Are our Thoughts Really the Facts?

The "So Now What?" Podcast

Let's talk about stories (thoughts) versus facts (circumstances).

Because we lived it, many of us can share a story about our infertility. All of us think that our stories are true.

We think that we are just relaying the information about our stories in a way that seem right to us. They're just observations about our experiences. We don't understand that the way that we interpret the world is not true to everyone.

The only place that the truth exists is in our mind. And the truth and what we believe is true, becomes the truth in our life.

You've heard many stories of two people experiencing the same event, observing the same event—maybe from their childhood, maybe from a crime scene, maybe from something that happened and you ask each of them to tell you what happened.

They each tell the truth about what happened, and yet, there are two very different accounts. Say they each get a lie detector test. Neither one of them is lying.

Which one is the truth?

How do we know what the truth is?

Does the truth exist outside of those people, or does the truth exist in each of us in different ways?

What I want to offer is that the truth exists differently in each of us.

What determines the truth is not some place out there that we're going to find. It's actually what we choose to believe. And all of that is going to happen right here inside of us and in our lives. This is where all of your agency is.

This is where all of your choice is.

This is where all of your power is.

None of your power exists in circumstances.

Circumstances are just boring, neutral things that exist out there that don't mean anything.

There's no colorful adjectives or language in a circumstance.

If a circumstance to you is negative, that's because of your thoughts about it. Otherwise, it's completely neutral, and all circumstances are neutral.

If I ask you to tell me about a negative circumstance.

What I mean is a circumstance that you're interpreting as negative because there's no such thing as a negative circumstance.

Keep with me here. I want you to think right now, There is something happening in the world. Someone is dying. Someone is being abused. Someone is being hurt right now. At this very moment, that circumstance that is happening somewhere out in the world is neutral to us. We are not affected by that circumstance right now.

Is that circumstance happening? Yes.

Is it affecting us in a negative way? No. And why is it not?

Because before I brought it up, we weren't thinking about it We weren't aware of it happening, but it was going on. So therefore, it is happening—there are people starving right now; there are people being abused; there are people being tortured; there are people being hurt right now—but it's not affecting us. We're not experiencing it because we're not thinking about it. Now, that's an easy way to think about it.

Now, let's bring it a little closer to home. Let's say someone died. Say that person actually died a few days ago, say last week Thursday. Their death is (a circumstance) is neutral. If someone hadn't told you it happened and you get the news days later, its neutral. You don't yet know that it's happened. It hasn't touched you here yet, even though that person died last Thursday.

When it exists out in the world and hasn’t reached you yet, their death remains neutral until you have a thought about it, when someone tells you about it.

And how you choose to think about that death will determine all of feelings you have.

People dying, people getting divorced, negative pregnancy tests, an embryo with a chromosomal abnormality, all of it is neutral until we have a thought about it.

And THEN we start affecting our lives with the circumstances.

Without consciousness, without thoughts, everything is just neutral. Everything just is.

Let me give you this example: My Reproductive Endocrinologist called me to tell me my frozen embryo had been tested and had trisomy 16. It would never make it to a full term pregnancy. That sequencing of that embryo was in existence for months before I was even aware of it, but I didn’t know. I may have carried hope in that embryo for all those months preceding that phone call, but the embryo was still the same. It had Trisomy 16.

I had so much angst and devastation by the results that were shared with me, but someone else may not. Someone could feel grateful and think, thank goodness I know this now and I didn’t have to go through with a transfer that would end up in a miscarriage.

That doesn’t mean that there would be high fives about the news, but it is a way to see how a circumstance (this phone call with results from my RE) can create different emotions depending on the way someone thinks about the words shared with them..

The circumstance means nothing until we have a thought about it.

Why does all of this matter?

Each day we have lots of emotion and lots of stories. And what I want you to know is what is going on in your mind, your thoughts, is creating the experiences in your life.

I often find that when my beautiful clients start out working with me, they look at a circumstances as the cause of their feelings, and want to change their circumstance, but working with a LCS certified coach I will help you see your mind and how you're thinking about your facts. And how to separate out the facts from the thoughts.

You CAN learn to identify what are the facts of this that no one would argue with. The indisputable facts that everyone in the world would agree has happened.

Everything is the way that you're interpreting it, the way you're thinking about it. And when you can separate those two things out, something magical happens.

There's more than one way to think about things that happen.

There's more than one way to interpret a circumstance which doesn't mean that the way youre thinking about it is wrong or should only seek to cause positive emotion.

That's not what I’m saying.

I’m saying that the way you are thinking about it should be deliberate because most of the time, what happens is we go into knee-jerk default mode with our brains.