Episode 236 Minisode: The Litmus Test For Your Truth
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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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Okay, so I wanna keep talking about the quality of your energy that you are experiencing in your body as being a litmus test for the quality of your thoughts and taking full ownership of those thoughts. They are not your fault, but they are your responsibility. You’ve been programmed from the time you were a little kid about who you are and who you’re supposed to be, what you should be doing.
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what’s right and wrong and good and bad and how to be a success in your particular corner of the universe with all the people that you people with, what success looks like, what a failure looks like. And all of that programming is the filter through which you interpret incoming bits of information. And if you are not managing your mind, your emotions, the thoughts in your brain, if you are not managing them, then they are on default.
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Your brain is always talking. The voice in your head is always talking. I want you to compare it to like a self-driving car. You can allow the car to drive you or you can switch it off the automatic default and you can drive the car. This is your brain. It’s an automatic car that’s traveling through time and space and feelings and stories. And you can either go with the default or
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you can plug in the coordinates that you want and take control of the wheel. This is the decision that you have to make with your brain. And what most people, it takes a while to realize is that if you are not actively thinking about your thinking with at least a 20 % awareness of your consciousness, you’re thinking about your thinking, you’re thinking about the questions you’re asking, you’re listening to the stories you’re telling yourself, you’re examining it for patterns and emotional reactions.
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and asking, is this the story I’m telling myself to get me where I want? if you’re not using your brain as a tool, it’s kind of using you as a tool. Your thinking patterns are just what is formed over your lifetime based on your beliefs and your conditioning and your learning and past traumas, as well as the brain diet that you consume, whether it be talking heads on cable news or whether it be murder mystery podcasts or whether it be
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the people you’re around and how they think and how they solve problems. Like whatever you feed your brain, that becomes the way you think. And the more you think that way over time, the more it just feels like you, but the voice in your head is not you. You are the listener. You are the observer. You are not your thoughts. You are the one noticing your thoughts. And
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It is a radical shift from the way you’ve been conditioned to see the world. You’ve been conditioned to see the external world, the to-do lists and the way the house looks and the way other people are engaging and interacting and your education and your goals and your car and what you’re eating and all the things in the external world that you think are causing your internal experience.
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And so we spend all of our energy and time trying to manipulate the outside world to reflect the way we want to feel. And sometimes we get it right and we feel amazing. But the rest of the time, we are just draining our mental battery because things aren’t working out and we can’t feel OK. And we spend all of this emotional energy trying to manage our feelings by going out into the world instead of going in.
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into our own internal world, recognizing that it is our thoughts that are causing our feelings and that nothing is preventing us from experiencing the emotions we want to experience in this moment, except our own minds, our own interpretation of where we are, who we are, and what’s happening to us and what’s going to happen to us and what did happen to us. The only thing blocking the energy, the pure energy
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in your physical body is your brain, the auto responder, the automatic car of your thought and learning how to respond differently to the thoughts in your brain because you have shifted your priority of who you believe and you believe your own body. You believe the experience in your body. Your body is telling you the truth and the truth, the litmus test is
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This feels good, I want more, or this feels bad. I do not want more. And in the past, when things feel bad, instead of feeling the bad and taking responsibility for it as it is a product of your own mind, you skip the feeling part because you think it’s true and you go up into your head and then you start telling yourself stories and making to-do lists and talking to other people and trying to change things, fix things, figure things out, control things.
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Like this is the wrong turn. This is where going up into your head instead of down into your body to take full ownership for this feeling and to save your body from the bully in your brain or just the low quality questions and storyline that are keeping your attention from what else you could be thinking and paying attention to. They are drawing your power away from
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yourself as the creator of your own life, where in every given moment where you place your focus and attention is how you cause your happiness in the future. It is setting your future self up for success. One decision about what you’re paying attention to at a time. And when you think about how many trauma dramas you get caught up in with family members and stories and your own past and
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what could happen in the future and how you need to prevent all of this. it’s like your entire mental resources are being wasted in this. It’s like you’re watching a bad television show. I saw that on a reel on TikTok. Somebody’s like, what people don’t realize is that when they sit on the couch and watch a show and they’re yelling at the screen and I hate this show and this is stupid and I hate these characters, change the damn channel. Like most of the time, if you don’t like a show, you can turn it off.
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Your brain is also your own version of reality TV show. And when your body is not experiencing this particular season and storyline with pleasure and joy, and that you are not able to spend the energy and take the action to cause an even better storyline next season, then you are wasting your life and you are giving away your power. And it is your power. It is not other people’s.
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Nobody’s stealing your power. Your power is either to sit in your automatic car and let it drive you around through the old neighborhoods that you live in and nothing ever changes and this is how you are and other people are. You can just get in the passenger seat and let your brain drive you according to automatic programming or you can get in the driver’s seat. You have the power, either one. It’s your choice. You just haven’t realized it’s a choice.
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You have a choice about the quality of the thoughts in your brain and what you pay attention to, what questions you ask. You have the power to create a different reality by noticing and paying attention to different things and then taking actions that continue to cause your own happiness in the future. And I know this is a lot to wrap your mind around. So I want to give you a really fun analogy. The universe doesn’t speak.
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English. The universe doesn’t use words to communicate. It is the words that create the energy in our body. is our language is the operating system of our nervous system. Okay. But I want you to imagine that the universe doesn’t speak English. It speaks energy and how you feel based on what you’re paying attention to in the story you’re telling yourself how you feel is what you’re going to get more of. if you are anxious and you allow the anxious auto
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driver to drive you around anxious town, you’re just going to stay in anxious town. You’re going to get more of that. The more time you spend in anxious energy, the more you perceive your reality to be anxiety inducing. And so you can bypass by going into the energy. Like we set emotional goals in the next chapter. Like how do you want to feel and then cultivating that energy. And I know it’s just not that easy to flip a switch. Like I want to feel peaceful right now.
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But if that’s the goal, if that’s what you program your car, your automatic driving car, if you program it and say, want to feel peaceful, then it begins to filter information through peaceful and not peaceful. And then you have a choice of what you want to pay attention to and the thoughts that you want to continue with versus redirect with a different line of questioning for your busy brain. Like if you set the goal, you calibrate your compass towards peace.
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or joy or abundance or confidence or whatever it is you want to feel. If you set your energetic coordinates for an emotional state, then your brain will assist you in the getting of that emotional state, which means you don’t have to figure out even what the external world would need to look like, or you don’t have to have it all figured out. You don’t have to have it all mapped out. You just need to know how you want to feel so that you can filter out the energy that you
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don’t want to feel. And then you rely on your best friend, which is your body, to alert you when you fall out of that feeling. You take full responsibility for the quality of the thoughts or the story in your brain. And you do whatever you need to take. Take actions to move yourself back into the emotion that you want. It really can be this simple. And I want to give you a fun analogy. I want you to imagine that you’re on a Caribbean island.
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you decide you want to get some sexy time with some native Caribbean Islander man or woman, and you want to attract this energy. But you speak English, and everybody here is either French or Creole. You can’t communicate what you want. You can’t talk about what you want. You can’t ask for what you want. So what would you do?
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You would put out the vibes. You would put out your sexy vibes. You would be moving your body in a sensual way. And what would you attract? Somebody who wants to get in your rhythm and get in your space and dance and smile and make eye contact. It is your energy that attracts like energy. You do not have to know what it is specifically that you want. You just have to know how you feel.
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and then get into that emotional outfit, whether it’s sexy or powerful or happy or abundant or peaceful or content or competent, whatever it is, you got to put that energy into your body and then act upon the world from that energy because the quality of your thoughts matches the energy, right? You know that. And so the more you exist in that energy, the more you think in that energy, the more your ideas align with that energy, the more your actions
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Create more of that energy. This is how you create a new reality. This is how you redesign your life is focusing on how you want to feel. That’s the only thing you ever need to notice in any given moment. Everything else will fall into place when you focus on how you want to feel. And I just want you to think about the reverse. How did we end up here? My friends, we’ve been burned out and overwhelmed and anxious.
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and reinforcing the idea that we’re over-thinkers and that we can’t trust ourselves or control ourselves when it comes to drinking. And every time we engage in those thoughts and feel that energy, those are the vibes we’re putting out into the universe, which means the about face is that you don’t have to figure out any words in your brain except, I’m going to trust myself to notice my body and I’m going to apply the litmus test.
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to the way my body feels, it’s either I’m either gonna think more of those thoughts because it makes me feel good and opens my heart, or I’m gonna think less. Which means entertaining any thought that you have had a problem in the past or you can’t trust yourself in the future is your body calling bullshit on the bully in your brain. And while I’ve taught you that you cannot change,
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your habits, either your thinking habits or your drinking habits overnight. You can’t change habits overnight, but you can change your goddamn perspective overnight. And if this stuff makes sense, then the only habit you need to change is how you respond to your own feelings. The correct response is to stop thinking about your feelings and to feel them and notice if they are causing suffering.
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in this human body that you’re responsible for taking care of. And then reject any thought or question or storyline that reinforces or deepens that suffering, including thoughts like, it can’t be that easy. I don’t have a right to do this. I deserve to be punished. I need to worry about this in the future. This has to be bullshit. I’m just fooling myself, believing that I can let go of all of this.
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All of those are thoughts. They don’t feel good in your body, which means they got to die on the fire too. This is the bravest thing you can do. This takes courage to give yourself permission to let go of all the emotional baggage you’ve been carrying and choose the emotional goal that will create the future that you want. Like you fucking deserve it. Like you’re fucking capable of it. Once you realize that you’ve created your own prison, you’re free to walk and
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The only thing that would hold you back is the idea that you need to get other people to agree or approve or come along with you or validate what you’re doing. How does that thought feel in your body? You can follow any truth that you want in life. The whole point of this episode is to say you have a choice and that my personal policy that’s creating exponentially awesome results in my life is that I followed the truth.
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that feels good in my body because I’m not going to cause unnecessary suffering to my body. And if whatever thoughts I continue and repeat to think become my habits, become my reality, that I’m going to choose to follow the truth that allows this body to not only exist in, but cause more of peace and abundance and joy and laughter and creativity and optimism and hope.
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and I’m gonna do it like my life depends on it because it does. And it’s not just me that will benefit. People who are healed, people who are whole, people who are abundant and peace and confident and joy, those people create more of that in the world. The only way to heal and change the external world is to heal and change our own internal world because emotions and stories and thoughts
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patterns are contagious and you can either choose to be and spread negativity, toxicity, fear and pain and anxiety and depression and overwhelm, or you can choose to be light and love and freedom and choice. And we can create a higher level of consciousness, a higher level of energy, higher quality thoughts and stories, but we can only do that if we’re living in it.
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But that won’t be true if you think that you have to see it before you can believe it. No, my friend, you have to believe it before you’re gonna see it.
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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.