Addressing The "Stories" We Tell Ourselves

Automatically transcribed, so the wording is close but not exact.

Macie: Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of This Is Not Your Practice Life podcast. My name is Macie. I'm thrilled to have you joining me today. If you're a brand new listener, welcome to the podcast. I hope that you get everything that you need and more by being here. And if you're a returning listener, thanks so much for being here. Thank you guys also just really quickly for inviting friends to listen, sharing the podcast, any chance that you get, leaving a review, whether you have worked with me. you are a long time listener of the podcast, all of that really, really helps. So you've been a listener for a while or if you've ever been a client and you've never left a Google review, I would absolutely love if you would just take the time to do that.

You can go to macierenae. com and if you click the podcast tab, there's a little button that says leave a review and you can leave your review. as a client who actually has experience working with me, whether it's been a freebie, a lower priced offer, a higher ticket offer, or you're a podcast listener and you've been listening for a while. Okay, today I want to talk about stories. So this is something that we use, like a term that we use a lot of times in the coaching industry, probably the personal development industry. I'm not really sure, but this definitely comes more from a coaching perspective. And I want to talk about what it means to have stories or for your brain to make up stories.

and how that relates to emotional intelligence work. Because I think it's really, really important to understand this. whenever I am working with a client and they bring me whatever we'll say, quote, problems ⁓ quote challenges that they're having, a lot of times what I'm looking ⁓ address is is factual from what is a story. And what I mean by that is when our brain gets to run loose and we're not maybe actively practicing our mindset work or our emotional intelligence skills, the brain is really good at making up stories, meaning that when we are uncomfortable with something, something comes up in our life, when someone, you know, ⁓ bring something to our attention, whether they're communicating clearly or not, our brain goes to war to protect us.

Our ego goes to war to protect us. And so a lot of times we will fill in the gaps for things that we aren't particularly sure of. And we will create a story in our mind about that person or that thing. So it's really, really important to be mindful of the stories that we tell ourselves. So I'm gonna give you some examples of like what this has looked like for me over the years. There might be a friend who comes to me and tells me about a situation that they're having with their significant other, their best friend, their parents, whatever it may be. And they will give me the 411 on what was said. how they responded and then based on kind of where they land their brain will have all of these stories meaning like I think that my mom is doing this because of xyz or I think that my friend is know behaving this way because of this thing and this thing ⁓ and give me ⁓ all these sentences and in coaching specifically When I am getting all of those sentences, what I have to understand and recognize is that many of those sentences are simply stories.

It doesn't mean that they're factual. It is the person's best guess at what is happening because when there's something that we're uncomfortable with or something we don't understand we feel slighted in any kind of way, ⁓ emotions are coming up because of a situation. Again, the brain and the ego go to war to help us be right, help protect us. And so it will create stories wherever there are gaps. The important thing to remember about that are stories are just up sentences. A lot of times it's made up ⁓ protection. And the problem with believing our stories, whether stories about another person. or we have stories about ourself, it is so important to address it because they're not real. But our stories are our thoughts and thoughts create more emotions and emotions drive our actions or our inactions.

And then we create results in our life. So our stories that we have playing subconsciously or consciously in our mind can be giving us a result. when we think of like being in our absolute power, being in full autonomy of our life, something that we have to be able to recognize is our stories or our stories. We really have to be able to pay attention to these because they are impacting our life. So another example, let's say that I decide to do a program within my business nobody buys the program. What is my brain going to do? It's going to come in and try and protect me. It's going to make up, you guessed it, stories, right? The stories could be the economy sucks, which yes, you could find proof that that's true, but still it is a story.

could like, else my could say is nobody really likes me. Nobody likes the programs. It's too hard. It's too easy. It's too high ticket. It's too low ticket. It's all of those sentences, especially if I don't have actual data. If I haven't asked, if I haven't done market research, all of those things are stories. Now think about what would happen if I believe all of those stories, especially stories like people hate me or people don't like me. Like where have you done this in your life where you get a result that you don't particularly love in your life and then immediately your brain goes to war with itself. And it's like, it's because I'm not likable. I'm not lovable. I'm not enough. know, I'm this, I'm that.

Those are stories. ⁓ this is what I mean by the brain creates stories because it thinks for whatever reason it's the safest thing to do. If we can come up with an explanation, even if that explanation is not true, even if that explanation is not right. We feel better about it. But here's the important thing that I want to tell you about emotional intelligence. You can have a very high emotional intelligence score, but this behavior of just acting from story, not fact, like literally watching stories be made in your brain and acting from that place as opposed to addressing what the story is and then deciding. to do the most emotionally mature thing or to communicate like an adult or to ask the hard questions or to have the hard conversations.

When we're not willing to do that, you can have a high EQ score, but not be embodying high EQ. So here is how this has shown up very recently. So I have a few different dynamics playing out in personal life. And it's really interesting because there are a lot of stories particular minds about what they think is happening, what they what they, you know, predict is going to happen, things that don't like, but they won't address it. And there's a lot of drama internally in their mind. And all of the drama in their mind is creating a ⁓ visceral physical But if you look at the facts ⁓ of the that their brain is creating, It's creating a physical sick response, you know, kind of like ⁓ a wedge. It's all been created by stories, stories that the brain is up to keep them safe, or it thinks it's keeping them safe.

What it's really doing is creating a lot of turmoil in a place where emotional intelligence is available to them and if practiced could solve everything literally in a snap. Okay, literally in a snap. It's so interesting watching it as a bystander and as someone who's been coaching for eight years because I'm like, it's just story. They're all stories in the brain and it's creating so much chaos and so much turmoil and so many results that are so unnecessary. But what would need to happen in order to solve all of it. One would have to be the person's awareness in understanding everything happening in my brain is not factual. It's a story. So they would first need to recognize like, are my stories?

My stories are that such and such and such and such and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. I'm not going to get into sharing the personal details, but I will tell you that if they were in a place where they wanted to actually activate the highest level of EQ, they would need to maybe even write out what all of their beliefs are. Beliefs, like our stories are really just beliefs that we have. Some of them may be true, yes, and some of them may not be, but a lot of times even our beliefs in this particular kind of circumstance ⁓ up because they're protective, because it's ego, right? So it's like, whether it's negative thoughts you have about yourself or a result you've gotten in your life where you're like, well, it's because of this or it's because of this, or you are watching someone else's situation and you have all of these kind of ideas of what's actually happening, even if it's not true, those are stories.

They're just beliefs that your brain has attached to because it feels the most comfortable, even if it's uncomfortable and it's making you sick. So the first thing to do is to kind of pull away for a second and figure out what are my stories, the stories that I'm telling myself. A great question to ask yourself all the time. What are the stories I'm telling myself? What are the stories I am telling myself? And write down all of the sentences, AKA all of the beliefs that you have about a particular situation. So if you get into an argument with your spouse, and you walk away from that argument and you are just so angry, frustrated, you feel unheard, you feel unseen. Your brain is now gonna make up stories.

It could be as severe as they're not the right person for me. We have nothing in common. This marriage is gonna fail or this partnership is gonna fail. They don't like me, they don't love me. ⁓ incapable of showing up for me. They're never gonna change. while all of those things can feel so true. You have to take a pause and step back and just see them as stories the stories that you tell yourself again are beliefs. If believe that they are true, those are thoughts that are in your mind. Your thoughts create emotions in your body. Based on the emotions in your body, that is where we take or where we stop taking action in our life. So if you believe those stories that are in your brain after you walk away from, in this example, an argument with your partner and you start thinking they don't care, they're never gonna care, all of this is gonna fail, not the right person for me, right?

Those are just ⁓ that are being created but now they've created emotions such as abandonment or rejection. Now you're going to take action from those big emotions. So everything is going to be clouded before you see these sentences as simply stories. OK, so the first step is to see what are my stories? What are the stories I am telling myself about the situation? When you get clear on the sentences and the stories, OK, then you can look at what are what emotions are these stories creating? and how is that impacting the actions that I feel like I need to take or want to take? A lot of times what happens when we're not practicing the highest level of EQ is as soon as we feel a quote, negative emotion, because there really are no positive versus negative emotions.

There's just emotions that are more comfortable versus uncomfortable. And when we feel very uncomfortable emotions, what we tend to do is like pull away and pull back from our work. So if you get in a tiff with someone, whether it's a friend or you get in an argument with your spouse or your family member, a lot of times what we do from emotional immaturity is we get so flustered and so frustrated that we're like, I'm shutting down. I'm not even going to address it. I'm not even going to have this conversation with them. They're not worth my time. It's not worth the energy. They don't get it anyways. It's going to be a waste of my breath. you know what I mean? And we kind of like go into this spiral where we pull away It's interesting because we can think that that's a very mature thing to do.

But if there are issues that are solvable and we're pulling away from salt helping to solve them, we're not actually practicing the highest level of emotional intelligence that we can. There's a difference between setting a powerful boundary directly with someone and being emotionally frustrated by an outcome and pulling away and making up more stories and creating more negative emotions in a cyclone. and then it pushing a result we ultimately want further and further away. So what I mean by this is when you get clear on what your stories are and the emotions driving them, you also get the opportunity to ask yourself, what would my highest and best self do? What would my, like when I think of the self concept I wanna be, what would that version of me do?

And a lot of times the mature thing to do when we're speaking of emotional intelligence is the hardest thing to do. So like where you would normally maybe pull away and be like, it's not worth my time. What if you just didn't believe that story? What if it was worth your time? if, even if that means the outcome isn't that you solve and come together and it's all forgiven and rectified. What if it's just that you don't let yourself pull away from uncomfortable conversations? So this is a big lesson that came for me last year in my just leadership skills. Being an entrepreneur is really hard and being an entrepreneur that has on a personal level been working on getting out of people pleasing for most of my life, very, very hard.

You know, I have, I remember my coach me ⁓ like, you like to be liked and you like to be loved. And when people don't like or love you, like you really struggle with that. And I think a lot of people could relate to that. Like, yes, we want to be liked and we want to be loved. Last year really brought about tension in certain relationships of mine on the business side. And that was really hard. And my old self, like people pleasing Macie wanted to have all of these stories, like make up all of these stories about like, well, it's because of this or it's because of this or maybe I blah, blah, right? And I had all of these stories and I just thought, what if I saw these stories of stories and decided like who I want to be as a woman, as a leader, as a business, as a company?

What if I just did that? And all of my decisions were then made not from stories that were protecting me, but from who I desire to be. And I will tell you that last year was very hard in learning to communicate as opposed to pull away, as opposed to like just shoving something under the rug as if it hadn't been said or it hadn't happened or as if I didn't need to address it. Instead of doing that, like showing my clients what real leadership and emotional maturity looks like. And a lot of times it looks differently than we think it's going to look. and it can be very, very challenging. But where can you do this in all parts of your life? Like when your brain makes up a story, where can you just be like, okay, this is a story that is trying to protect me.

How do I want to show up in my life when I am not emotionally the of these stories? Like if I just… separate myself from them, how can I show up powerfully? How can I show up very emotionally, maturely? So going back to like the friend situation that where there's like wedges and there's their stories being kind of created between certain parties. If in those moments they would just communicate, the questions that they wanna ask, feel the feelings that they're entitled to feel, but instead of not addressing the hard conversations that may create more tension before it creates resolve, if they were willing to do that, they would be practicing the highest level of EQ. But it is oftentimes a wound for us to feel hurt or offended And then we just kind of break away and we want to like shove it under the rug and we, you know, we want to be angry and we want to be justified and we don't, we don't want to keep showing up, you know, in situations and maybe even relationships that don't feel good, but we leave so much on the table.

I always tell my clients when you do that, there's still energetic cords and there's still energetic ties to that person, to that situation. There's unresolved hurts. There's unresolved situations. So as much as you want to pull away, if you really want to practice emotional intelligence, sometimes what it means is actually leaning in, leaning in and saying the things leaning in and setting the boundaries leaning in and getting the real story asking for the real story, right? Leaning in and being willing to let your body feel any emotion that comes up while you get to the root as opposed to listening to the story. is so important. cannot tell you. So it doesn't matter if you have on paper a high EQ.

If you choose to shrink or to constantly listen to the stories in your mind as opposed to knowing your actual autonomy, your actual ⁓ skills, your like self leadership skills, your actual power in life. Like if you shrink that down, you are not practicing your EQ at the highest level that you can be, even with a high score on paper. the vulnerability that is required to embody emotional intelligence, the ⁓ willingness to feel every uncomfortable emotion, willingness to say the things that you think you'll just die if you say them. ⁓ And I don't mean like mean right? But like the honest your honest feelings, your honest truth. what you really have coming up, what questions you really want to ask, you know, and being prepared for the answers and the reciprocal outcome of what may happen.

Like that's the hard stuff, but it's also the powerful stuff. And a lot of times when we actually get the real root cause or the real answer or what's really going on because we were willing to feel all the hard things. A lot of times what it actually confirms is like, wow, I really did have a lot of stories. It wasn't that at all. more example I can think of that comes to mind. So years and years and years ago, years and years ago, really on in my business, I had program that was called Inner Mastery. I did several of this program and it was like my first group years and years ago. And over the course of several rounds of doing it, think I had maybe like 22 women that had done it. most of them were ⁓ local to me.

So they either lived, you know, in the same state, even if it was a different city, or they lived in surrounding states. And I decided one of my first events that I wanted to do was to ⁓ all of these women to my personal home and just have like a whole inner mastery kind of reunion day. And I thought it's gonna be so fun. I'm gonna get to meet them for maybe the first time they're gonna get to meet me, they're gonna get to meet each other. It's gonna be the best time. I set a date and I invited like 22 women to come over. And one by one, I think I've shared this on the podcast before like ⁓ early on, but one by one, every single woman sent text or canceled. and told me that they couldn't come.

like they're, you know, they would be like, I'm so sorry. Thanks for inviting me. I can't make it. And the first one was like, ouch. The second one was like, ouch. The third one was like, ⁓ my gosh, what's going on? The fourth, the fifth, imagine 22 different women telling you no, like literally not a single person could come on the dates and the ones that could originally had things come up where they couldn't. And also Kentucky at that time decided to have like this winter storm. like, logically, I knew like there's a dangerous winter storm. I wouldn't want anybody driving in this. But also the story I was telling myself was I'm unlikable. I'm unlovable. Everybody is, you know, decided not to come.

It's me. They don't actually like me. They don't actually like the coaching. They didn't actually like the program. That's what I mean by the stories. We tell ourselves those stories created such pain in my life, like so much pain. I really was like, I don't even know why I'm a business owner, why I'm a coach, why I create programs, why I'm doing this, why I should keep going, why I've started a podcast. I don't know why I'm doing any of this story, story, of painful stories, lots of painful emotions. And I was just like, I can't do this. I'm not doing this. And then I was mad and I was angry and I was angry at everybody for not showing up. But I was more upset I was obviously this horrible human being that nobody wanted to be around.

It was terrible. ⁓ was terrible. But they were just stories. I had to, ⁓ I felt my feelings, by the way, I had to pull myself away from that experience and go, what are the stories I am telling myself? Well, I'm telling myself, I'm not a good business person. I'm telling myself people don't like my coaching or my programs. I'm telling myself, no one likes me. I'm telling myself that people are fake. They're smiling on zoom and then they, they want nothing to do with me. All of these stories, even if they had sent texts, like my kid is sick. I can't make it. You know, there's a snowstorm. I don't feel comfortable driving two hours. Like even though I had that stuff. And that's what I mean. Our brain is so protective of, don't want to feel rejection.

I don't want to feel these hard things. I'm going to give all of these stories as to what it could be because I need something logical so I don't feel this pain. We still feel the pain. Okay. So once I was finally able to separate from the stories that I was telling myself and realize like, okay, if I look at this very neutral and I, and I just show up with the most emotional maturity, what would that look like? Well, it would still be. loving and respecting having no ill feelings towards my clients because that is their prerogative. from an emotional mature place, I want to show up ⁓ and I'm going to try again and I'm going to trust that. that people will come in a couple of weeks with a different date whenever maybe we're not having crappy weather.

And I'm going to tell myself different stories, right? I'm going to figure out the facts. I'm going to go back and I'm going to look at all the text messages of like even why they were unable to come. I'm going to figure it out and I'm going to put myself out there again. And when I put myself out there again, I can't remember if it was like or nine women that were able to actually make it. They drove from different states. They drove from different cities. It was a great evening. had a lot of fun and you know, it was just it's just so silly. like an example of the stories and I could have held those stories, had a lot of resentment. I could have literally allowed myself to just never create a program again, not ever do anything in person again.

And I would have robbed myself and all of these years later, thinking of like all the retreats I've done. I've done six at this point, like official retreats. I would have robbed myself from all of that. I would have robbed my clients of group programs. I would have robbed them of connections. I would have robbed myself of what was possible to create in my business all because of stories and emotions I wasn't willing to feel or address. And instead, just what are these stories? serving me? Like, are they helping me get where I'm trying to go? Are they helping me become the person that I want to be? A lot of times, They're just not there. They're in self protection. They are in ego and we don't want to operate from that place.

It's just it's it's like the hurt little girl place. So it's like how do you operate in life if you're not operating from the hurt little girl or the hurt little boy? You know, that's that's not getting the outcome that you want. When you think of like your best and highest self, how do you address certain situations? And a lot of times you're going to address it. from what is factual, what information you need to know, how you want to show up maturely, not from story. So I hope this episode helps you. But if you have any questions, let me know, reach out. You're welcome anytime. DM me, say hi. If you've never said hi, if you've never introduced yourself, I love connecting with people, people who've maybe been listening for a long time and they've never introduced themselves.

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