The Peaceful Mind Podcast
Episode 75- Circumstance Swapping


FULL TRANSCRIPT (without timecode)
You are listening to episode 75 of the Peaceful Mind podcast.
Welcome to the Peaceful Mind podcast, a place for creating the peace of mind, you need to be the best mom you were created by God to be. If you want to bring more balance, more joy in more peace to your motherhood. This is the place for you. I'm your host, certified life coach at Catholic mom Danielle Thienel. In the name of the father of the son and of the Holy Spirit.
Let's get started.
Well, hi there. Welcome back to the podcast. I am going to be talking today about circumstance swapping. I've noticed a lot that this has come up with new clients that come to me, and I'm very aware that it's actually going to happen. And so I wanted to let all of you just kind of contemplate this in your head and see how you're maybe showing up in this way in your life. And I'm going to guess that if you haven't coached, if you don't have a life coach, if you're not coaching with me now, then for most of you, this will be a total new concept and you'll be able to look at your life a little bit differently and think about it a little bit differently.
And that is always my goal. OK, so this is what I want you to know, especially as we journey to have more peace in our lives, more peace of mind. This one thing that I'm about to tell you is probably, I would say, the number one thing that gets me closer to peace or return to peace, or gives me peace of mind because I know it and I want to just reiterate it to all of you today. And that is that one of the most important things that you'll ever learn is facts don't hurt.
That's right. The circumstances of our lives have no effect, zero effect on us until they encounter your mind. And from there, you attach meaning to them. You have thoughts about those circumstances and thoughts come from the mind. So you're not sad about someone dying until your mind registers, the fact that they have died.
The person's death, which may have even happened. Days have go a go. It didn't have any effect on you, but at the same moment that they die, we could be somewhere else over here laughing because our minds aren't aware of what just happened. So that example is to show you that we want to learn how to separate out the facts from our thoughts. And when I say facts, it is interchangeably with the word circumstance because that's what our circumstances are.
They are just neutral data points that have happened in the world, something about which everyone would agree. There's no adjectives when you describe it or any judgments. So circumstances are what we want to pull out and separate from all of the story and thoughts and thinking and patterns of drama that we have going on in our minds because we when we don't separate them, we they kind of overlap and we don't really have a good.
We don't get good clarity over whether something is actually like true and factual and that everybody in the world would agree on. Or if it's just our brains doing its thing, offering us a lot of thoughts that we think them over again and then we believe them and then we feel like it's true. So let me just give you some examples of circumstances so that then I can explain to you what I see happening with how I've named it as swapping circumstances.
So circumstances? Some examples are the sky is blue. There is carpet on the floor. I have a son.
Maybe my daughter said the words quote, I don't have time. Or I weigh 150 pounds or I have a business. Do you see how these are just very neutral data points? And everybody in the world, if they kind of saw it or were faced with, you know, looking at it, they would agree, right? Would everyone agree the sky is blue? Yes.
If they were all fitting in the room and looked down and saw carpet? Yes. Another way of thinking about it is if and everybody in a court of law or a judge in a court of law would agree that it's true. So what about your life, are your circumstances? So where do you live? Are you in a house? How many kids do you have? Are you married? How much do you weigh? How much money is in your bank account? What is in your kitchen? Do you have like a college degree? Do you notice how these are all just facts about your life? Another really important group of circumstances I want to point out is what other people say.
So the actual words that come out of your children's mouth, your spouse's mouth? Let's just say you're your priest. Let's say a boss, a mother in law. Yes, everything they say becomes your own circumstance. OK, so the words people say, the things that you own and that are around you. These are examples of what I want to tell you are absolutely neutral.
They're not good, they're not bad, they're not positive, they're not negative. They just are, they just exist like the weather is a circumstance. It's a neutral circumstance that is one that you can easily use as an example to see that you don't have any control over. Right? Would you agree? Would everybody in the world agree that our whether it exists? Yes.
Then that is a neutral circumstance. But here in lies where it all changes is that right now, many of you and I used to be one of them believe that. Is that how we feel? Is directly related to the circumstances in our lives. So if the scale goes down, oh, we feel amazing, right? If we have more money in the bank account, that will make us feel great.
If we don't, then we will feel negatively will feel bad. Right? So when we have thoughts about the circumstances like she's rude or I'm too busy or my kids are mad at me or I'm underpaid for the work I do, these are all thoughts that you have. And it's these thoughts that create how you feel, right? When you think I'm underpaid for the work I do.
What do you feel resentful? And so you think that when your boss says you are only getting this amount of raise, then that's what makes you feel resentful? No, there's one important step in between and that's the the thought you choose to think about what your boss says. So you feel resentment, not from what your boss says, but you feel resentment, resentment because thoughts in your mind in this in particular one you're choosing.
I'm underpaid for the work I do. That's the true cause of your feelings. And in this case, a painful feeling. So that kind of foundation that I wanted to remind you about separating circumstances from the thoughts, from the story that you're telling yourself about the circumstances is really vital to gain control, to gain your power to to actually get super aware.
This is just number one, right? Awareness of what your brain is offering you around all the different circumstances that you will face in this life. We have them every day. The same ones that we have and then we have new ones that come our way, right? Some we really like in some we don't. But whether we like them or we don't like them, whether it causes us to feel more peace or have us go out of peace, it's still not the circumstance that causes it.
It's still your choice of how you think about it. OK, so this brings in the swapping part. Let's start with the example of where you live. Let's say you don't like where you live. Let's say you moved to a different country and there's you get there and you're just have the fact or the circumstance of you being in this particular country. And so you have a whole bunch of thoughts and thinking that the reason why you are miserable or you don't like it and that you're feeling bad and that you're not happy is because of where you live.
It's because of this new country. So you might have thoughts like it's not easy to get around. I don't like to speak this language. I don't have any friends here. This has terrible weather. It's not what I thought it was going to be. And so the blame of the circumstance for causing you to feel terrible then has you wanting to swap the circumstance out? You're like, I don't like this place this circumstance that I'm in, so I'm going to change it.
And so you take yourself to a new country and then when you go to the new country, you still have the same thoughts in the same brain. None of that changed. And so you may find yourself in a similar situation where you're then at a new place focusing and just still thinking all of thoughts for this new place. So another example of circumstance swapping could be with your job.
OK, if you work outside the home, you may have a job and where you were. You see, like your boss is, maybe you have thoughts like your boss is mean or your co-workers aren't helpful. Maybe you think they expect too much of me or I don't like these hours, right? So notice how there is just this neutral circumstance of a job that you have. It's a fact, right? Where you would everyone would agree.
Let's say you sign some paperwork or you've just gone to work there. And this circumstance is then seen as why you aren't happy at the job. And so because we're correlating your emotional state to the job itself, this is where we want to go into circumstance swapping. You might have thoughts now like, I don't need this job. I'm not putting up with this. This isn't a right fit for me.
And so you change your circumstance. Perhaps you quit, right? And so you leave the job and then you go after another one. And so just like moving to the foreign country and then moving to another one, then you will just go to another job. And maybe for a while at the new job, you'll have access to better feeling thoughts. However. If you haven't kind of gotten the concept that I'm trying to like, let you know about today that circumstances aren't the cause of your feelings, but your thoughts are the cause of your feelings.
And so we really want to separate what truly is a thought from a circumstance so that you can make a more powerful decision. So you go to this next job and after a little while, then if you if you're still like blaming circumstances for how you feel, then this job will also provide you circumstances that you will attribute to reasons why you feel negative. So where are you swapping out the circumstances on your in your life? In order to try to make yourself feel better, if hearing this today kind of shows you in a highlights that you have been putting a certain responsibility onto circumstances to create how you feel and not your thoughts.
I want to offer you to find out the circumstances in your life right now that aren't making you feel great. And I want you to see if you can tap into not swapping out circumstances, but really taking a look at what your thoughts are about it. And do some work there to see if you can think about and look at the circumstances in a different way, one that feels better, one that's more serving.
So I want you to know and leave this podcast just thinking, first of all, about what is actually the circumstances of your life. Like, really become a little detective and go around and say, like, is that a fact? Is that a circumstance? Is that like a situation that's neutral? Is this something that's totally out of my control of changing? And just in that, it's brings a new awareness to your life, because then you also get to see if it's if it is, then you're like, Oh, what am I thinking about it? What am I choosing to think about it? Or even you can say, how do I feel about that circumstance? So let's just say you have dinner put in front of you, right? And I say that because in my household, my husband is the cook.
And so a lot of times I come in not knowing what dinner is going to be, but I sit down and then it comes in front of me so that literally looking at the dinner plate is a circumstance of my life. It is literally just a neutral situation. This plate of food in front of me on the counter, at six o'clock at night. And so I then get to choose what I want to think about it just for example sake. Let's say it's a dish that I really don't care for.
It's like not my favorite. I could swap it out, right? I could I could go to the refrigerator. Get something else out and say, I'm not going to eat this, but because I know it's not the food itself that has any bearing on how I feel, but my thoughts I may choose to do otherwise. I may choose to think, No, I want to show my appreciation and eat the food anyway, or I want to be just kind of curious.
Maybe my taste buds changed. Maybe I'm wrong about it. Or maybe he cooked it in a different way, and it's actually going to taste amazing. But, you know, in that moment, I get to decide by my thoughts how I'm going to feel about the food. And I want you to know that you two have the same amazing power to utilize in your life. Though I offered just kind of off the top of my head examples with the dinner being served with moving to a different country and a situation at a workplace, I want you to take this week to just look at your life circumstances and see them as neutral.
If you can separate out really what are things that are factual about your life from the story and drama and all of the thoughts you have about it, and then you get to decide, do you want to swap and change your circumstances or do you first want to try now that you know this power that you have? Do you want to look at it differently? Think about the circumstance differently, and that will change how you look at everything, which is a beautiful thing.
So this is why I say that you can have peace no matter what the circumstances are in your life, because peace is a feeling it is not caused by anything outside of you. It is caused by your thoughts, your thinking, your beliefs. So look at your circumstances and to have more peace in your life, more peace of mind, then decide on purpose. Maybe not to swap out the circumstance, but to see what you can do within yourself, within your mind, to look at those circumstances different and to feel better about them.
OK, everyone, any questions? Email me. I love to hear from you all, especially about specific episodes. And then if you have been enjoying the Peaceful Mind podcast, I want to just ask you if you could go to whatever listening platform that you are listening to this episode on and just give a little rating. And if you have another minute to spare a review, that would be so awesome, and it helps the podcast to be able to be heard by many more.
All right, everyone. Thank you so much for being here, and I'll talk to you again next week.
Thank you for tuning in to today's episode of the Peaceful Mind podcast. Are you ready to take everything I teach you here and put it to work for your own life to really learn how to have peace of mind, no matter what is happening around you? If so, I'd love to have you as a client, as your coach. This is where you'll get personal and focused time on your own mind, using life coaching tools, concepts and proven life transforming wisdom all through a faith filled lens. To learn more about how we can work together.
Come on over to DanielleThienel.Com. There you'll see how to sign up for a free coaching consult and learn how to get started. Until next time. Peace be with you, always.
