197. The Sentence that is running your life

0:00Come to the Becoming You Show, where limits get torched and possibility takes the mic. I'm Leah Rowley, human in permanent beta, neuro strategist, mom to three amazing humans, married to one legendary soul, and your no-fluff permissions lead to stop waiting. Every week we rewire rain patterns, smash, hand me down mindsets, and dive into the daring, identity shifting conversations, most people dodge. Ready to turn potential into proof? Grab your pen. Your next chapter starts now. Hello, my beautiful friends. How are you? Welcome to the Becoming You Show. I'm your host, Leah Rowling, and I am delighted. I'm delighted that you're here, and I'm really excited about doing another series. I've heard from you about the relationship series and the last rant series, and I love

1:04offering up a series for you, and so that's what we're going to do this month. This month is all about clutter, right? When I talk about clutter, I like to think about clutter as I like to think about it this way. I believe that the life that you want, the life that you really, really want, is buried underneath everything that you don't. Everything that you don't want is what I'm putting into this conversation around clutter. And so we're talking today specifically about thought clutter, mental clutter, and we'll work through the month talking about other types of clutter. Most people, when we think about clutter, we think about closets and pantries and desks and phone apps, and I promise you we'll get to that.

2:05But there's a reason why I want to start with thought clutter first, because I believe that your closet is a result of this type of clutter as every other clutter. So I don't believe that people lose their life to a catastrophe. I believe that they lose their life to what I'm going to call a sentence today, one sentence, right, that they made up in about a second. And then they never went back and checked that sentence, right? I've literally watched friends a marriage come apart over a sentence, right? Not in a fair, not money, not some huge betrayal. One person decided that the other one meant something by what they said, right? And then they spent 11 plus years defending that decision to make it mean what they made

3:05it mean, okay? I've watched people walk away from work that they were good at over a sentence, an assumption, an interpretation, right? And they didn't say hi in the hallway, and there it is. And eight months later, they're gone. And they'll tell you that the culture was bad, and they'll believe it for themselves, okay? I've watched parents lose their grown kids over a sentence, not a fight, just a decision about what that kid's distance meant, which then had them acting in a way that made that distance worse, okay? So that's where we're starting this month, in your head, not in your closet, right? And I want to tell you why, and I kind of teased it in at the very beginning, okay? Because a month called clutter, right? You probably expected me to open with the closet, with the garage, with files and paperwork, right? But this one runs underneath everything else. You can clean out a closet without understanding this, right?

4:07You can buy a beautiful new planner without understanding this. You can't get your actual life back without it. So here's my claim for this next little time that we have. And you can decide if, at the end of this, I made it. I honored the claim. I don't believe you're overwhelmed by your life, okay? You're overwhelmed by what you've decided your life means. And most of us have never gone back and checked a single one of those decisions, not a single one of those sentences. So today, we're clearing out the sentences. We are doing sentence management, okay? So I want to tell you a story first, because I think it kind of sets the stage. It's a client of mine, married a long time, amazing human, amazing human. And there was something on his wife's calendar that kind of made him uneasy, okay?

5:10An ordinary appointment outside in, nothing anybody would look at twice, right? And so what he did in this unease of an ordinary appointment is he asked, he asked if he could just stop by while she was there. Just ahead of time, not an ambush, not a, I got you, not a, and in that request, in that ask, he got a yes, right? Everything on her end was easy. There was no pushback, no defense of nothing, right? He got every single thing he asked for. He got the yes, that's what he was asking for, or no. He still felt terrible, right? And here's what I want you to see, and this is what we miss. If the appointment was causing the feeling, then handling the appointment should have fixed the feeling. He handled it, he got the yes, didn't feel better. So what's going on? Well, what was going on was the question really wasn't a question.

6:12And we had to come about that in this session, right? It was a test. And there was exactly one answer that would have passed, or so we think. And that was enthusiasm, right? She said sure. Yes, she said yes, sure, yes. But sure was never going to pass. He had already decided that her answer was going, what her answer was going to mean before she even opened her mouth, right? And then he said this, which I thought was always interesting. He said, yeah, but she said yes, and it was in a monotone way, in a monotone way, okay? Monotone is a read. That's not what's true. The fact was the recordable fact, the camera ready fact was she said yes, or sure, whatever she said. That's a fact. Monotone is a read, right? That's something that he's putting on it in his second. And then he walked around experiencing like it had actually been part of the room, part

7:14of his experience, right? And here's the other thing that I want to offer up to you as an angle to see here is when people know or when they when they when they feel like they're getting checked off, checked up on and I don't know her model. I don't know what she was navigating, but I'm guessing the interest in going to her appointment probably made her go a little flat. That's just what people do, right? So the thing that he did to feel better is the very thing that produced the flatness. And then he took that flatness as proof that he should then feel worse, right? He built it, but not on purpose. And that's what we're going to do today. We're going to build, we're going to build how we think on purpose. So let's talk about what's underneath all of that, right? This isn't a character flaw. It's not just him. It's all of us. There's a sequence and I talk about it a lot on the show because it's really important understanding of the mind.

8:17There's a sequence that happens when we process a situation, when we process an event, when we process life. And it runs whether or not you know about it. It is running right now as you're listening to this. Something happens, even this conversation, and you think something about it. And that thought makes you feel something, and that feeling makes you do something, and then what you do create your results. So something happens. He sees an appointment. That's the fact. He thinks something is off about that appointment. That makes him feel off. His off thinking makes him feel off, okay? And the thing that the off feeling made him, quote unquote, made, right? Invited him, prompted him to take action on the thing that felt uneasy. And so he decided that he would ask request to be at that meeting. If being at that meeting or that appointment would have made him feel better than it would

9:21have made him feel better in the yes, it did it, okay? Because it wasn't the appointment that made him feel uneasy. That's the point. It was his uneasy thinking about the appointment, okay? That's it. That's the whole thing. And this isn't just a nice idea that I came up with. It's not my philosophy. It's the order your brain process an event, okay? So here's the part that nobody was ever taught, okay? There's the situation and the thought. And those are very, there's two very different things. Something happened and then you decided what it meant. Two things, not one. There's space in between them. But most of us have never seen that space in our lives. We were raised to experience those as one thing. Something happens and it means this. Same record, same motion and it feels like an event. It feels like a fact because it shows up like one event. But I'm here to tell you friends, it's two. And when you can't see that space, here's what your life turns into. It turns into a reaction.

10:22Things happen and they hand you your day. Your mood gets assigned to you by traffic, by a ton of text, by somebody's face, in a meeting who's thinking about their own kid and wasn't thinking about you at all. Right? You're not driving your life, you're getting driven by it. By a thousand small decisions that you made so fast that you never even watched yourself make them. That's what I mean by thought clutter. It's not that you think too much, it's that you've got years, right? These stacked up intertwined situations and interpretations and you read every one of them like fact and you act as if they are facts, right? And here's what it, here's what makes it even worse than a messy closet. You can see a messy closet. You can walk into your closet and be like, oh my gosh, I have nothing to wear, I can't find my favorite shirts because they're, they're jam packed in with all of the other. You can witness that and you're like, well, I should probably clear out my clutter or clear out my closet.

11:24But how many times do you like, right? I really should clear out the clutter in my head. How many? How many of you, how many times have you offered that up to yourself? Probably maybe never because you can't see it. It doesn't feel like a pile of thoughts. It feels like the truth. It feels like you know what's going on. It feels like being perceptive. It and a lot of us are honestly a little proud of it. We call it like reading people or I just have this gut sense or I have this, right? And maybe so. But if that gut sense makes you feel awful, then I'm not sure how helpful that is. Okay? So I want to give you a picture because I think this one might stick. So I want you to think about the front door, right, of your house. Okay? How does a house actually get cluttered? Right? How does your house, the house that you have right now, I want you to think about it. How does it get cluttered? It's almost never one big thing. Nobody wakes up and fills up their house on a Tuesday.

12:28Okay? It's the stuff that comes in, right? That comes in at a quicker pace, then goes out. And nowhere in that whole process does anything get a decision, right? There's no moment at the door where somebody holds, you know, stands guard and stops and goes, hmm, do we need this? Right? Is this a useful thing to bring into this house? Do we already have one? Do we already have a useful thing that works, right? And where would it go? Where, where if we don't have it and it would be useful, then where is that useful thing of use? That's it. There's no decision at the door for most of us in our house. Your mind works the same way. Most of us don't have a door on it at all, right? Something happens and it walks right in, wearing whatever meaning it came with. And you never check, you never check that meaning where it came from, right? Did it come from the event? Did it come from your past, right?

13:31And it stacks up day after day and year after year. And after enough years, it stops looking like the stuff you carried in. It just looks like your life. It just looks like this is how things are, right? That space between what happened and what you made it mean, that's your door. That's your door. Building that door is the work, right? Quite, quite frankly, honestly, that's the whole month, right? And I promise you we're going to get to your garage and your house and your pantry. It's the last episode. But again, I'll tell you why because it reframes everything. Your house is at the end of the line. Your closet is at the end of the line, right? It is the results of letting things in in your mind. Your house is the result. It's what came out the other end, which is exactly why cleaning it doesn't stick. You can spend a Saturday in September on that closet and you feel incredible.

14:33And Sunday you're taking pictures. February, it's full again. And you decide the problem is that you're not disciplined. You're plenty. You're plenty disciplined. You cleaned up the end and you never touched the beginning. You never touched, you never touched upstream from the behavior that creates all of the stuff, right? It's how the organization industry got to be a billion dollar business. While houses stay such as full, it's not a scam. The bins are lovely. They're just working on the wrong end of the line. They're just working at the result, right? They're just trying to organize the stuff, but organizing the stuff doesn't change the behavior that consumes the stuff. Yeah? So we're going to go to the front. That's where we're going. So there's one question. When we begin to separate out sentences from thoughts, this door that we're building, we're building a door for our mind.

15:39And it requires one question. And that is what is true here? What is a fact? What could be recorded? What could be presented in a court of law? What would a camera have picked up? That's the one question. That is the door between an S and your thoughts. A fact is what a camera records. What two people standing in the room would both have agreed happen? Everything else is a thought. And as you know, thoughts are optional. And that's the good news. So let me walk you through the client issue that I gave you at the very beginning. She said sure in a monotone way, the camera picks up sure. That's it. The camera picks up sure. And then all of the thought clutter comes on the other side of sure.

16:42That's just the nonsense of our brain. That we just have to be on to ourselves about. And we get to look at all of those all of that nonsensical thinking as junk mail. When you get all of your mail as you're going through it, as you're going through it, you want to keep the stuff that's back. And if it's junk, if it's thoughts that make you feel heavy and uncertain and frustrated, then that just becomes recyclable. You just throw it in the garbage. Okay. He's always behind. Okay. That's a thought that we run. He's always late. The camera picks up one person, one morning, setting up at 907. Always is a thought. And listen to how hard always is working in that sentence. Anytime you hear yourself say always or never, that's usually a thought. That's usually a thought standing up very straight to pretend that it's a fact.

17:42It wants to sell you that it's a fact it isn't. It's just a thought. Okay. She doesn't respect my time. Camera picks up. She came in 15 minutes after the time that she was supposed to and she didn't text. That's what the camera picked up. Respect is not visible. A camera has never once recorded what somebody thinks about you in here. They're ignoring me. That's a thought. It's a thought that I just kind of came up with this this morning with a client. So what she said, they're ignoring me. Okay. The camera picks up. The message was sent on Tuesday and there was no reply by Thursday. That's what a camera picks up. They're ignoring me. Thought clutter. Right. My kid doesn't want to have a relationship with me. Thought clutter. Camera picks up. Three days, no phone call. That's the fact. Best is a story. And that story is making you act in a way that probably turns these three days into 20.

18:47So see how fast that is. None of those took any effort at all. That's the problem. This isn't hard. It's automatic. It's the automation of it is exactly what makes it so invisible. And maybe some of you have been spending this time in this conversation wanting to maybe discount argue with me. For the last, I don't know, however long we've been talking. Okay. And you're thinking, Leah, some things are real problems. They're real problems. They're not just thought errors. Okay. And you're right. They are. Right. If something serious is in front of you, that's real. And it deserves a real conversation in real action. I'm not asking you to shut off your judgment or by or be naive or let things slide. Here's the difference. Okay. When it's real, you look at it and you do something about it. There is a next step and you take it. When it's a sentence, nothing ever settles it.

19:49Right. You get the yes and you feel worse. You get the reassurance and it rears off by dinner. You get exactly what you ask for and somehow it doesn't count. That's your tell. And the fix doesn't fix anything. Right. I want you to think and imagine and invite yourself to consider that you're never working on the right thing. Okay. So I want to close this by talking about probably the hardest version of this. Okay. Because somebody listening has it. Okay. Somebody for sure has it. Okay. Somebody in your life is not going to change. Why am I bringing this up? Well, we're going to talk about relational clutter later, but it's a big one that comes up all the time. It creates so much thought, confusion and clutter, so much. So much of our thoughts are thinking about other people and how if they would change, it would be better. And if they were different, it would be better. There's so much relational clutter as it relates to thoughts.

20:52Okay. And so I'm going to tease it out in this one. Okay. Maybe in your life is not going to change, right? Maybe they've told you, right, that they're not going to change. Maybe you've just watched it long enough to know. Maybe it's an aging parent or a sibling or a person whose health or history means the version of them that you keep waiting for is not coming. Maybe it's maybe it's a child. Maybe it's a spouse, a significant other. Maybe it's a friend. Okay. It doesn't matter who it is. I'm sure you've got that person in your mind right now and you're like, they're just never going to change. Okay. I've noticed this in myself and in the people that I work with, when someone won't change, okay. I want you to hear me say this. Most of the pain isn't actually about them. It's not. It's about wanting them to be different than they are. And those are two separate hurts and we run them together. Okay. There's the real one, right?

21:52The one's, the one that's just loss, right? And maybe that loss looks like you don't get the relationship that you wanted. You don't get the relationship that you thought you were going to have, right? You don't get the parent that you thought you needed, right? Or you're watching somebody you love become less of who they are. Okay. That one is real and you should let it be real. That's not clutter. That's grief and the grief belongs to you. And then there's the pile on top of that grief. All of the judgments that they should be handling this better or she should have gotten help years ago or why won't they just do this or why can't they just do this and how many times do I have to ask them, right? We put all of our judgments on the way that they should operate. You've heard me call it a manual before, like a rule book. Even if they signed it, even if they agreed to it, has nothing to do with them and has to do, then it becomes a breach of contract, not a breach of our ability to love them. Right? So I want you to try this sometime as an exercise, not as a punishment.

22:55I want you to write down every judgment that you're holding about that person, all of them, and I want you to read the list. It's usually a lot heavier than you expected. Okay. And almost none of it is helping them. It's almost always costing you. Okay. It's almost always costing you. So I want you to find yours. Okay. I want you to find yours. Where do you find your thought clutter? Where do you find it? First, most easy, like talk about an apple, like low hanging fruit. That's what I was trying to say. The person who irritates you most. Okay. Right? Maybe not the person who wronged you. Okay. The one who gets under your skin way out of proportion to anything they've actually done. Right? That's running on the sentence. And it's usually about you, not them. Okay. What did you decide they think of you? Right? You'll hear how thin it is in a second outside of your head.

23:58Okay. That's easy thought clutter. The person who irritates you. Right? Again, it's not the person irritating you. You have irritating thoughts about them. That's good to know. The thing you keep explaining. That you keep needing proof for you to be right about your feeling awful. Okay. You know the one. You've told four people. You re-argue it in the shower. And you're still explaining. Right? You're still explaining something. You're not working it out. You're defending a decision that you already made. So what is the decision? Okay. And the last easy thing that's really accessible is the old thing that still sings. Stings. Right? Something finished. He's talking about it anymore. And it can take you out of your Tuesday. Okay? So that is the work that I want you to do until next week. Clean up the clutter. Clean it up. Right? Examine your thoughts. Think about what you're thinking about.

24:58Do a thought audit. Don't trust your thoughts to be beneficial. Like scrutinize every thought for how it makes you feel. For how you show up as the person in this life that you get to live thinking that thought. Right? And if you need help, if you want help examining your own mind, practicing the strategies for how to think, really creating quality thinking about your life on purpose, not by default. Be organizing the mind in a philosophy that allows you to lead and love to the biggest extent that you can. Join us in the membership. If you're not in there, get in there. If you want to just dabble, our academy just launched, you can get courses really inexpensively

26:00for the work that we do, the work that I teach here. Love this podcast moves something. Get into the lab. Download a course. Work on your life. Work on it. We spend a lot of time in it. Working on it means examining the thoughts that we're in. Working on it means deciding those quality thoughts on purpose. We live in our life 99% of the time. I want to give you permission, not that you need it for me to work on it. Okay. So get in the lab. Download a course. Your life deserves it. Right? You matter enough to work on it. And until next time, have a beautiful, amazing, wonderful day. We'll talk about emotional clutter next week. Talk to you soon, everybody. Bye. If this episode cracked something open, go ahead.

27:00Let it. And then head to learrollingcoaching.com and grab the tools to rewire the story and reclaim your future. It is yours. And then share this with someone who's still waiting to be chosen, still waiting for permission and remind them they don't need a breakthrough that they are the breakthrough. Until next time, my beautiful friends, invest in you and keep becoming.