Mindset: The difference between what is real vs what is true [Best of WHC] | ep91
Today’s Mindset Monday reads:
Know the difference between what is real and what is true: The feelings are real.
What is not true are the beliefs, the stories, the myths that are feeding this feeling.
Honor your feelings. Unlock your wisdom. That’s how we find the truth.
In this week’s Best of WHC, we’re remembering the time I had a meltdown in my Instagram stories when a really big coaching account released an “inspirational” reel saying “your overwhelm isn’t real.”
This coach went on to say that overwhelm isn’t a real thing and that it’s something that can easily be solved by writing down an 87 point to-do list.
87?! I wish I was making this stuff up.
There were so many things wrong about this message but the one I focus on in this podcast episode is the harmful notion that feelings aren’t real.
Love, your feelings are real….so incredibly real.
You don’t need a PhD in psychology to know this is true. When you are caught in any emotion or feeling it is a very real experience. You are experiencing the physical and mental effects of it through your body.
There can be nothing more real than this. Whether it is joy, anger, overwhelm, sadness, frustration- your feelings are very real. However, when it comes to our emotional states there is an important difference between what is real and what is true.
What is real is how you feel. But what is often not true is the thought that is creating this feeling or the thoughts that this feeling makes you believe.
So yes, the feeling is real. But the thought that is the foundation of this feeling, or the thoughts this feeling elicits in you- those are not true. Our journey is to honor whatever we are feeling because it is the key. It is the key to our healing, growth and transformation. Our feelings contain so much wisdom.
When we can acknowledge them, sit with them and get curious about them we unlock so much within us. We unlock the stories and myths that we are holding on to and that is where our healing begins.
If a client came to me to talk about overwhelm, I'd walk them through a process in which we would figure what is real (their feeling), and what is not true.
This process includes acknowledging the feeling, and then asking the feeling questions to help unlock what is underneath it all. *If you want to hear more about this process head to the podcast.
Perhaps underneath their overwhelm is the belief:
“If I don’t do this then I am a failure”
“If I don’t get this all done I am letting them all down.”
“I have no idea what I’m doing and I will never know what I am doing.”
Those thoughts are causing and feeding the overwhelm. Those thoughts are un-true. And so now, as a coach, you and I get to figure out what your truth is.
Once we find the truth- that’s when we uncover different feelings (notice I don't say better... no feeling is better than another... just different). Perhaps your overwhelm turns to grief. Maybe it turns to acceptance. Maybe it turns to calm.
This is how we transform, heal and grow.
But it always starts with the feelings.
If you want to dig deeper into this work and hear how I would lead a client through a process of inquiry to unlock their truth, tune in to the episode below.
A quote to take with you:
“This overwhelm in my body is real, but is it true that I never know what I’m doing? No. That’s not true. This frustration in my body is real, but is it true that I’m not where I should be? No.
The wisdom is all in the feelings.”
Did you know that each episode comes with several guided journal prompts?
If you want to be in the know and get each Mindset Monday straight to your inbox complete with journal prompts to take you even further, get on my email list.
Here’s a sample of this episode’s journal prompts:
Take a moment and identify a feeling you are having. Once you name it, write it down.
Now see if you can identify the thoughts that are creating or feeding this feeling. Start writing whatever comes to mind.
Go through each thought and ask yourself if this is the absolute truth about you or your life. If it's not the truth, see if you can find another thought that feels more true and that truly honors who you are and your wholeness.
What's standing out to you as you do this exercise?
About your host, Shirin Eskandani
Hi, love! I’m Shirin.
Coach, speaker, writer, and life alchemist.
I teach you how to trust your intuition again, tune out all the BS, and let your heart lead the way.
Because once you strengthen your inner GPS, decisions become easier, boundaries become clearer, and belly laughs become a daily thing.
A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ME:
I’m a certified life coach (accredited through the International Coach Federation)
My husband and I met on Instagram and we live in Brooklyn, NY with our plant babies
I have a masters degree in Music and was a professional opera singer for twelve years. I worked all over the world singing on stage at Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera (more on that later…).
I believe in the woo just as much as I do the work (internal and external). No amount of crystals and affirmations will make up for a lack of a healthy mindset and aligned action.
I love all the Real Housewives franchises. Don’t make me choose one… seriously, don’t.
+ Read the episode transcript here
[00:00:00] Welcome to Wholehearted Coaching: The Podcast. If you're looking for more purpose, more passion, more joy in your life. When you have come to the right place, let's create your dream life while living your dream life. Okay, love.
[00:00:21] Hi love. Welcome to Wholehearted Coaching: The Podcast. This is where we take a deeper dive into my mindset. Monday post would, you can read on Instagram at @wholeheartedcoaching, or you can get the full post. Plus my weekly journal prompts. When you sign up for my email list, you can do that in the show notes, or you can head to my website, wholehearted-coaching.com.
[00:00:45] So this month on the podcast, every week we are re releasing a fan favorite or personal favorite episode of the podcast. Last week, we looked at the myth of faking it until you make it. And this week we're doing another podcast, which is one of my favorites. And it's about the difference between what is real and what is.
[00:01:10] Now this episode is for anyone who is interested in shifting your mindset, shifting how you look at your thoughts, shifting it, how you look at how you feel. This was a podcast episode. That was a very personal one for me, because a lot of the times on this podcast, I am sharing with you what I am learning, what I am experiencing and going through.
[00:01:33] And this podcast episode is one of those episodes. Where I'm really sharing with you, something that is totally transforming my life. An aha moment. That is completely shifting how I experience my life and how I move in the world. This particular podcast episode was inspired by an Instagram post that I had seen by a nother.
[00:01:58] And Instagram posts, which had said that you need to make more to do lists and that your way to overcome overwhelm and anxiety is to just brush off that overwhelm and anxiety and to make a to-do list, which I was like, what? This is such terrible advice. It's it's about gaslighting, how you feel ignoring what's going on for you and making you shift your focus onto something that may overwhelm you even more.
[00:02:27] This episode truly is one of my favorites. I'm telling y'all. So again, if you have a listen to this episode before I urge you, I encourage you to listen to it again, because I am positive. You will pick up some new gems and new ideas, and if you've never listened before, enjoy love. And before I head out, because this time of year is all about giving and receiving.
[00:02:52] In January, I am offering a free week long workshop called your best year where I'm going to be discussing all of the rituals and tools I use to create a really soul fulfilling year a year. Not only where I am doing the things I want to do, but feeling the way that I want to. If you want to be one of the first to sign up for this free workshop, head to wholehearted-coaching.com/waitlist and in the spirit of receiving, I would so love it.
[00:03:25] If you love could leave a review of this podcast this month, whatever platform you listen to. Wholehearted coaching the podcast on. Go ahead, leave a review, leave some star rating. And subscribe to the podcast. The more subscriptions there are, the more comments and ratings there are, that means that this podcast will be recommended to more people.
[00:03:48] So this holiday season, if y'all could do that for me, that would be so incredible. All right, love. Let's get into this week's podcast. So today's episode is one that I have been thinking about for a while. And I have been trying to figure out how to phrase this idea, how to talk about this idea. And honestly, it's been something I had been really wanting to share with you, but I just really didn't know how to do that.
[00:04:16] And this week, I figured out how, and I figured out how, because of an incredibly ridiculous and harmful and toxic post by a pretty big coach on Instagram, I'm not going to name who they are, but what we're going to do in this episode is a look at this post as a case study. You know what happens often within the coaching world.
[00:04:41] It's not the coaching that I do, but it's the coaching that we often see. This is the type of quote-unquote Tony Robbins coaching that I really dislike. And I think is incredibly harmful to us. What happens in this type of coaching is that the focus is so much on shifting our mindset to get to goals that we totally skip over the feeling.
[00:05:04] Right, but the feelings are this noise, this unnecessary part of the whole thing. And especially quote unquote bad feelings, right? Like sadness and overwhelm and frustration in that traditional world of Tony Robbins coaching. It almost seems like you shouldn't. Feel those things, because those things are what get in the way of what you want to be doing in the world.
[00:05:27] And so you want to use these mindset tools to bypass all of these feelings. So you can have the goals that you want in your life, but the truth is, are feeling. Are so damn necessary and vital and important. Our feelings are so incredibly necessary in our transformation and in our healing. And the key to so much of our healing is in the feeling.
[00:05:55] So today's episode is about how we can use our feelings to unlock our wisdom, to unlock our healing, because y'all, the feelings is where the gold is. So today's mindset Monday reads know the difference between what is real and what is true. The feelings are real. What is not true is the beliefs, the stories, the myths that are feeding this feeling honor your feelings, unlock your wisdom.
[00:06:32] That's how we find the truth. So let's talk about the post that really got me so incredibly angry. Now, as I said, this was a post on a pretty big coach's page and it was a real, and it was just an audio with images on it. And pretty much the thesis statement of this real was overwhelm. Isn't real. That overwhelm is not a real feeling.
[00:07:00] It's a made up feeling and that overwhelm can be solved by simply writing down a to-do list. Okay. And this person was like, yeah, you just write down your to-do list. You write down your 10 things for the day, your 47 things for the week. You're 87 things for the next two weeks. And this person is saying this, and I'm like, first of all, that to-do list with 87 things sounds hella overwhelming.
[00:07:27] And how dare you tell me that overwhelm is not. If you are listening to this, you know what overwhelm feels like in your body? You know exactly what it is like, whether it is in your belly, whether it fogged up your mind, whether it tightens your throat, that feeling of overwhelm is so incredibly real. And here is this coach telling you that that is not a real thing.
[00:07:58] Now, there are so many things that are wrong with this message. But the thing I really want to focus on is this gaslighting, this dismissal of overwhelm being real of a feeling, being real. We live in a culture in societies and communities that already negate our feeling. Right that dismiss how we feel either that they're not important or that what we are feeling is not true, that it's not valid.
[00:08:31] And this is a narrative that we really need to shift and change within our communities. Within our households. Feelings are real. What you are feeling is very, very. When you feel sadness or overwhelm or frustration, you know what that feeling is like in your body? The experience of that emotion is incredibly real.
[00:08:58] I once read that emotions are just energy in motion. And I love that definition because we know what that feels like, right? That energy of frustration through our body, that energy of overwhelm or that energy of sadness or joy, whatever that is. And so this person, this coach saying that your overwhelm is not real, is really negating a truth of yours, right?
[00:09:24] That you are feeling this. But there is something that is not real, not true in this equation. So love your feelings are real. You are experiencing those feelings in real time. You know what it's like in your body now, while your feelings are real, your thoughts that create those feelings or the thoughts that those feelings generate in your mind as you're experiencing.
[00:09:57] Those are on. True. So this is what I talk about, the difference between knowing what is real, the feeling and what is true or not true, what is not true is often the thoughts that are at the foundation of your feeling. So I want to go deeper into this. Now I learned this idea first from Brooke Castillo, and I don't think she originated this idea, but to me, she was the one who really like taught it in a way that seems so understandable and accessible to me.
[00:10:34] So what Brooke Castillo says is that it is not our circumstances that make us feel a certain way. It is instead our thoughts about a circumstance that make us feel the way that we feel. So, for example, let's use the example of age here. So let's say two people are both turning 40. This is the same circumstance.
[00:10:56] They're literally turning 40 on the same day, same exact circumstance. Person a thinks, oh my gosh, this is amazing. I have lived 40 years. I am so incredibly grateful and I cannot wait to see what the next 40 years has in store for me. So that's person a and then there's person B who thinks, how am I? 40 years old?
[00:11:20] I haven't done anything with my life. I am so behind. So those two people are having the same circumstance. But their perception of that circumstance is what is changing their experience of that circumstance. It's, what's creating the feelings in that circumstance, right? So person a who's incredibly grateful that they are at the age of 40.
[00:11:47] They're probably feeling excited and joyful, hopeful. And person B who is really focused on how perhaps quote unquote behind they are, how they can understand that they're here. They're probably feeling despondent and incapable and feeling like down on themselves. So what are we really seeing here? It's that the thoughts are what create the feelings for us.
[00:12:14] The feelings are real. We are experiencing those feelings in our body. But the thoughts, those are often not true. So then how do we find our truth? The answer is in our feelings, all of our feelings, all of our emotions contain so much wisdom. So if I had a client who came to me and they said they are feeling overwhelmed, What I would ask us to do what I would get us to do.
[00:12:48] The journey I would take us on is to acknowledge and embrace that feeling. Not to say you're not feeling overwhelmed. You just haven't written a to do list down. No, it is to accept that very real feeling and to then get curious. So, what does getting curious about our feelings look like? So some of us are really so Matic and physical.
[00:13:12] And so with a client, I'll ask them, where do you feel it in your body? What is that feeling like? Right. Is overwhelm heaviness. Is it heat? Is it pressure? Isn't butterfly. And then I get us to ask the feeling questions. And now if you've been here in this podcast community for a while at wholehearted coaching, you know that I love to ask feelings, questions, because that is where the keys lie.
[00:13:40] That is where the gold is. And so when we start to ask the feelings, questions, like, what do you think of this person? Right. So what do you think of. Right. What are you worried about? What do you fear? That's when all of the untruths come through. So oftentimes let's say a client is feeling overwhelmed and we start going through this process of inquiry, untruths pop up.
[00:14:11] Like I have no idea what I'm doing. I am behind everyone else. And no matter what I do, I can not catch. If I do not do all of these things, I am a failure. These thoughts, these beliefs, these myths are what are making you feel overwhelmed and also exacerbating the overwhelm because of course, what ends up happening is we always have like a thought, I always call it this, the umbrella thought the base thought.
[00:14:40] So maybe your base thought is I never know what I'm doing. So I never know what I'm doing creates overwhelm for you. And then once you're in that feeling of overwhelm, we go into this spiral of thoughts, right. That support the original thought. So I never know what I'm doing. I'm always behind, I'm a failure.
[00:14:59] Look at this person. And so then we fall into this spiral, which makes the overwhelm even more overwhelming. So if a client came to me and said, I'm overwhelmed, and if I gave them a to-do list, do you think that that is actually going to help with their overwhelm? I mean, maybe it's a bandaid solution, but what happens when that week they can't finish off all the things on that to-do list.
[00:15:27] What happens when they find that they need to add more things to that to-do list? No, the wisdom, the gold is in finding what your untruths are and then finding the truth for yourself. Because once you can find the truth, then we start to generate and create different feelings. So let's say that the core thought the belief is I never know what I'm doing.
[00:15:56] And with a client together, we're like, all right. So you're really believing. I never know what I'm doing. And when you believe I never know what I'm doing, it makes you overwhelmed. And when you're overwhelmed, you cannot get work done because it always feels like you're behind. Right? So this kind of loop is one that we have all been in.
[00:16:16] And what we really have to start looking at is the thought that is the most important thing here. The on. So maybe the truth that comes up for me in a client is I may not be where I want to be, but I acknowledged my growth. I am exactly where I meant to be. I am doing exactly what I can do with everything that's going on in my life.
[00:16:42] I am doing my best and my best is enough just by saying these thoughts. Do you sense a shift in your own body that different feelings are being generated? Right? So if you started your day with a thought, all right, you may not be exactly where you want to be. I am growing. I am trying, and that is enough.
[00:17:10] Now I would imagine those feelings would maybe shift from overwhelm to acceptance, to maybe calm, to groundedness, to present. All of these feelings are feelings that allow us to do different things. I don't even want to say better things, but just different things. And we could only get there with the client by looking at the feeling, looking and addressing and saying, yes, your overwhelm is real.
[00:17:41] Now. Let's figure out what the untruth is that this overwhelmed. Is founded on that this overwhelm is feeding you. That's where the gold is. Love. The feelings are the key. I cannot stress this enough, honoring, accepting, acknowledging your feelings is going to unlock. The motivation, the feelings, the happiness, the fulfillment that you have been seeking, it's not bypassing it.
[00:18:11] It's not saying it's not real and creating a damn to-do list. It is sinking into accepting, embracing, hugging that feeling and saying, what are you have to tell me? And is that the truth? John Weiland says the feelings are real. The story is bullshit. That's what we're talking about today. The stories so often are bullshit.
[00:18:38] And I really recommend listening to my two episodes on myth and magic myth is all about the stories that we hold on to the beliefs that we hold on to. And in that episode, I talk about why we hold onto those myths, why they're so important. And magic. That is the truth of who we are. So if you want to go even deeper into figuring out how you can unlock your magic and why your myths are there and why there are important, check out those two episodes.
[00:19:10] But this idea of real and true love this for me was a game changer, right? That, yes, it is real. This overwhelm in my body is real, but is it true that I never know what I'm doing? No, that's, that's not true. Yes. This frustration in my body is real, but is it true that I'm not where I should be now? That's not true.
[00:19:37] And when you start asking yourself these questions, And no longer gaslighting yourself. That's when you unlock it all for yourself. And again, the key, the wisdom is all in the feelings. You know, for me, this idea of real and truth is also something that can be applied to our greater society. Right? So white supremacy.
[00:20:06] Is not true. It's a bunch of bullshit, right? We know that, but in our world, the effects of white supremacy are very, very real diet culture. That's a bunch of BS, right? That is untrue, but the effects of diet culture in our lives, that is very real. When you start seeing the world through this lens, when you start seeing your experience of life through this lens, it's almost like the matrix it's it's like you took the pill that shows you this dimension.
[00:20:47] That is just a bunch of BS. But we can't just say, oh, this is BS. So let's just throw it out. Let's not look at it. No, no, no, no, no. We have to actually explore it because once we start exploring the stories, that's when we can find what our truth is, that's what we can start changing things for the. I want to end this episode with a quote from a really incredible book, all about feelings.
[00:21:13] It's called permission to feel by mark Brackett. And this book is just such a great deep dive into feelings and emotions and how we can start to actually recognize how we're feeling. Get really clear on how we're feeling and how we can transform our feelings from a really scientific perspective. I love it.
[00:21:35] I cannot recommend it. But I want to end this episode with just one of the quotes from this book. I could literally quote the entire book for this episode, but that would be very long and that will be an audio book. So the quote reads understanding emotions is a journey, possibly an adventure. When it's finished, we may find ourselves someplace new someplace, unexpected somewhere.
[00:21:59] Perhaps we had no intention of going and yet there we are wiser than before. Maybe wiser than we wish to be, but there is no other way forward. Love your emotions. Your feelings are real. They are valid and they are necessary. They are the key to your healing because they uncover what you're holding onto the untruths, the stories, the myths.
[00:22:35] That you are holding onto. And that is when we can start to create the truths that create the different feelings. That is the beauty of knowing the difference between what is real and what is true until next week, I will talk to you then. Thank you so much for joining me this week. If you liked this week's episode, please share it with a friend comment and rate this podcast until next week.
[00:23:08] See you later. Love.