Welcome to UnF*ck Your Brain. I’m your host, Kara Loewentheil, Master Certified Coach and founder of The School of New Feminist Thought. I’m here to help you turn down your anxiety, turn up your confidence, and create a life on your own terms, one that you’re truly excited to live. Let’s go.

Welcome to this week’s Coaching Hotline episode where I answer real questions from real listeners and coach you from afar. If you want to submit your question for consideration, go to unfuckyourbrain.com/coachinghotline, all one word. Or text your email to 1-347-997-1784. And when you get prompted for the code word, it’s CoachingHotline, all one word. Let’s get into this week’s questions.

So, here’s the first question. These questions are actually both kind of about motivation, so they I think that they make a nice pairing.

So first one is, “the usual question when someone says I really want to be in a relationship, for example, but this could be anything they want, is what are you making it mean about you? And consequently, what thoughts can you think now that are totally available for you? Which I get, if for example you want a relationship in order to feel loved, you could think thoughts now that produce love for you. Because feeling loved isn’t a function of changing your circumstance.

But what if we don’t have a specific thought or feeling we are seeking, but more like I want a relationship because I want that experience whatever it brings. Is that a sign that we’re in a good place with this decision? Or am I overlooking something about always seeking a thought and feeling?”

Okay, so number one, the question isn’t always what are you making it mean about you. The question is what are you making it mean? It’s interesting, this is a conflation I see you guys making a lot and I see it in the Facebook group a lot that there’s a lot of defaulting to like, are you making it mean something about you? It’s almost like our own self-centeredness that thought work helps us with comes out in the way this gets translated somehow.

Sometimes the issue is what you’re making it mean about you, but sometimes the issue is just like what you’re making it mean in general about what are you making a circumstance mean about another person or about human life or the world or the Red Sox or whatever. It’s not always what are you making it mean about you.

Second part of this question, same question. I do think like, I’m interested in having this experience. Number one, that is a specific thing you’re seeking, right? I mean, it’s not about better or worse, but just if you’re going into something thinking, well, I just want to see what this experience will be like, you definitely are going into it kind of more open-minded and without having unrealistic expectations about what the experience is supposed to be and how it’s supposed to make you feel.

So I definitely think you’re setting yourself up to better experience whatever it is, because you don’t have such an agenda. At the same time, I don’t know that I totally buy that as an explanation. Like, there’s a lot of things in my life that would be an experience, like trying to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. But I don’t want that because I’m just like, I want that experience whatever it brings. So I just would push on this. It’s possible this is your true thought about why you want to be in a relationship, but I think that maybe this whole like, what are you making it mean about you is kind of throwing you off and that’s why.

What if you just asked yourself, why do I want to be in a relationship? What am I making being in a relationship mean? You might not be making it mean anything about you in the sense of there’s something wrong with you, but you might be making it mean something about you, like what other people think about you or how you would feel if you were in one or why your life would be better if you had one. I don’t think that humans really seek things out usually because we’re like, I don’t know what this experience will be like, but I’m interested in it. Like, why? Why are you interested in it?

Right? I’m not saying that’s not possible for that to be true, but I would just dig a little deeper and I think that this sort of slight distortion that the question is always what are you making it mean about you might be actually playing into your not totally seeing what’s going on for you here.

So, I would dig deeper. Listen, you can do whatever you want. I think it’s not going to, nothing bad is going to happen. It’s not going to go wrong if you decide to go with this thought, but why do you want the experience of a relationship? Right? That might be a useful question for you.

All right y’all, I know you’re as tired as I am of having the top podcasts in wellness or health and fitness categories be a bunch of dudes who don’t know anything about socialization and who are not taking women’s lived experiences into account. So if you are looking for ways to support the show and more importantly, make sure the show gets to more people, please leave us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. And bonus points if you include a few lines about the way you use thought work and self-coaching or anything you’ve learned from the podcast in your daily life. Those reviews are what teach the algorithms to show us to more new people. It helps us get new listeners all over the world and I’ll be reading one story from a recent review in each of these question and answer episodes.

This one comes from Lucy MP who says, “Love this podcast. Kara is brilliant. I’ve been following her on Instagram for years and recently have binged her podcast. This is a must listen for anyone who is working to shift their mindset and let go of society nonsense that is messing with her brain.”

Congratulations Lucy on making the jump from social media to the podcast. It is really going to help you grow so much faster.

Next question. My question is about the love of a hobby versus the motivation to do it versus the motivation behind doing it. Okay, I don’t know if those are distinctions that are going to be useful, but let’s see. Okay. “For example, I’ve long thought of myself as a writer. I’ve made a career out of writing. However, I think of it as a hobby too, though I don’t often write for fun.

Writing for fun seems forced to me and I understand that I shouldn’t wait for motivation and that being motivated is a feeling I can conjure with my thoughts. However, when I think about writing for fun, I find myself feeling dread. And I ask myself things like, do I really want to do this? Do I really like doing this? Why is it so painful to write? I wonder if I want to write just so that I can call myself a writer and feel okay with my life as I have an interesting hobby. I often fear I’m boring.

When thinking about writing a book, I picture only the finished product rather than the process. PS, I can’t help but jump on the bandwagon and declare my love for you. Thank you for all that you do.”

You’re very welcome. Okay. What’s going on with this question? If you don’t want to write for fun, just don’t do it. I feel like sometimes this is where you use thought work against yourselves. Yes, motivation is created by your thoughts and you can create motivation to do anything. But why? Why do you want to? If you don’t want to write, why are you trying to write?

Right? And you write for a living, so maybe you want a different hobby. I don’t know. Maybe you want to play rugby or do embroidery or something or stare at the wall. I mean I think I would answer these questions. Do you really want to do it? Do you really like doing it? Here’s the thing. The fact that you put something off or procrastinate it or whatever doesn’t always mean you don’t want to do it. It may just mean you have an intervening thought that’s getting in the way, right? Of like, am I going to do a good enough job? And if somebody ever reads this, will they hate it? And I should have already written it. And you may have all these other thoughts getting in the way.

So I do think you want to coach yourself to that extent, like figure out what are the thoughts that make it dreadful? Why is it painful? There are things that I do not particularly love emptying the dishwasher. It’s not something that fills me with joy and fulfillment. I also don’t dread it and find it super painful, right? Like when you don’t want to do something just because you’re kind of not that into it, it’ll feel kind of neutral. You’re not excited about it and you might feel a little “eh” about it. But if something is painful and dreadful, I actually think there’s something always interesting to figure out about why. You may or may not decide to change it.

But I can’t coach you on this farther than telling you that you should answer those questions. One thing you love to do is just take something that is just a matter of looking at your own thoughts and turn it into a conceptual question. Both of these questions do that, right? The first one is like, is this a sign that this is how you know you’re in a good place? Are we overlooking something about always looking, like you want a general rule about it, right?

And then in this one it’s like, what is the love of a hobby versus the motivation to do it versus the motivation behind doing it, like making all of these abstract divisions or whatever, definitions of different things here. It’s not complicated. What are the thoughts you’re having when you go to write? And why are you trying to write in the first place? Just answer those questions. Don’t overcomplicate it for yourself.

So I don’t know, you got to coach yourself. I don’t know what the answers to your questions are here. But it sounds like you’re kind of on to it because you say that you fear you’re boring. So you have a thought I’m boring and then your thought is like, oh well if I write then I won’t be boring, which PS, definitely not true because number one, boring is just a made-up thing.

Somebody who wants to talk in depth about sports statistics is extremely boring to me and they are extremely fascinating to someone who wants to talk about sports statistics. Boring is not a thing that people are. It’s a thought that one brain has about a subject and not all brains have the same thoughts. So number one, you’ve got that going on. Then are you trying to write so that you won’t think you’re boring? What is more boring than dreading writing and not writing? Right? You got a lot to unpack here.

I just want to encourage you, don’t try to make it conceptual, okay? Just coach yourself on these specific thoughts. Why are you doing it? Why is it so painful? What if I’m boring? Writing would make me interesting. If I have one lesson for you, it’s stop trying to overcomplicate your thought work. It’s really not more complicated than that. I’ll talk to you next week.

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