Hello and welcome to episode four hundred and one of the Love Your Life Show. I’m Susie Pettit, a life relationship and parenting coach. By the end of this episode, you will know one of the most important things you can practice to become more emotionally mature and feel less emotional. Drama, suffering and reactivity. Sound good? Listen in.

Hi. This is the Love Your Life show with Susie Pettit, certified life and wellness coach. Join Susie as she helps you with your wellness and mindset so you can live a life you love. Let’s go Warriors.

Hello, Warriors, and welcome to episode four hundred and one. I am so excited to be here at episode four hundred and one with you. Last week in episode four hundred, I reflected on why I do this show and my intent and how to help you with it. And today, I want to continue that conversation through a more practical coaching lens, a sort of, you know, inner or an outer reflection of after four hundred episodes, what are the main things I want you to really learn and embody? What are the foundations that I want you to have and walk away with?

We are complex humans. We have a lot going on, which is why there are over four, you know, four hundred episodes of the love of your life show. And yet it really can be surprisingly simple. When I sat with the question of like, if my listeners practice just a few things, or if I could just send, you know, a couple different tools to people to help them feel less reactive, more in control of their lives, have less drama in their relationships, what would they be? And two things kept rising to the top. And even though I’ve talked about these two things over and over and over, I sometimes wonder if their importance gets lost in the weeds. And so today, I wanted to double underline these two skills for emotional maturity and emotional regulation.

And so the first one that I’m like a big drum beat, bullhorn, etc. skill that I would love everyone to just get more and more skilled with is to learn to tell the difference between facts and thoughts. Learning to slow down enough to distinguish between what is actually happening in our lives versus what we think about what is happening in our lives.

And before you tune out, say you’re one of my OG warriors who’s listened to every episode and you’re like, yes, Susie, I know this. I’ve listened. Let me just say and ask you to stay in here with the mindset of like, what can I learn from this? Because this is something I still practice and will be practicing until the day that I die. This is lifelong work and the more we can really get in. We’ve had so many years of believing that our thoughts, our feelings came from the the facts of our lives. That the more that we just sit and marinate and be like, oh yeah, let me see where I’m doing this again, because we will be doing it over and over again, the better for all of us, right?

So whether you’re an OG warrior and you’ve listened to all four hundred episodes or this is your first episode, let’s start at what the heck do I mean? But by knowing the difference between facts versus thoughts, facts are the neutral things that happen in our lives. A car honks at us. Our husband comes home late. Our teen comes home from school and goes straight to her room. Those are facts. If someone else were in the room, they would agree those things happened.

Another way to think about it. If a movie camera was recording, what would it capture? It would capture those moments. It would capture the the car honking. It would capture the husband walking in the door at six thirty. When the schedule says six, it would capture the teen going straight to their room. That’s how we know they’re facts.

Then our brain does what brains do, and it does it really quickly, and it gives us thoughts. It starts to make up stories about those facts. And those thoughts create and those stories create how we feel.

So let’s slow this down a little. This meta skill. And let’s just look at that car honking example. Okay, the car honks. What do we think? What do we feel? Maybe we think, ah, I didn’t do anything wrong. And you feel tight, defensive. Maybe a little righteous. Anger. Screw you, buddy type energy. Or maybe you think, oh, yeah, my bad. I did kind of cut them off. You feel sort of open. You’re like, yeah, yeah, I do that sometimes. Maybe a little sheepish. Give them a little wave. Or maybe you think I did cut them off, but not that badly. They must be having a really rough day. And you feel calm or compassionate or you’re like, oh my gosh, you’re right. I totally messed up. I suck at driving and you feel shame. Same fact the car honked. And for totally different emotional experiences like road rage, compassion, shame, like oh my goodness, all because of how we thought about it.

And can you see how that person who’s in the car and then goes about their day? Can you see how separating out the facts and the thoughts might be really helpful? This is so much of what coaches train like me help with in coaching to start noticing how it’s the way we’re thinking that’s creating the way we’re feeling. Just a little bit of awareness. Awareness between the difference between thoughts and facts. No need to change anything or judge ourselves for thinking that way. We can keep feeling how we want to feel totally fine. Just notice.

Seriously, the longer we can sit in that noticing, not judging ourselves as a sort of compassionate watcher, like a coach. Like I’m always I’m like, yeah, I get it. I see how you’re feeling that way. When you think that way, be the compassionate watcher of your mind. The more we grow our emotional maturity and learn the skill of emotional regulation.

All right, think about it. When I can say like, oh, I was reactive there. I was thinking how he shouldn’t have honked. And that made me feel tight and icky. Now I have something to work with. Then I can use tools like alternative explanations or cognitive restructuring, like things that we get from the podcast roadmap. If you’re a new listener, grab that SMB dot com slash roadmap.

Okay. We can, we can like when we sort of step back and see that it’s our thinking that’s creating how we feel. It gives us something to do. Like it gives our brain something to hang on to instead of feeling in this disempowered victim place. And it’s just like, ah, it feels very like anxiety provoking. Like, like my mood is dependent on what other people do. Right.

So why would we want to practice this meta skill? Because it puts us back in the driver’s seat of our own life. No real pun intended. Well, sort of. But when we realize I feel this way because of what I’m thinking, rather than I feel this way because of what someone did, we step more back into that. Like Victor of our life, we feel empowered. The other way, our anxious brain is like child mode. Life is scary. People are dangerous. I have to control everything out there to feel okay in here. But when we see that our emotions come from our thoughts, not other people or circumstances, our nervous system settles. We don’t have to be so hyper vigilant. We have agency.

So slowing down to figure out what was the fact and what am I thinking about. That fact helps us be less reactive and more emotionally mature. It reminds us that how we’re feeling isn’t fixed. It’s not set in stone. And yet, right now, come back to me if your mind has gone away. This brings up something really important. When people learn that their thoughts create their feelings, the instinct is often like, okay, great, then let’s change all the thinking about these uncomfortable emotions. Like give me a different thought to think. But dear ones, that’s not the goal. Life is not about feeling happy all the time. Maybe if someone honks at us, we don’t want to carry that around all day.

But let’s take the example of a husband walking in the door at six thirty is what the video camera showed when his last text said he’d be home at six. So here’s the fact. And we could have many possible thoughts. Same fact, many thoughts. I’m going to just assume a heteronormative thing here. So the wife might think he probably had a really hard day and feel compassionate and not say anything she might think. Here we are waiting again, not feeling considered and feel angry. She might think a bit of a mix, like, I know work gets intense, but I wish she’d communicate and feel frustrated and sad. Or she might think, there he goes again, living a self-focused life and feel contempt and resentment. That’s a wide range of emotions. Again, compassion, angry, frustrated. Resentment.

But here’s the part that can feel counterintuitive. I, as a coach, am not going to coach you to get into a feeling good place about this. I’m going to ask, how do you want to feel about your husband being late? Do you want your husband to be on time? Because in about half of our lives and our life situations, uncomfortable emotions are exactly what we need to take the action that we need in our life for healthy relationships.

What the what? Seriously, you might think of those examples I just gave you and think like, oh yeah, we all need to be that first woman who’s like, oh yeah, he probably had a hard day and okay. And just shoves it under the rug. Never considers herself or what she’s modeling to the kids. That self-abandonment. Here you go. Don’t worry about me. Over time, that will lead to resentment and emotional shutdown. Whereas anger, frustration, and sadness can be really healthy. Signals. Our feelings are here to tell us something about what’s happening in our lives.

Depending on your values and what you’re setting up for a family structure, I might want you to feel and to be able to sit in anger and frustration a little more. If a woman has the tools to process these emotions, she can notice the anger, soften it in herself, regulate herself so that later in the day she could respond intentionally and say something like, “I notice I felt really angry when you came home late. Eating dinner together as a family matters a lot to me, and when you’re late, I start to tell myself, we don’t matter. I know that might not be true for you, but it’s hard sometimes. Can we talk about a plan so this doesn’t keep happening?” That’s emotional maturity, not bypassing emotions, allowing yourself to have the uncomfortable emotions.

Life is fifty fifty. You’re not exploding with them either, but using them wildly. You’re not sitting there at the dinner table with the kids like slamming down your nap. Oh, here’s dad late again. Okay, talk about childish. I’ve done it. But that’s we’re like trying to get the kids to collude with us in our child brain instead of regulating our emotions, okay? Or we just have or we don’t stand up for what we think is appropriate and just model to the kids all sorts of other stuff. But emotional maturity is not always having these like happy, feel good emotions. It’s, it’s being able to feel the wide range of emotions, not bypassing them, not exploding with them. And it all starts with recognizing the difference between what’s happening in our lives and our thoughts about what’s happening in our lives. Learning that our thinking is responsible for how we feel, versus thinking the thing happening in our life makes us feel what we’re feeling. That’s where empowerment lies. It really is.

And yet learning it can feel heavy. Which is why I love the love your life, school and coaching people with this. I know when I first learned this and when I was first practicing, and even now I can still like, like at first I was like, oh, yay! Okay, that feels like way safer to me that I’m responsible for how I feel. But then I’d really quick get into either some toxic positivity, like talking myself out of my thoughts and being more like that woman in the first example, like it’s all okay here when it wasn’t okay with me, or I’d get in the reverse of just sort of like, oh my God, like shaming myself. It sort of felt better to be able to blame others, I guess is one way to say it in a whiny like, that’s them. They need to change. My husband needs to change. My father needs to change. My boss needs to change. Like pointing out with that finger. Yeah. Can you see how that’s sort of childish, whiny, like people are gonna be people. And it’s also disempowering. We have one finger pointing out. We have three pointing back at us. We get to take some responsibility instead of giving them all the control over how we feel. I don’t want that.

I don’t want my husband being thirty minutes late to ruin my whole day. Or the car honking to knock me off my game. We didn’t even talk about the other example. The teenager going to her room. I don’t want to give a teenager control over my feelings. Right. And with the example of my husband and teenager, which I can talk about in coaching, I want to feel some uncomfortable emotions. My uncomfortable emotions are telling me that a boundary has been crossed. A value of mine has been knocked off. Super important and empowering work.

And this is a foundational skill. Learning the difference and continuing to remind yourself the difference in daily practice between the difference between circumstances and thinking, okay, we have hard wired into us years and years of thinking that they, that actually the circumstance, the facts in our life create how we feel. And so this is why it takes daily practice. This is why ever since I learned this in like twenty, I don’t know, twelve or twenty fourteen, I’ve been meeting weekly with my coach so she can help me, not only support me in my feelings and my, you know, like when I’m feeling the appropriate uncomfortable feelings. But she can also show me when I’m sort of caught in that, like that whiny little child and trying to hold others responsible for what’s going on in a really gentle way. It’s so helpful. And it’s where empowerment lies. It is the backbone of emotional maturity. And if you can sit with this, you really will have a lot of growth.

And I’m actually going to pause here for today. I fully planned to talk about two foundational things in this episode. And now I’m like remembering who I am and how I talk and how I love getting into like the detail of this. There’s so much to say about this stuff. So we’re going to call this at part one next week in episode four hundred two, I’ll come back and share the second foundational meta skill that when paired with this absolute, like it’s the thing that I want you guys to walk around with. So definitely worth the wait. And definitely you have things to that you can work on and practice and be aware of this week. Seeing where you’re, you’re mixing and combining the thoughts with the facts.

So come back next week, we’ll keep building this together. And then this week, let’s go. You’ve got this, I love you, I’m supporting you with it. Thank you for being here, dear listener. Thank you for being the type of person that is learning the difference between your facts and your thinking, and not walking around being this activated child all the time. You really are making this world a better place. And I’m so honored that you listened into this show. I am sending you a great big Susie supportive hug.

Thank you for listening to the Love Your Life Show. If you want to hear more from Susie and support the show, be sure to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes. Also, leave a review and share this podcast with friends and family. You’ll get a Warriors.