How to STOP Giving Up

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How to STOP Giving Up!

Tune in to this week’s podcast for a pep talk on how to stop giving up. I feature two foundational pieces of keeping our word to ourselves and having a future different than our past. These two pieces have helped me to stop giving up in my life and are what I use to help many women stop giving up in their own lives too. I can’t wait for you to listen!

Current Beliefs:

First and foremost, it is crucial to think about what you currently believe about yourself and what you believe is possible for you. Most have a small window of possibility for their life. We look at our past as evidence for what our future can be. Our brain’s motivational triad supports this pattern of thinking yet it is not helpful for our overall life satisfaction and happiness.

When we are learning how to stop giving up, it is extremely important to be aware of our current thoughts (aka beliefs) so that we can interrupt our thought drama. I speak in the podcast of examples of how everything around us was once impossible to the human brain. To our cave women ancestors. Anything great that’s happened in this world happened because someone expanded their lens of possibility. That is the sort of thinking that we get to tap into when we learn how to stop giving up.

How to Stop Giving Up? Redefine FAILURE

We stop giving up when we take the negativity out of our definition of failure. Forward progress emerges when we learn how to not judge and berate ourselves when we hit a roadblock or experience a setback. Instead of looking at a setback with harsh inner criticism and evidence of our future possibility, we consider our setback with a curious mindset. The better we can get with quote unquote failure the greater and better our lives will be.

Quick review and recap: we have 65-80,000 thoughts a day. Those thoughts are thoughts about the past, the present or the future. Our brain is wired to spend most of our time thinking of the past. We look to the past to predict what our life will be like in the future. This is normal – our brain is predicative, it likes to predict. And, if you’re a podcast listener you know I speak of how our primitive brain is not wired for our overall happiness and success. Rather, to live a life we love, to feel better in our days, we get to override our primitive brain. If this is new to you, grab the podcast roadmap as this is a foundational piece of a life well lived and the roadmap gives you a step by step listening guide to get started feeling better asap.

Future or Past Focus?

Pause for a moment and take inventory of your thoughts yesterday: are your thoughts more about the past or the future? more time thinking about – the past? Or The future? Unless you’ve been working with me or another coach for a while, you probably are past-focused. You might say things like “this is what I always do” or “I always do this”. You look at your past to determine what’s possible for you in the future and keep creating more of the same. You keep recreating the same version of yourself. We keep creating the same life. Further, if we keep thinking these thoughts, we will keep getting the same results in our lives.

Clearly, there’s no need to shame ourselves as this is how the brain is wired and when unexamined, our brain repeats old thoughts and old patterns. However, to learn how to stop giving up, join me in my efforts to stop this patterning. Today we begin to consciously choose to focus more on our future and what we want to believe is possible for our life than focusing on our past as evidence for what is possible.

How Failure Tolerance Helps You Stop Giving Up

After we’ve chosen to focus more on the future and what’s possible for us, it’s time to reframe how we view setbacks. What if failure is no big deal? What if you’re just either winning or learning? In this week’s episode, I give specific examples of how failure is exactly what you think about it. How about we adopt Edison’s mindset from the quote pictured earlier in this post?

We have the power to decide what failure means. If you choose to think you’re only succeeding or learning, there is no failure. Furthermore, if you’re committed to believe in your future and your goal, anything that happens along the way is learning that moves us forward.

Attempts are what move us forward. We learn by our attempts. We learn by our actions. Our actions move us forward. Whether we get the result we want or not, we are moving forward.

Choose You!

Ultimately, how we stop giving up is by changing the narrative in our head. The thoughts in our head are sentences we choose to think. When we are thinking critical, judgmental, and negative thoughts it is much easier to give up on ourselves and our dreams.

Choose to view failure differently so we can stop giving up. Choose what you want to believe about your future. No matter what has happened these last 30 days, 30 weeks or 30 years, what do you want to believe is possible for you? One of our biggest hand cuffs is fear based negative thinking.

When we look at the past as evidence of what is possible for us, we are confused. The past only shows us what we were thinking to get the results we got. It doesn’t show us future possible thoughts, it shows us our limited or faulty thinking. Allowing our brain to look at the results we have in our life as evidence of what’s possible for us instead of evidence of what we’re thinking.

Anything is possible for us. If we believe it. If you believe you can stop yelling, you can,. If you believe you can stop worrying, you can. If you believe you can lose the weight, you can. If you believe you can enjoy parenting teens, you can. The opposite is also and absolutely true too.

I vote for. I believe in you. I have a group just for you.