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.

This is your listener Q&A for this week. Here is the first question. “On a coaching call, you said, ‘You can’t just get over it, and what does that even mean?’ This is something I’ve been told to do all my life, to get over whatever happened and just move on. I’m African American, so maybe it’s a cultural phrase. Two questions: can you speak more on what you meant by ‘you can’t just get over it and what does that even mean?’ and what to do to stop believing that? I do want to change that thought.”

So, it’s an interesting question. When I was coaching that person, what I was trying to express was that either other people tell us to get over it or we just have the thought “get over it,” we’re sort of giving ourselves this instruction that we don’t understand. We don’t know what that means. It’s like when you say to your brain, well, I should just forgive the person, or I just need to move on.

It’s like this way of describing a whole thought change that isn’t useful because it doesn’t give your brain any idea of what it is you want it to do. If your brain knew how to just get over it or just forgive the person or just move on or just not worry about it, your brain would already do that. So when I say like nobody knows what that means, what I mean is there’s no kind of brain program we can run of just getting over it. Who knows what that means? And like what that means to the person who said it to you might be different than what it means to the person down the street, might be different to what your brain thinks it means. It just is a phrase that doesn’t have any clear objective meaning.

And so that’s why it’s not useful. So if you’re saying to yourself, well, I just need to get over it, then dig into that. What does that mean? What are you saying to yourself? I need to not be upset about this, or I need to not care about this, or I need to change this thought. So I don’t think it’s about, I can’t know from here what thought you should change “just get over it” to, but I would sort of suggest in general, just always going back to more curiosity. If you ever are sort of telling yourself, just move on or just get over it or just any kind of general, vague instruction like that, I think you want to dig deeper and be like, well, what does that mean? Is there a feeling I’m having that I think I should stop having? Is there a thought I’m having I want to stop having? Is there a feeling I don’t have that I think I should have? Right? In some way, you’re judging your emotional experience, and that’s always making it worse.

So anytime that you’re like, oh, I should just get over it, or, you know, someone else told me to get over it, whatever that means, you’re not over it, right? All that means is you still have thoughts and feelings, and so you need to dig into your specific thoughts and feelings and figure out how to shift them and not try to operate at this kind of general level that gives your brain no purchase, like nothing to hold on to actually get some traction.

Alright, 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 week’s podcast review comes from user Sefolaaaaa, but there’s five As at the end, so I’m not going to try to say all of them, who says, “The podcast is life changing. Kara’s thought work teachings have drastically changed my mental well-being. I’m so glad I found her and won’t stop singing her praises to all my female friends. I also joined her online coaching program and love it. I’ve learned so much. I’ve tried all kinds of therapy and self-development, and thought work is the thing that has worked for me. I’m very grateful to Kara.”

I am very grateful to you for leaving this review and for sharing my work with your friends. That is so helpful whenever any of you do that because word of mouth is always the best recommendation. And our Society is actually closed right now for new members. So if you’re not already in there, you can’t join now like this listener did, but we will be opening up something new and exciting in a few months. So keep your eyes and ears peeled.

Okay, second question. “Hi, Kara. I’ve noticed that when I’m judging myself and think I haven’t achieved enough, I never do it directly, but via a faceless group of people who I assume are constantly watching and assessing me, tutting and shaking their heads.” Sounds like a horror movie. “It’s like I’m operating from a belief that similar to submitting a personal tax assessment, I’ll have to submit a personal productivity assessment, and it feels terrifying. Although in reality, no one else knows or could care less about how much I’m achieving. I think there are two parts to this problematic thought. The first is, I haven’t achieved enough. The second is, other people think. In my intentional model, my thought, my value is not based on my achievements, but I’m finding it tough to shake this image of others judging me. Do I just need to work on the first bit and the other people think part, will that fall naturally away?”

Basically, yes. Other people are never really the issue. It’s your own thoughts. When other people judge us for things that we love about ourselves, we do not give a shit. I have never once in my life given a shit that someone thought I was too feminist. Has not kept me up once. I have never even contemplated it. I’ve never worried that someone thought I was too smart. Even though there are probably people who think that, who think I’m way too feminist. I don’t know that people go around thinking people are too smart, but maybe, like, yeah, she’s obnoxious the way she uses big words and talks about ideas or whatever. Who knows? I don’t care. I just never think about that because it’s not something that I have any self-consciousness around.

So anytime we are imagining other people judging us, it’s always our own thoughts. The faceless they is just the green screen. Sometimes we have a person that we fixated on. And if you notice, it’s fascinating, like often who people imagine judging them will be someone they don’t even know that well. It’ll be like the girl who was popular in 10th grade, right? Or whatever. And sometimes it’s closer to home. It’s like their best friend or their parent or their boss. But whether you’ve filled out the puppet’s face or not doesn’t really matter because it’s never about them. It’s always about you. And that is true whether that person really does or doesn’t care if they’re real. Now, your faceless people obviously don’t care because they don’t exist. But it’s all the same. It basically doesn’t matter if you made up the people, if they exist, if they don’t exist, if they’ve ever actually said anything to you or not, it really is irrelevant.

It’s always about your own judgment of yourself. That’s what you care about. So you’re on the right track by working on the thoughts about your own productivity because it really has nothing to do with anyone else. Like in your case, it’s so obvious because they’re faceless, right? It’s not even about a real person’s opinion. It’s just your brain hallucinating, right? Kind of projecting. It’s like a ventriloquist dummy.

So, yes, keep working on your own thoughts. And when your brain does that, I think you can just remind your brain, they’re faceless because they’re just me. My is the only opinion that I’m actually worried about. And that will sort of maybe help. But generally, yes, just keep working on your own thoughts and beliefs about this because the faceless other people are, they’re just projections of you and your thoughts. Always. That is one of the few always rules of thought work. That’s it for this week. I’ll talk to you next week.