TJ5: Loving Yourself, Mindfulness, Meditation, Affirmations & Mindset 047

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About Loving Yourself & Mindfulness

This fifth solo episode of the Transition Journey (TJ) series is a deep exploration of loving yourself, mindfulness, meditation, affirmations, and mindset. The goal of this episode is for you to have both an understanding of why these topics are important to your life and to be able to start implementing them to develop a more personal relationship with yourself and the direction of your life.

By incorporating such affirmations into daily practice, individuals can rewire their thought processes from a fixed mindset, which views abilities as static, to a growth mindset that embraces challenges as opportunities for learning and self-improvement. With psychologist Carol Dweck as a reference on this topic, this episode provides listeners with a framework to understand how adopting a growth mindset can dramatically enhance one’s potential for success. By highlighting the stark contrasts between a fixed and a growth mindset, the episode encourages listeners to view every challenge as a stepping stone to achieving their full potential.

Other concepts discussed in the podcast are the significance of affirmations in shaping our beliefs and behaviors, and the transformative power of mindfulness meditation illustrated through Tanner’s journey and the ways it has impacted his life direction. By sharing stories of individuals who have successfully transitioned to new careers while juggling other demands this episode offers both inspiration and practical advice for listeners seeking to follow a similar path.

The episode concludes with a call to action, asking listeners to reflect on and share their self-love practices. It’s a reminder that personal growth is not just about the destination but the journey itself, which is enriched by our ability to love and care for ourselves in the midst of life’s difficulties. This powerful message is a must-listen for anyone looking to transform their life through self-care and mindfulness.

Resources for Mindfulness, Meditation, Affirmations & Mindset

Transcript

Intro 00:01

Welcome to the Rehab Rebels podcast. Are you a rehab professional ready to transition to an alternative career? Hear inspiring stories from others just like you and learn the best ways to bridge your career gap. This podcast has you covered. Now here’s your host, doctor of physical therapy and podcaster, Tanner Welsh. 

Tanner Welsch 00:21

Welcome back to another episode. This episode is part five, the Transition Journey mini-series, where we’re exploring loving yourself, mindfulness, meditation, affirmations and mindset. If you haven’t yet listened to the previous episodes, go back to Transition Journey 1, which is episode 40, and go through them in order. They’ll build on each other and they’ll make more sense. The goal of this episode is for you to have both an understanding of why these topics are important to your life and to be able to start implementing them to develop a more personal relationship with yourself and the direction of your life. Now, these practices have helped me on my journey and you may find some benefit in them as well. What we’ll do is I’m going to share some personal stories around these topics. We’ll break down the definitions of each of these points and learn ways to implement these practices in our lives. Let’s begin. The really overall umbrella of this episode is about loving yourself and developing and nurturing a deeper relationship with yourself. Something that we all know about healthy relationships is they require intentional and continuous effort from all parties involved to grow and develop over time. This includes the relationship that we have with ourselves. 

01:37

I have a question for you, especially you if you’re a mom when is the last time you took time out of your busy schedule for you. The reason why I ask this, especially towards moms, is something I realized with talking with moms, and moms and my family. They’re often the last person to give to is themselves, because they’re giving to everybody else in their family. They’re spouse, they’re kids and they give, give, give. They’re often the last ones to really carve out any time for themselves or spend any time on them or with themselves. A question that I have for you is how can you be the best person mom spouse, best rehab professional if you’re not cultivating time for yourself In the mom realm? There’s some things that have come up when we boil things down, some topics that I’d like to really just crush and get to the bottom of, and one of those is mom guilt. And possibly, too, there’s some other factors, like some social norms and maybe some social traditions that say well, in order to be a great mom, you have to do this, this and this, for example, you have to be this way or do this certain activity, etc. And I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to conform to social norms or traditions to be a great mom, a great dad or a great parent. Some examples that have come up from talking to guests have really been pretty interesting, because many of the guests have transitioned to starting their own businesses, that have talked to their moms. They’ll come up to this point where they feel they should be, whether it’s doing the cleaning or cooking or actually the care for the children and if they don’t, they have this mom guilt and they talk about the mindset and the mind shift that they have had to go through and take in order for them to grow and progress with their life and their goals and, in this case, their businesses. 

03:27

And something that I believe it was Jaisa Sulit from episode 24 shared was that for her it really wasn’t an effective use of her time to both have her kids at the same time. She was wanting to work on her business at the same time. She wasn’t able to be present with really either one very effectively, and so what she did was she blocked out a chunk of time to have the kids be taken care of, have somebody take care of the kids for that block of time, and whether it’s two, four, five hours, whatever and then during that time she would focus solely on her business. And this worked out really good for her because she was able to be present within that time, focus on her business that she was working on while the kids were getting taken care of. And then, when the kids were done with the care and came back, she was able to be fully present with them because she got her work done with her business and it was really effective and she just had to work through this mindset shift, which I hear is pretty common, and that’s why I wanted to bring this up and really crush these things and share some different stories and experiences other moms have talked about and shared, and some other things that they’ve talked about is having boundaries, setting non-negotiables and not saying yes to everything, or some other examples. You can check out episode 21,. Monica Flores we talk about some mom stuff in there. Jayce LaSule we already mentioned episode 24. And Kara Infante, some military mom, episode 32. She would be a good one to check out too. 

04:49

A little backstory with my mindfulness meditation what caused that to begin? And then we’ll break into what is this mindfulness meditation, the personal story behind this was it really all started at the lowest point in my life when I had failed the boards, had no job, was living in my parents’ basement and my marriage was crumbling. So to get the full story on that, you can listen to episode 43 with what is your why? And I had to ask myself how did I get here? What caused me to get where I am today? And that was a big pull as to what brought me to practicing mindfulness and meditation and developing a more awareness of me and my thoughts and behaviors and things like that. 

05:32

Something that I grew up with was a dad that always said you know, life is about making mistakes, but it’s also about learning from those mistakes. And he said if you repeat the same mistakes, then you’re just a fool. So I really had to ask how do I reduce the odds of repeating past mistakes and improve the odds of more satisfactory life and a better overall life direction? And the simple answer is you know, learning from both our experiences from our mistakes and experiences that we make, but also from those of others. It’s funny because I see from a career example, I see a lot of people in these different groups of you know alternative careers or maybe non-clinical careers really jump and ship to going non-clinical. The grass is greener on the other side and that may be. You know it fills you up and the perfect match for you, but I think it’s really important to understand who you are, what your personality is like, and develop this deep connection with yourself so you can answer accurately Is this career move really what’s going to be best for me and is it really what’s filling me up, or am I basically repeating some form or fashion of something that I’ve already done in the past? I think it’s really important to get clarity on those things so we aren’t really wasting time and we’re really effective and intentional moving forwards with how we choose to go about live our lives and the careers we choose to pursue. 

06:53

There’s many forms of meditation, but the meditation that I’m going to talk about is mindfulness meditation and, like I said, this really all started with me wanting to better understand myself, how I got where I was, how not to repeat past mistakes and provide more insight about my life direction. There was a book that I came across years ago that was really helpful on this, and it’s called the Headspace Guide to Meditation and Mindfulness how Mindfulness Can Change your Life in 10 Minutes, and it’s from Andy probably going to butcher his last name Hood Income, p-u-d-d-i-c-o-m-b, and I’m going to read some passages out of this book that really helped find what mindfulness meditation is and solidify all that. Let’s start with what mindfulness is. Mindfulness is the ability to be present, to rest in the moment, whatever you’re doing, and meditation is the best way of learning this skill. So mindfulness doesn’t require you to change anything and becoming increasingly aware of your own mind, you may find you choose to make some changes in your external life, but that’s entirely up to you and there’s no need to give anything up or radically change your lifestyle in any way. 

07:58

Dramatic changes like this are rarely sustainable anyway, which is what makes a mindful way of living so achievable. You can keep living as you always have done if that’s what you want to do, and mindfulness is about learning how to change your experience of your lifestyle. It’s about finding a way to live as you are, but with an underlying sense of fulfillment, and meditation does not make you think. It only shines a big, bright light on your mind. You can see it more clearly. This comment comes up because sometimes, when people are first meditating, they associate the practice of meditation as actually what’s causing all these thoughts to appear. But really what’s often happening is there’s this background noise that’s always going on in our minds, which is thoughts or is our mind working? It is something interesting in the book that the practice of meditation does not actually make you think. It more shines the light on your mind and what your mind is doing. 

08:55

He goes on to say don’t make the mistake of thinking that all thoughts are bad. We just need to know how to relate to them. What you need to ask yourself is how much of your thinking is helpful, productive, and how much is unhelpful and unproductive, and only you know the answer to that. So a little bit of history too: Jon Kabat-Zinn, in 1994, is one of the most popular Western writers on this topic and the creator of the mindfulness-based stress reduction program. Jaisal Suleht actually went through. 

09:21

That program defines mindfulness as the awareness that arises through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally. I really, really like that definition of mindfulness. To meditate as a paradox thing is an exercise of non-doing. Generally speaking, the work is to become an observer of one’s inner world, exerting minimal effort and adopting a stance of non-judgment. Okay, meditation is a way to plant the seed of mindfulness and water it so that it grows throughout our lives. 

09:51

I’m going to give an analogy that was really good out of the book reference that I mentioned earlier about mindfulness and meditation. It’s a car analogy and the exercise is imagine that you’re sitting on the side of an interstate or a highway, a road or road with a lot of traffic going by and there’s many different shapes, styles, colors, brands, makes, models of different vehicles, and these vehicles are actually representative of our thoughts. Maybe there’s a vehicle that goes by that really catches our attention and we see ourselves just envisioning maybe even driving the vehicle or being in the vehicle and our attention is just solely focused on this vehicle and around the vehicle. And the analogy is, instead of being focused on being in the vehicle or driving the vehicle, the practice is to remain sitting and be present on the side of the road. So it’s not to get attached and super focused on our thoughts. It’s just to sit there, be aware, be present of what’s going on. Another example they give is with this car and highway interstate analogy is maybe you’re really trying hard to direct traffic out there and control your thoughts, so to speak, and that’s not the purpose of mindfulness meditation. It’s really just to remain seated on the side of the road and be present and aware, and I’m just observing the thoughts or the cars that are going by. That was a really useful analogy for describing the practice and what the purpose and the goal was. 

11:17

Something that I realized from this particular practice was yes, we have to talk about, I guess, my history with alcohol and then we’ll lead into it. I am four years over and when you started in college on the weekends and then really continued after college and it was really part of that work hard, play hard lifestyle and I tended to push the limits with things, so this really wasn’t the best and healthiest environment for me. And around the time actually, I was at the lowest point in my life and really started exploring mindfulness and meditation. I really realized that this alcohol consumption was something that I really couldn’t control and it was also around the time that I had a daughter. My daughter was born, I think, within a year this time so a lot of new stuff going on and I just decided it was best for me in my life to not drink and go about a lifestyle, a sober lifestyle, just to be a good example for her and for me, and it really wasn’t bringing anything or adding anything to my life. That’s something that I did and that was really at the start of my mindfulness meditation practice. But something that I realized even later, which I thought was really interesting, that I believe I’ve gained insight from actually doing mindfulness meditation, was that I realized when I feel I have no control over my life and my life is out of control. I tend to engage in risky behavior. It’s funny I didn’t see that whenever I was consuming alcohol, because that really just puts fuel on the fire, because we definitely don’t make great decisions whenever we’re drinking alcohol. I thought that was super interesting and insightful. So that’s a little bit of a backstory of some things that I’ve realized and gained from mindfulness meditation. 

13:00

Let’s go on to affirmations. What are affirmations? Affirmations are statements that we say to ourselves that can shift our minds in ways that can make us feel better about ourselves and our lives. They don’t make our thoughts come true. Rather, they help us think in ways that make our lives better. And the first time I actually came across this was super early on in episode two with Robert and Haley. We were talking a little about woo-woo stuff and affirmations came up, and Haley sure are telling me about different affirmations that she used in her life. I think she had something about finding a partner that she was looking for and different aspects of her life, and something that really stuck with me that she mentioned that I’d like to share with you is this affirmation right here, and it is everything is always working out for me and it’s super simple. I really love it and we’ll get to some more examples here in a minute. But that was one that I’ve really just enjoyed and try to be mindful of and aware and believe in. And it’s hard sometimes when things aren’t going your way. But really looking at the bright side and having that growth mindset which we’ll talk about later in this episode here and staying positive and learning and growing, I think, over time always seems to win out versus having a limited mindset. 

14:14

Let’s go into how maybe to use some of the affirmations. This comes from Psychology Today. I’ll post the link in the show notes. But here are some tips to get started. Say affirmations out loud, use the present tense, try not to highlight the negative, choose meaningful affirmations and everyone’s different, so it’s best to choose affirmations that feel best to you and you could try the affirmation, for example, I’m full of love. Someone else may prefer I am strong and capable, or I’m fine just the way I am, and so explore the following affirmations to see if you find some that feel good to you, and you can Google affirmations or examples and there’s the lists online that you can reference to if you’re looking for more, but here’s a list we’ll go through. 

14:59

I grow and improve every day. I appreciate the opportunities I’ve been given. My life is full of potential. I give myself permission to be myself. I have the power to change. I am courageous, I’m allowed to have needs and take up space. I have value, I am worthy of love, and I know if this is maybe the first time you’re hearing about affirmations. This does sound silly, woo-woo. I will say it’s different than if you’re just thinking these things versus saying them out loud. It goes with the power of voice and putting things verbally out into the world, so to speak. 

15:38

But like most things, these practices are not a quick fix, like you’re not going to see benefits right away. They take time to practice, cultivate, before you start seeing really some of the benefits. And what’s great is you can modify them to do what’s best for you, for example, these affirmations. Some affirmations may work for others but not for others, and vice versa. You really have to just have to decide which ones are best for you. There’s a caveat that these aren’t going to be quick fixes. They often take time to develop, cultivate and shift and really reap the benefits long term later down the road. So let’s dive into mindset. This is a collaboration with VeryWellMindcom and Psychology. Today We’ll have the links in the show notes here. 

16:21

Your mindset is a set of beliefs that shape how you make sense of the world and yourself. It influences how you think, feel and behave in any given situation, the way we sort out what is going on and what we should do. As people encounter different situations, their mind triggers a specific mindset that then directly impacts their behavior in that situation. It means that what you believe about yourself impacts your success or failure and can help spot opportunities, but can also trap us in self-defeating cycles. And this isn’t about all the beliefs we might hold. It is about the beliefs that make a difference in our lives, the beliefs that distinguish people who are successful and what they do versus those who continually struggle. For example, according to a Stanford psychologist, carol Dweck D-W-E-C-K, your beliefs play a pivotal role in what you want and whether you succeed in achieving them, and she popularized the idea of mindsets being by contrasting different beliefs about where our abilities come from. 

17:21

And this is where you may hear about the fixed mindset and the growth mindset, and we’ll dive into those now. If we have a fixed mindset and think our ability is innate, then a failure can be unsettling because it makes us doubt how good we are. On the other hand, if we have a growth mindset, then we expect that we can improve our ability and a failure therefore shows us that we need to improve, make improvements in ourselves. So let’s go over some examples here of a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset. So we’ll read down a list of fixed mindset examples. 

17:52

With a fixed mindset, either I’m good at it or I’m not. That’s just who I am. I can’t change it. If you have to work hard, you don’t have the ability. If I don’t try, then I won’t fail. That job position is totally out of my league. So now let’s look at the growth mindset list. I can learn to do anything I want. I’m a constantly evolving work in progress. The more you challenge yourself, the smarter you become. I only fail when I stop trying. That job position looks challenging. Let me apply for it. So some really good examples with the growth mindset versus fixed mindset and this is also from verywellmindcom. They talk about how to unfix a fixed mindset. 

18:32

While people with a fixed mindset might not agree, Dweck suggests that people are capable of changing their mindset, and here’s ways that they suggest doing that, and that’s focusing on the journey. I’m really bad at this. I need to take some notes and some take-homes here from this, but focus on the journey. An important factor when building a growth mindset is seeing the value in your journey. When you’re fixed on the end result, you miss out on all the things you could be learning along the way, and it’s a good take-home. If you’re struggling with a task, remind yourself that you just can’t master it yet. Integrating this word into your vocabulary signals that, despite any struggle, you can overcome anything. Also, pay attention to your words and thoughts. Replace negative thoughts with more positive ones to build a growth mindset and I love that because it goes back to affirmations right, it really references what we were talking about with affirmations there and take on challenges. 

19:23

Making mistakes is one of the best ways to learn. So instead of, you know, shying away from challenges, embrace them. A book referenced around this out is Mindset Update Edition Changing the Way you Think to Fulfill your Potential by Carol Dweck. Yeah, that wraps up this episode. Life’s a garden. Dig it, guys, Joe dirt. What seeds are you planting and cultivating in your life? So I encourage you all to invest in yourself, take risks, make mistakes, learn from your mistakes and those of others, be creative and have fun. Life’s a journey, not a destination. 

19:56

In our next episode it’ll be the last of the transition journey mini series we’re gonna talk about healthy relationships, environments and networks. Okay, and the end of this episode, our call to action, is Sharing the ways in which we love ourselves. Okay, and I’ll go first. Something that I had started doing at the end of last year, that I’ve wanted to do for years and just been putting off and off and just making excuses, is an activity which is yoga. I’ve really wanted to do yoga for a long time, and the goal for me isn’t so much of the cardiac workout, it’s more for feeling more centered and connected with myself, my body, in my mind, and a benefit too that I’ve noticed for me is it helps relieve some tension and stress that builds up in my body throughout the week. That’s little, my little call to action, a way in which that I love myself and would love to hear Ways that you love yourself. 

20:49

So go to Instagram and comment in the post for this particular episode, or, if you’re on YouTube for this episode, go down into the comment section and Comment. 

20:59

You know what do you do to love yourself, what are some you know practices or some things that you do and share with others. 

21:06

I invite you to click that subscribe button so you don’t miss out on any of these episodes coming out, especially this last solo episode for the transition journey mini series, and I’m talking with listeners to better understand the depth of this community. Maybe yourself are looking to you know, leave a clinical job or transition to a different career, and or you want to improve your finances to start your own business. How I can help you is by talking through your next career, finance or business move together, acting the sound board and discuss where you’re at or your goals are, providing any insights and tips from my own experience and or the guests that I’ve talked to and I’d be happy to help. So reach out, connect with me on Instagram, rehab rebels Podcasts and medium, or you can go to rehab rebels org and click on the contact tab and send me a message there. I hope this episode was helpful and you gained something from it for you and your life, and we will see you in the next episode. Take care. 

Outro 21:58

Thank you for listening to the Rehab Rebels podcast. If this podcast was useful, make sure to hit that subscribe button and leave a review. For more information about transitioning to alternative careers, head to rehab rebels dot org or follow us on Instagram at rehab rebels podcast. We’ll see you next time. 

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