EP 213 Minisode: Small Emotions Have Big CONsequences
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Hello everyone. So I do a daily podcast called Coffee with Colleen inside my emotional sobriety coaching program. These are short, sweet mini-sodes that either give you an inside look at something I’m going through in my own life or a simple, easy strategy that you can implement or both. You may hear me reference other content that only my clients have access to. So if you’re interested in learning more about my program,
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get in the show notes and schedule a discovery call with me or my team. My name is Colleen and I’m a mindful drinking coach helping high achieving professional women permanently reduce their alcohol consumption by 80%. Join me each week for evidence-based holistic strategies to regulate your nervous system, balance your dopamine and activate the growth mindset that makes you so powerful in other areas of your life.
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so you can stop worrying about losing control and trust yourself again. Get happy, not sober. It’s not about the alcohol.
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I want to talk to you about how tiny little emotions that don’t even register on your radar can have such a powerful impact in the reality of your life. We create our reality. We see what we think we see, literally. Like our brain is always searching for evidence of what we think is true.
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95 % of what we think is subconscious. They are the assumptions that we’ve learned over time. If this, then that. That’s what an emotion is. It’s a memory. It’s a learned lesson that has been encoded into our physical body. And we just naturally follow whatever the rule was that was formed without having a conscious awareness or having to make a decision.
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You know, all of your beliefs were once just thoughts and ideas. None of your beliefs are true. Beliefs are just rules that you interpreted about yourself or about the way the world works. And now you think they’re true. A belief is a thought you no longer question. It’s really no different than a thought, except you’ve thought it so many times that now it just looks like the wallpaper. It’s just one of the things that that’s the way it is.
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We tend to think of our emotions as these big, outsized, energetic things, you know, where we get mad or we get frustrated or we get scared or we get excited or whatever it is. We think of our emotions as the things that we feel that we have to deal with. But those are just the tip of the iceberg. Most of our emotions don’t ever make it into conscious awareness. And I want to tell you a cute little story.
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that shows just what a big deal it is to miss your emotions, your assumptions, the biases, and what a powerful impact that can have. So we’re going through a big changeover in the back end. We got a new CRM. I don’t even know what that means. Customer something management. I don’t know. I’m figuring it all out.
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We have a new domain and we’re sending emails and it’s going glitchy and as you would expect, nothing is easy. We have to work through a lot of the snags. And because I have done this before and my emotions inform me that you don’t just move your entire system in one felled flip of a switch. So I instructed the consultant to phase our transition with sending emails. And this first phase,
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we’re just sending emails to my existing clients because I know everybody. I can weed through, you know, who shouldn’t be on the list or, you know, personal preferences in terms of opens or unsubscribes, all of that. And so yesterday, one of my team members reached out and gave me a name of somebody and said, this person has unsubscribed from all of the lists, which means she’s not getting any of the emails and she’s an active client. I know her.
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And that kind of took me by surprise. And my immediate reaction was, gosh, why doesn’t she want to get the emails? Is she writing us off? She’s not going to come to any more of the calls? Gosh, I haven’t seen her in a while. I wonder if something happened. I assumed something was wrong and that this was intentional. That was just my first gut reaction. That was my emotional.
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reaction, something must be wrong. And within 30 seconds, I caught that assumption, remembered we were dealing with a big fucking shit show of technical issues. And so I decided to reach out and ask the hard question, did you intentionally unsubscribe from the list? And within 30 seconds, she came back and said, no.
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I didn’t unsubscribe from the list. I just thought the meeting last week was canceled. I didn’t think too much of it. But then somebody reached out and said, are you going to the retreat? And she goes, and I never got an email for the retreat. And I just assumed that I wasn’t invited because I haven’t come to the meetings since like July. And she said, I wasn’t mad about it. I just figured there was limited capacity and the seats are going to go to the most active people.
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And I just want to pause here, because how many times in our lives do we see a piece of data and fail to get curious or to reach out and actually communicate because we are afraid that what we think is actually true? Had I not caught the old story of rejection or insecurity about my own program or about my own
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Content or the value of my calls, which of course I’ve had to work through all of that Am I doing enough is this good enough? Am I serving people will they like it or they satisfied do they feel like they’re getting their money’s worth? You know which that those beliefs have propelled me to probably way over deliver Hence most women when they come into the program are like what the actual fuck there’s there’s so much content I can’t even breathe or make sense of it. And yes, we are working on that
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kind of weeding it out, maybe drip feeding it, which means delivering it incrementally instead of just raining on your head the moment you sign up to the program with, you a thousand hours of content. But yes, I am passionate about what I do and I love reading and I love creating new stuff. And I’ve also always been very hypersensitive to the fact that people pay a lot of good money to be in my program and I better fucking show up, bells on.
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and home run in terms of delivery. And so that has driven a lot of my behaviors to the point where I’ve been blinded by, you’re pointing a fire hose at people and they’re like in freeze mode when they sign up for the program because there’s too much. So I’m working on all of that. But bottom line is that had I not caught my own first knee jerk reaction of the assumption that
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She must just not be happy with me and my program. And had I not taken the hard action to move through that emotion, to not let it control me, but to stay rational and big picture and objective and reach out to my client, had I not done that, then I would have never found out. First of all, she didn’t unsubscribe. That was a glitch, an error in the system. I don’t know how that happened. I don’t know why it just happened to her, but it happened.
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But I also would not have been able to engage with her and find out she was making an assumption that she wasn’t invited to our community retreat. And she didn’t even seem upset or mad about it. She was just like, Dems to facts. I guess I just didn’t make the cut this time. She was super cool. But this is where it is so important to look around your life and start paying attention.
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to the micro assumptions that have massive impact in your reality. This is how self-fulfilling prophecies become a thing. This is how our limiting beliefs that are deep at our core, that we’re not good enough, we are not worthy, some people are better than other people, we’re not as capable or competent, we don’t have access to the same resources that everybody else has.
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playing field isn’t level, we’re at a deficiency, there’s something wrong with us, or there’s something unfair about the world, that goes both ways. And these emotions that are guiding us through life often don’t even show up on our radar. I wasn’t upset that she had unsubscribed, she wasn’t even that upset that she hadn’t been invited to the retreat, but we were both operating on these assumptions that had they gone unchecked,
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might have led to a breakdown in our friendship that we’ve formed since she’s been in the program the last eight months, and might have reflected poorly on me. She might have missed out on a retreat opportunity. I mean, these are the sliding door moments we’re not even paying attention to in our lives that alter the course of our future. And I want to just dial it back to two simple beliefs that I want you to explore evidence of.
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in your own life? Where is there evidence in your life that number one, you’re operating at a deficit. You’re not as good as other people or you’re not good enough just in general. And then the second one is that the world isn’t fair or that you’re being judged because back to belief A, you’re not good enough or you haven’t shown up enough. Or I suppose a third possibility is other people are just assholes.
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The truth is other people are assholes because they’re operating on their own emotional assumptions. Like when you begin to break this open and see how limiting it is, I have had to notice this on a micro level because my business growth, my success to lead this community and create a team and build everything, I have had to challenge every fucking thought in my head.
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because I was operating under so many small-minded, lacking, scarcity mindset, inferiority, imposter syndrome, insecurity, self-doubt, all of the things. I’ve had to question everything because it shows up in the tiniest little things like somebody unsubscribed from an email and how if I was not able to notice when my emotions are controlling me, then
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I would not be able to do and be who I am and where I am. If you’re not managing your emotions, they are managing you. And when you’re not paying attention to the tiny little blips that are on your radar because they feel so familiar and true that you don’t stop to question them, then you are living in a reality that will bring your past into the future. If you want your future to be different,
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then your past, then who you’ve been, what’s been available to you, how you’ve operated, all of that. If you want a future that’s different than the past, you’re gonna have to break the mold. You’re gonna have to break the habit of being yourself. That’s one of my favorite Joe Dispenza books, Break the Habit of Being Yourself. And what you need to do is develop the capacity to shift your focus. I’ve done another coffee with Colleen where I said,
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You need to devote 20 % of your bandwidth at all time to monitoring what’s going on inside of your body. And that requires you to spend less time worrying about what everybody else thinks, everybody else’s opinion, the look on your face, and what that means about me. Like, you’re doing fake mental math problems in your head, and that’s robbing you of the ability to see something different. If you want the future to be different than your past, you’re going to have to start seeing something different.
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This is the secret to changing your self-identity, is to start looking for evidence of what you want to be true. I talk about this with changing from being an all or nothing black or white person, and to just start saying you’re a less is more person. Because you don’t have time to be all or nothing about everything. There’s mostly gray in your life.
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And if you just start noticing where you ate one cookie or half a cookie, or you just watched one episode and didn’t binge the whole season, or you ordered the small coffee, if you just start noticing the evidence of what you want to be true, that will then draw you forward into that path. You have to focus on what you want in order to get what you want. Everything is created in the mind first. We have to believe in what we want.
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in order to see it manifested in the 3D world. And the mistake most of us make, because this is how we were raised, is we place our power in the external, in the circumstance, in the number in the bank account, in the opinion of someone else. We place our power in what we think we see, and then we spend all of our time and energy trying to control or change or manipulate what it is that we see so that
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our thoughts can tell us that we’re okay. And the shift is when you start using your emotions as your superpower guidance system, you start realizing that there are infinite ways to interpret what you see. And so when you’re able to operate, step over, if you will, the boulder that feels like rejection.
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or insecurity or uncertainty, when you are able to step over that, you land in a place where you can be curious and open-minded and optimistic and thoughtfully, intentionally create what it is that you want because you’re looking for evidence. And there might not be a lot of it, but there’s a little bit and you focus on that. And then, oh, there’s another piece of evidence. And that new version of your desired reality begins.
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to grow. So your takeaway for today is to just start looking around your life and noticing. Stop the clock, stop the scene, pause and notice where you’re making an assumption as small as it may be. And then look for something different. Reach out and ask the question. Say the weird thing. Do something different. And what you will find is a whole new universe.
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of possibility. So start looking around your life and noticing where you need to break the habit of being yourself. Stop with the assumptions and ask yourself what else could be true and what would be possible for me if I wasn’t afraid of my own damn feelings and I made myself available to find out what else could be true.
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All right, thanks for listening. And if you’re a high achieving, coachable woman who is ready to commit to manifesting your best life, and you’re going to need to reduce your alcohol consumption by about 80%, so that alcohol goes back to being a pleasure instead of a soul sucking problem, get in the show notes and click the link and schedule a discovery call with me or my team.