A few weeks ago I attended a mastermind hosted by my life coaching school where I also met up with a smaller mastermind group making 7+ figures in their business. The women in this room were making anywhere from $1 million all the way up to nearly $20 million. All talented and successful life coaches.
Conversation in this group kept wandering back to the ways different people in our lives had reacted to our success. And a lot of common thoughts emerged for just about everyone, no matter where they fell on the 7+ figure spectrum.
My closest friends are totally thrilled about my success.
My brother resents the fact that I make as much as I do.
Some of my friends feel insecure about the success of my business.
My parents seem a little *too* into how my business has grown.
One of my coaching colleagues expressed frustration with the way she’d been coaching herself on this.
She’d been trying so hard to convince herself that a particular family member didn’t actually have negative thoughts about her success as a coach.
But it just wasn’t working.
So, I shared with her a different approach, the tried and true thought that helps me whenever I get stuck in my thoughts or the thoughts I believe others are having about me.
Thoughts are temporary. Even when other people are thinking them.
Sounds simple enough, right?
And it is. But really understanding what this means for you and how it can bring some relief to your brain takes a little more breaking down.
See, our brains love to generalize and seek out patterns.
You learn that a friend judged your body, for example, and your brain will spin that single instance of judgment into the entirety of that friend’s thoughts and feelings about you.
Your brain will try to convince you that your friend is passing judgment on your body every moment of the day – that judgment is now an inextricable part of your relationship with this person.
WRONG. (And thank goodness, right?!)
The truth is, if your friend ever judges your body, it’s a fleeting thought in her brain. Sandwiched between a million other thoughts just as fleeting, like worrying that her mom is mad at her, thinking about the details of her big work project, or wondering if she should get her brows shaped differently next time.
And this is exactly why reminding ourselves that thoughts are just temporary is so critical, especially when it comes to how we think about the thoughts that others have about us.
Because it’s not like our thoughts or other people’s thoughts about us are these rational beings who sit down to complete some kind of objective scorecard. Thoughts are just electrical signals being sent through sacs of jelly in your brain.
Most of them are here for a split second and gone the next.
Not only are our thoughts temporary, but they can also be pretty damn contradictory.
Like how your parents can be disappointed you got divorced and simultaneously proud of you for leaving a marriage where you weren’t happy.
Does it make rational sense that those two thoughts can exist simultaneously inside the same brain? Not really, but hello! Have you met a human brain? They don’t really make sense a lot of the time.
Other people’s thoughts about you, they’re just clouds in the sky. Or a squirrel running back and forth in front of a window, because let’s be honest… squirrels are funny and our brains often feel like they’re moving at the speed of a squirrel, not the speed of a cloud. 😉
A single cloud that goes across the sky at one moment in time does not define the sky forever. It’s not static. The same is true about other people’s thoughts about you. And it’s also true about your thoughts about yourself.
Thoughts are temporary. They’re contradictory. And they don’t always mean something.
Like the clouds in the sky, let your thoughts float by and be free.
