Episode 260 Minisode: Have you noticed what you notice?
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Have you ever caught yourself spiraling, convinced that life is just one big long list of problems? Well, here’s the thing. It’s not the outside world that’s the problem. It’s your internal reality, which is created by your own brain. Here’s what you need to know. Every second, your brain has to filter the millions of bits of incoming sensory data and decide what’s getting through to your conscious mind.
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Everything that doesn’t register as important is remanded to the subconscious where it’s either stored or deleted. And if your brain is in the habit of noticing problems like what other people think and why things aren’t going to work out, then those details define your life. In today’s episode, I’m breaking down the science and the spirituality behind what you pay attention to. You’ll learn
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why noticing what you notice is the most powerful tool that you already have. Because when you can direct your brain to filter for solutions and to notice details that make you feel joy, curiosity, and possibility, you will literally recode your entire reality.
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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 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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As much as I love to talk about energy and the law of attraction and manifestation, I’m still a person who is very grounded in science. My favorite thing to cozy up with in an evening is the latest brain research, not written by the nerds, but actually written by somebody who’s got a personality and stories. I’ve gone down the rabbit hole with Anna Lemke’s dopamine research and Kiribabenet.
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research on iterative mindset and environmental design, and James Clear’s Atomic Habits, and really anything Andrew Huberman puts out there. I listen to his three-hour podcasts like some people binge reality TV. But I also love the crossover with spirituality, Michael Singer’s books, The Untethered Soul, and Don Miguel Ruiz, everything he’s written, from The Four Agreements to The Five Attachments.
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to the voice of knowledge. David Hawking’s book on letting go, Joe Dispenza’s book on quantum healing, and Bruce Lipton’s books on the biology of belief, and James Dottie’s, he’s a neurosurgeon, but he’s moved into spirituality, and he has books, one of them’s called The Mind Magic, I listened to his podcast, The Magic Shop, where he interviews leading edge experts in neurophysiology and mindfulness and.
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the science of compassion and kindness. Like there’s so much science that supports the spirituality and I just love it when it all comes together. It literally turns me on in a very creative way. It makes me happy and it gets my energy flowing and it lifts and open my heart. I feel curious and optimistic and hopeful and creative and curious about how to apply all this stuff in my own life.
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And I follow a few people on TikTok because I’m also in a business program with them. There’s two of them, Michael Hunter, who I had on my podcast, who has a master in Taoism and did 25 years of acupuncturism. And now he’s kind of doing what I’m doing. We’re in the same sort of program. How do you coach and teach and create online programs that
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can actually help people change their lives. And he’s very woo woo, but he’s also science based. And there’s another gal that I follow, Aliyah Frederick, and she’s in the program. And she put out a TikTok last night that I almost couldn’t go to sleep. I was so excited of just the meaning. It was like popcorn or fireworks in my brain. was like, holy shit. My body was just like, this is true. This is true. This is true. And I want to just pause for a moment and talk to you about
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what truth is. This is my latest explanation. I heard somebody say that anything that opens your heart is the truth and everything else that weighs you down, feels negative, feels stuck, bad, all of the negative emotions is a lie. And thanks to Bruce Blatton’s book on radical honesty, which gave birth to my sixth core skill of emotional sobriety based on honesty, learning how to tell the whole truth.
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I teach and speak of the truth as, you know, truth is an experience in your body. It is a felt sensation. We mistake truth for words in the Bible and laws on the books and opinions of our culture. We think that the truth is a set of morality or judgments or right or wrong. And you can go with all of that. This is just a different definition.
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That when I teach emotional sobriety emotional sobriety is recognizing that everything in the 3d world is Neutral it’s not good or bad or right or wrong until you decide it is So it is the filter of your own emotions and your judgments and your thinking processes that cause Neutral circumstances to have meaning like it just is what it is and you then you decide how you want to interact with it Do you want to accept it or reject it?
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And so the litmus test that I’ve been speaking of recently and is really forming as a really cute little rule that, you know, for the most part works is that any truth that you are thinking of or contemplating on, if it feels good in your body, if it opens your heart, if it opens your mind, if it brings you into a state of optimism and hope and forward thinking and creativity, that that’s...
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your truth. That’s the truth. That’s your truth that you want to follow. Of course, we all have negative truths and stories and traumas and pain and, you know, chosen beliefs about what’s good and bad and right and wrong. And you can choose to keep those, but you’d want to do so from a place of power. I choose to believe this. I choose to accept this feeling into my body. Like the if anything can be true,
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and nothing is true because truth in a human brain is just words. It’s like thinking you’re looking at a picture of the sunset and that that’s the sunset. No, it’s a representation. Words in the human brain are also just representations of ideas and emotions. And we are the artists of our life, creating our story, creating our persona, creating our reality. And that’s the
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that I always am trying to teach like with emotional sobriety is for you to realize that you your reality is your personal interpretation and that if you don’t like your reality you’re the one creating it it is not happening to you it is the way you are seeing the world it is what you are choosing to pay attention to like everybody walks into a party
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And one person is an artist and she sees color and angles and light. And one person is a musician and he notices the music and how that affects the energy. He hears harmony and tones and rhythm. Whereas a lawyer walks in and sees loopholes and technicalities and potential liabilities and case law for this particular situation. And
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someone with alcohol use disorder walks in and notices where the bar is and who’s drinking and who’s not drinking and if their brand of alcohol is available and what time it is and how fast are they drinking and a person with food issues notices the appetizers that are offering and is doing the calculations in their brain on calories and the diet and how they look and how other people look and what they’re eating and if they look
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Like they do a lot of exercise and run that off or they just have a natural metabolism. And then anxious people walk in the room and notice the facial expressions and the body language and the energy that people are speaking, their intonations, and they are thinking about all the stories they think they know about people and what’s happened in the past and what might happen in the future and the drama. Like all of these people are in the same room experiencing a completely
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different reality and their reality is caused by not the party itself or the circumstances or the other people. It is caused by the way their brain has been trained to notice and pay attention to certain details. There are 11 million bits of information coming at your body every second. Your brain can only process 40 of them.
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So your attention, your focus, what you pay attention to is the most powerful thing that you have in terms of causing your reality and creating the life you want. It is your focus. It is what you pay attention to. And this is why your emotions are actually your superpower. And if you can learn to keep 20 % of your focus, as I teach,
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on what’s going on in your body so that you are always aware of your truth. But your truth that your body is reflecting to you is not the truth of the outside world. It’s the truth of your own programming. It is of your own mind, the habits of thinking that you are engaging with, you know, the framework of your self image, who you are and who you are supposed to be. And that causes
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you to interpret what’s happening or think about what should be happening and what’s right and what’s wrong. It causes you to pay attention to certain details and exclude others. There are 11 million details every single second. You only get to pick 40 and your experience in your body, your emotional state, the state of your nervous system is a direct reflection of what you are paying attention to.
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and your feelings are an invitation from the universe or from your body or whatever. Your feelings are an invitation to examine the energetic quality of what you’re putting out into the world and what you’re looking and bringing back to you. It’s not the story about the details or the words in your brain. It’s the feeling. It’s the energy. You get to bypass figuring everything out and just feel it out and make decisions from there.
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Is this a truth I wanna lean into? Does it open my heart and open my mind and cause me to emit an energy of curiosity and optimism and creativity, which means I’m gonna bring that back to myself because I’m gonna be paying attention to that and noticing that. Because whatever you’re paying attention to, you’re gonna get more of. Your brain is a lot like the algorithm. Whatever you are engaging with, clicking on, liking, commenting, sharing with your friends,
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will show up more in your feed. That’s how the algorithm works. It doesn’t show you what you like per se. It shows you what you’re paying attention to. Like I said about the 3D world being neutral, in the algorithm world, all content is neutral also. There’s 11 million pieces of content every single second. And the algorithm’s job is to notice the 40 bits of content that you are engaging with and paying attention to and serve you more of it.
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That’s how it curates the feed and that’s how your brain curates your thoughts. And so what I wanna leave you with today is just an invitation to start noticing what you’re paying attention to and how that feels in your body. It’s just an awareness exercise. Next time you get on social media, what’s popping up for you? Oh my God, I just have to share. So there’s this new song by like Project 76 or something and it’s like.
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I think that I just got more gay. I like the song. I don’t always understand the words. So it took me a while to realize that all the women I’m looking at, oh, this is a lesbian thing. But all of a sudden I’m in like a lesbian algorithm and I’m enjoying it. I’m like, well, maybe, I don’t know. Like I’m kind of done with the dudes. So like whatever. But my point is that the more I pay attention to these reels, the more of it that I’m seeing.
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And the more I’m kind of starting to question my own sexuality, I mean, in a hilarious, all good, maybe sort of way. But my point is that I’m noticing that I’m noticing. And that’s my call to action for you today. Start noticing what it is that you notice. What are the topics and stories that dominate the newsfeed in your brain? And then notice how those make you feel in your body. Just notice. That’s your job today.
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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.