock your potential. And that's why I'm thrilled to share that my new book is out right now. It's called The Greatness Mindset. In it, you'll learn how to build a plan for greatness through powerful exercises and toolkits designed to propel your life forward. This is the book that I wish I had 20 years ago. It's everything I've learned in the last decade with the research and the science to help you unlock your mind. Make sure to go to lewishouse.com slash 2023mindset to pick up your copy of my book, The Greatness Mindset, today.

0:55Well, the first word that I think we, most of us can relate to is the word stuck. being stuck in our lives, watching yourself live patterns, whether or not they're in your daily behaviors or patterns in your thinking mind, or just being stuck in certain specific feelings. And a lot of us do logically. We're insightful. Maybe a lot of us have been in treatment and therapy and we might know a way out or think we know a way out, yet we still feel stuck. I felt that my whole life, having clocked many hours in my individual work before I shifted the way I practice, but with individual patients, clients, same thing, that word would come up.

1:30I feel stuck. I had maybe thought I had the tools to change, thought I had the insight to change, couldn't implement them. And you're a therapist. And I'm a therapist. Now, I'm seeing same stories coming in week after week with my clients, quite literally the same stories. Here's the issue I had with my partner. Okay, we'll explore it insightfully. Maybe we'll even come up with a game plan of how to choose a new response in this future fight that, of course is going to happen. Flash forward to that next week, same fight, Groundhog's Day. I get this in therapy a lot. It's like, okay, when there's a breakdown or a fight, the therapist will give a tool to try to like diffuse the fight or to say, okay, let's take 10 seconds of our breathing together or let's step out of the room and then come back together when we're calm.

2:11We love our timeouts. Whatever it is, right? There's like different tools you can use in an argument or a fight with a loved one or a friend or anything like that. But why Why don't they seem to work most of the time? When we're having that conversation about what to do next, we're in a part of our brain where consciousness lives. This is where we can be separate from ourself, our thoughts, our feelings, where I do my little spotlight, where we're like this little observational spotlight of ourself. We have access to logic, to long-term planning. That's the part of our brain that makes us human, this ability to be conscious, to observe ourself, to think about thought.

2:46beautiful empowering gift that we have. But we're not able to do that in a stressful moment. Those are the moments that we're having this conversation. So a lot of therapy sessions take place very consciously. We're here, calm. The ambiance of most therapy rooms is very calming. We're in that nice balanced place. And so we get it. But you're right. When we get into the moments where we need to use it, we're now functioning from a lower part of our brain called the subconscious, which is part of our past. I talk a lot about the subconscious as the means in which we literally carry our past, where all of our wounds live, and what causes those emotional reactions.

3:22So even if I know what I'm going to do differently, we're going to, hey, you're my partner, and we love this idea of timeout. So when things get escalated, we're going to timeout. Chances are when an emotion is touched in one or both of us, we're shifting right back down to that emotional lower center of our brain, and that's going to dictate what we do. And we're probably going to do the same thing that we always do when we're upset. React, scream, fight. I'm out, run away, tantrum, I dissociate. I love that one myself. Is that what you do? Oh, I used to be the queen. I used to call it my spaceship.

3:51I used to go away. And I got very good at not appearing away. So I could still continue. But emotionally, I was so disconnected from myself, the moment, my feelings. So you would be physically there, but not emotionally or mentally. You would just disconnect emotionally. Disconnect. So I'd be very calm, talking, or in appearance, because I was. I don't care, I don't care. Down here, there might have been a whole multitude of feelings bubbling up. So these tools can only work to a certain point, it seems like, based on your experience of working with a lot of people one-on-one and seeing them come back, okay, we tried timeout, we tried this.

4:24It seems like they only work to a certain point of our ability to be conscious of the moment. Yeah, consciousness is where we are granted choice. Otherwise, that subconscious is going to run those same patterns, behavioral, emotional. And it's almost like we have no choice. We have no choice. You'll hear me often talk about we become reactive to the environment. We live a reactive life toward the environment, as in things happen in our world and I only react in the same way, typically. And it makes us feel very powerless, very victimized. We are a victim of circumstance in that way. So how do we change that?

4:56We have to practice consciousness. We really have to. I mean, change begins when you practice being conscious, practice showing up, practice observing yourself, practice observing all of the patterns, Practice when it's calm so that you can practice when it's chaotic.

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6:15Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.