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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mom-entum podcast, the show dedicated to inspiring, uplifting, and empowering moms on their journey through motherhood.  I’m your host, Tanya Valentine, and I’m so happy you are here.

 

So today I want to talk about something that can be so transformative in your life and it’s one of the coaching tools that I learned early on that was so eye opening for me and that is this idea that circumstances are neutral.  And if you’re going, but what does that even mean, circumstances are neutral, stay with me here.  

 

First let’s talk about circumstances and what exactly they are.  The circumstances in your life are facts.  They are things that happen outside of you that everyone in the world, at any time, could agree upon to be true.  So that can be things like the weather, the words someone said, someone’s behavior, things that happened in the past. 

 

 But the circumstances as they exist on their own are not good or bad.  They just are, they are neutral.  I’m going to give you an extreme example here, just to demonstrate why and how this is true, but 9/11.  While yes, most of us would agree that 9/11 was horrible. But the event of 9/11 is neutral because not everyone in the world would agree that it was horrible.  The terrorists that were involved in this celebrated this day as a victory, in fact. 

 

Or you could even think about it this way.  Let’s just say someone close to you died and you have not yet received the news of their passing.  You aren’t sad, you don’t know that they have passed.  But it’s still happened.  So it’s not negative, you haven’t experienced it as negative until you have a thought about it.

 

Now I’m not suggesting that you want to feel positive about all of the circumstances in the world.  I’m not suggesting that I want you to feel positive about 9/11 or someone close to you dying.  I want to feel sad when someone close to me passes.  I want to feel angry and sad that 9/11 happened.  

 

As human beings living in this world, we are meant to experience the spectrum of emotions.  The world is designed to be 50/50, 50% negative and 50% positive.  And we can only fully appreciate and enjoy the positive when we also experience the contrast to that.  We appreciate sunny days more when we have gone through the rainy days, we can only truly know happiness when we have experienced sadness.  And when we can embrace this idea that everything is 50/50, then when we do experience the negative 50, we just say, “Oh yea, this is just that negative 50”, and then we know that it will pass.  Rather than feeling negative about feeling negative, being unhappy about being unhappy and then that just compounds the negativity in our life.

 

So again, I’m not suggesting you want to feel positively all of the time, I’m just saying make sure the way you are interpreting the circumstances in your life is being done in a conscious way.  Because there are many other circumstances in our life that we, by default, interpret as negative. And if we actually took the time to look at it through a different lens, and decide consciously the meaning we want to attach to it, we wouldn’t experience so much unnecessary suffering.  

 

 Now, why is this important? Because so many of us believe that we are unhappy because of the circumstances in our lives, (our kids, significant other, our job, where we live, what someone said to us) 

 

We think there is this external thing that is causing us to feel a certain way. And when we believe that, we are giving all our power away. Because we can’t control the things that are on the outside( we can’t control other people, what they say, their behavior, the weather, something that occurs in the world, we can’t control whether or not someone we love gets sick, or if someone we love dies). But what we can control is our thoughts about them, our thoughts about said circumstance. And it is our thoughts that create our feelings, not the actual circumstance. It’s our thought about the circumstance.

 

Why this is so important to understand is, we are completely giving our power away when we believe that it’s this outside thing causing us pain. Oh, if I had a job that wasn’t so stressful, if my kids would just listen, if they would just get to bed at a decent hour, if my significant other was more romantic, if I had more help, then my life would be so much better. 

 

But that’s not how it works. We can’t rely on the outside world to change in order for us to feel better. If we have to wait for the outside world to change, we could be waiting a very long time. 

 

We can’t control other people and the things that happen in the world. And when we believe that we need to do this in order to feel better we turn into control freaks. And this creates a lot of problems for us, it creates so much angst within us. The other people in our lives do not want to be controlled.  We do not like it when someone tries to control us, we like to be in control of our own lives.  

 

But when we try to control the other people in our lives and they resist, fight back or pull away, this causes a disconnect between us and that other person, which is the opposite effect we are going for.  The goal is connection, to connect more with those that we love.  And then we feel frustrated because that’s not what we want. 

 

So when you can start to wrap your mind around this, that your feelings don’t come from these circumstances of the outer world, but instead they come from your thoughts, you are going to set yourself up for a much happier life and you will improve your relationship with others because you’re not going around, trying to control the world so that you can then feel better.

 

We create so much drama around the circumstances in our lives.  As human beings, we experience the world through a narrative.  Things happen in the world outside of us, and automatically, subconsciously, our brain is assigning meaning to these things.  It’s trying to figure out, ok what does this mean for me?  And this is how our brains have evolved to survive because we need to be able to analyze and interpret our environment in order to determine whether or not it is safe.  

 

It’s like you see a snake and, it happens automatically, but you have a thought: snakes are dangerous. And this thought produces a feeling of fear which then causes you to run.  Ok, great, well that just kept you safe.

 

But what about when our kid is throwing a temper tantrum because he can’t get that toy at the store and we have this visceral response, this same fight or flight response as what happened with the snake because maybe we have thoughts like: this shouldn’t be happening, I need to make it stop, I created a monster, he always does this, see this is why I don’t take him to the grocery store I’m never gonna do this again, he sucks, people in the store are going to judge me, they’re gonna think I’m a bad mom, or I am a bad mom.  And these thoughts, how we are interpreting this situation, cause us to feel anger, fear and shame. And what’s worse, is that it shifts us into our flight or flight response, which is controlled by our primitive brain.  And when our primitive brain is in the driver’s seat, we can’t access our prefrontal cortex, or our higher brain, which would help us to think clearly, help us think more logically and come up with a creative solution.

 

Now let’s consider a different way of thinking, just to better demonstrate how the circumstance is neutral and it is our thinking causing the problem.  

 

So in the circumstance of our kid throwing a temper tantrum in the store.  How could we make that completely factual, completely neutral? What exactly happened?  He said he wanted a stuffed animal and you said no, so then he is now crying and screaming and thrashing his body around.  You could have a thought about this that: this is completely normal for a toddler to react this way when he is told no.  You could think, this is not a problem, nothing has gone wrong here.  This will pass.  These people in the grocery store, they get it, in fact, I’m sure many of them have gone through this exact same thing with their children and they probably are empathizing with me right now.  If we chose to intentionally think those thoughts, then how might we feel?  Much better, right. And then we don’t feel this pressure that we have to make it stop as soon as possible.  Instead, we are more relaxed, and we can actually be there in the moment with our son and hold space for him when he is experiencing this big emotion that he is overwhelmed by. And when we can hold space like this for him, we end up with much better outcomes.

 

I’ll give you one more example  before we wrap up for today.  I was coaching a woman once who was having issues with a coworker. And She said, “She’s rude to me.” But when I asked her to describe the situation using only the facts—no emotional language, just what actually happened—she paused and said, “Well, she didn’t look me in the eye when I was talking to her.” That was the only factual part of the interaction she could pinpoint. It was a real “ah-hah” moment for her, and she realized, “Wow, that feels different.”

 

When we separate the facts from the story, we remove the emotional charge.  If I asked you to retell a story about something you consider to be an issue right now, using only the facts, watch how that takes away all of the emotional fuel. It’s like you then get to start from a blank slate and decide on purpose what you want to make this thing mean and how you want to think about it, so that you can then feel and act with more intention, rather than be so reactive.

 

Let’s end today with a little homework. Think about a problem you’re facing right now. What’s the neutral, factual circumstance? Strip it of adjectives and emotions—just the pure facts. Now, what’s your thought about it? How does that thought make you feel? You might just be surprised at what you discover.

 

Thank you for joining me today. Remember, circumstances are neutral—it’s our thoughts that create our experience. So if you want to feel better, start by becoming more aware of your thoughts.

 

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