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In this episode I talk about how our brains are always asking and answering questions; it’s how our brains are making sense of our circumstances and giving everything meaning. This is the essence of thoughts…. And harnessing the power of these questions in your life works with your brain to change your life by changing the focus of your thoughts on purpose and through human psychology. This episode is powerful and is a must for the life of any Radical Imperfectionist. Listen, subscribe and share this message with anybody that would benefit from this message. I can’t wait to hear from you!
Have a wonderful day ❤️❤️❤️
Hello My Friends,
As you may have noticed, my podcasting schedule lately has been biweekly as opposed to weekly. That is not an accident. The winter has been a lovely time for me of growth, and shedding old beliefs and improving upon my habits. As many of you also know, I’m also a homeschool mom of two incredibly fast-paced, energetic, emotional, inspiring, faster than normal boys. They have more ideas and energy than I ever thought was possible and my life is incredibly full. We got to go to the mountains the week before last, and then my birthday came and went. The past week has been an incredible struggle for me. As you learn, when you do thought work, one layer is peeled back and another layer shows itself. And the more I become willing to face my skeletons, and my demons; standing up to my inner critic, and feeling the emotions that are there, the more I am humbled and yet challenged by continuing this work of growth for my own internal and external freedom.  Because of my own personality and struggles I have had in my habits and how for over 30 years of my life I managed, or rather ran from my emotions, from time to time I can still feel knocked down by thought patterns from my old habits that can still creep in when I am feeling weak and vulnerable. My attempt with this podcast is never to show you what it would be like to have it all together, because, well frankly I don’t have it all together, but also because that’s just not even possible. Having it all together is not a goal here. The goal is being okay with not having it all together, and learning the skills to not be afraid to struggle; to not be afraid to face what we have feared facing our entire lives, or when we do have experience fear, to feel it and even allow it to guide us toward what we would previously run from. Understanding that when our motivation comes from freedom and not from fear, then we are able to embrace our imperfect lives, not as struggle-free, but as beautiful amidst the struggle because it’s about learning and growing and loving and not about perfection. So, long story short, this past week for me was somewhat brutal, and one thing I am committed to in this new life of mine, pursuing freedom and love, is to owning my struggle, and responding with love and acceptance the best I can. I tell my husband when I am struggling, instead of surfing social media more, I retract and instead connect more directly with those in my life that help me to see the truth and work back into the life that I love so much, disarming those lies that are still there. I am not here to show you what it’s like to have finally made it from struggling perfectionist to perfection, but to show you what it’s like to opt out of perfectionism altogether, and instead subscribe to a life of presence and messy beauty being real and feeling the feelings and thinking thoughts and living an awesome imperfect life on purpose. Because that’s where the awesome exists. That’s where it’s at… That’s my jam.
Okay, so today I want to talk about questions!!! Let’s get into it!!! In the last episode, I discussed how complaints often are masking a desire essentially, and I talked about how important it is to find the desire below the complaint. To get there, we need to ask questions. I also mentioned something called afformations, and this week I want to get more into questions and afformations.
Several years ago I read a book called A More Beautiful Question by warren berger. The gist of this book is the idea that in order to grow at all we must ask questions.
The truth is, that our human minds are always asking questions, but we are doing this without intention behind our questions as it is the narrative running on autopilot that is often the one asking the questions, and if your autopilot narrator is your inner critic, then these questions are very dis-sempowering.Â
This is the problem.
You see the process of thought is essentially the brain asking questions and seeking answers. That is the thought process broken down as Noah St. John talks about, and it’s pretty simple and profound if you think about it that way.
As I also talked about, many people try to do affirmations and don’t understand why not only do they often not work, but often times you end up feeling worse than before you said them. Why is this? Well, again, the brain is constantly asking and answering questions. When you put words to a thought that your brain does not believe, without any questioning and dissecting of the concept itself leading your brain to agree with this said conclusion, then all you are doing according to your brain, is lying to yourself. Whether it’s a true thought or not, if you don’t believe it, it will not only be tossed out, but often will be used as a measure or tool by your brain to further make you feel like crap. If you say I am so patient, and your brain does not believe that, it will not only disagree with this thought but will say Yeah right, remember yesterday when you yelled at Dezzy for dropping his plate? Or whatever, and you immediately not only feel terrible, but worse than you felt before. This is because affirmations do not essentially work with human psychology or the way your brain actually works.
If you are saying affirmations however that you already have evidence for in your brain as this being truth, and you believe it, but want to remember it, then this rejection and shaming process doesn’t happen but more often this needs to be a neutral thought especially when you have core beliefs you don’t yet know all about which are more powerful than what you might have recently read about.
Before we are even able to understand the fact that we have parts of our brain and thinking that is conscious and parts of our thinking that are automatic and unconscious in our thinking, our brain is asking questions and answering those questions on it’s own… making meaning of the world around us, and forming a blueprint for the way we think of ourselves and the world and ourselves as we relate to and fit into that great big world.
Because of the way our brains work, more important than answers to questions are the questions themselves. In A More Beautiful Question, Warren talks about how it’s the more powerful questions that inspire all of the great change and innovation in the world. When people are able to transform their thinking, understanding their brains by always asking questions that assume great things, from a place of curiosity, growth, solutions and freedom, then those people change the world.
This is true for business as well as in our personal lives, and it is much harder to ask these questions or so I have found, when it comes to our inner worlds because this is where our fear is held in such high regard by our unconscious minds. Our unconscious minds are concerned with keeping us alive and safe; and tough feelings are considered unsafe, and thus, our brains try to avoid situations that will cause us any emotional struggle whatsoever. The more we faced uncertainty and perhaps trauma and insecure situations growing up, which most of us had those growing up, even within dominantly ideal home circumstances, the more our brains created beliefs which still govern our thinking, and thus our emotions and decisions and how our lives play out.
We want to numb our emotions, to run from them by buffering them. We don’t want to feel them because they don’t seem safe. We are afraid of how we will feel; that fear of feelings governs most of our actions in life, until we become aware of this idea, and or taste the beauty of being motivated instead by freedom. When freedom, passion, love and purpose fuel our thoughts and actions, and not fear, we experience an entirely new world and our lives are transformed. This is what happens when people go through incredible life change.
Each time in my adult life when I faced a huge challenge emotionally and came through it, I was so deeply empowered. I still had struggles, and still had fears, but a taste of the freedom and personal power I felt in owning my life and changing it for the better was far superior to any feeling of false security ever attained by following my fears.
I joked for a long time about the fact that if anybody from high school knew I had not only went onto college, but graduated with honors, studied to be a certified nursing assistanct and got my California real estate broker’s license, they would drop dead from surprise. I now realize though that it’s not because I was dumb, but because My actions painted a picture for others that I was a hopeless misfit who was angry at the world. But when I began college and finally didn’t feel stupid, and finally enjoyed school, and had the freedom to study what I wanted, I was fueled little by little with freedom and a taste of a bigger life. All of this is not a brag. There are people that went to much more prestigious colleges than I, or those that went to no college at all that are smarter than I am. I am not slaming myself either. I am a bright girl. But more than that, I am resilient; I am strong; and I am committed to growth. I have always been committed to growth, ever since the first taste of my capabilities. And I don’t mean natural ability. I have strengths, as everyone does, but have a lot of weaknesses I have overcome and continue to work on. So none of this is a brag, or a slam on myself. Or even a pep talk to amp you up on my story; but simply playing into this very idea, because if you don’t believe something, you will not believe it. But how do you change beliefs then if you want to believe things that fuel your life toward freedom when right now your life is governed by fear? This is how. It is in asking better questions.
Again, you are already asking questions. When you get curious, you have to get real, you have to get humble and you have to be open to discomfort. When you accept that this emotional pain we are all so afraid of; this pain that keeps us afraid, well, it’s not going to kill us. When we realize that it’s in feeling the feelings and being willing to go through feeling the feelings that we realize not only how strong we are, but that the discomfort (because it’s more like discomfort than pain, especially as you do more and more thought work) is not unbearable. If you are willing to ask better questions, and feel uncomfortable; then your brain will answer the better questions, just as it’s constantly answering the terrible questions you’re asking it, and the answers will fuel you through any potential discomfort to the actions you need to take.
Think about the questions you ask yourself right now… what question from the inner critic are probing you constantly? I know I hear, “why can’t you be patient?” “why am I so incapable of focusing on one thing at a time?” “why can’t I keep the house clean?” “why am I always so forgetful?”
Guess what… the brain will answer these questions, and does all day long. That’s why when you’re struggling, it can feel impossible to get out of. It’s a spiral because your brain enforces the truth you provide in these questions (even if it’s a lie) as an affirmation, by finding evidence to support that and this solidifies your beliefs in yourself, your life, your capabilities, the world and your place and value within that world.
So, ask questions that don’t defeat you. Practicing better thoughts is about working on actively thinking thoughts that will actually get results in your life that you want. But that involves noticing your thoughts, listening to them, feeling the feeling that results without resistance and judgement or numbing and running in fear. That involves then dissecting the thought to see how it’s not true, and finding a true thought that is helpful that you can actually believe.
When instead of doing this kind of thought work you simply try to replace deeply rooted beliefs and thoughts stemming from these beliefs with thoughts that would feel good ideally if you believed them, but you don’t freaking believe them, then that is where you are feeling defeated. That is where you are getting stuck and that’s where this powerful questioning comes in.
As Noah St. Johns says, “the point of affomrations is not to try to trick your mind but to use it properly.”
Instead of saying a thought you want to believe that you don’t, ask your brain why that thought is true and see your brain help you to bridge the gap in how you see your life now and how you hope to see your life. I have talked about perception time and time again, because everything we think is simply an interpretation of circumstances and what they mean for us. Again, this is our brain answering a question on autopilot which results in a belief. But if instead you want to see your life as empowered and beautiful, you need to ask questions which inspire your brain to prove that to be true. This is not because it’s not true, but because it’s a matter of perception and is all relative, so to rewire the way your brain sees something, propose to your brain a question that it can’t deny answering.
If you feel ugly, fat, and unworthy of love… then first of all, you are not alone. The way our culture paints an incredibly impossible ever changing superficial standard of beauty and where our value comes from, makes it incredibly difficult not to have those internal beliefs because they are in our subconscious from a life lived in this world. This is not your fault, and is also not about blame. We are all constantly learning, and we can only change the world by changing ourselves, and healing and spreading love.
I digress..
So if this is a thought you want to change, obviously I would do thought work on this and get incredibly specific about your beliefs…. Do brain dumps, rewrite your story, dissect your thoughts.
But in regards to asking questions, to making these afformations that so many talk about authored by Noah St. John, you can turn around what you want to believe about yourself into a powerful question as scaffolding to building beliefs that nurture your growth. For example, instead of “I am beautiful in my body as it is and worthy of love”, I would say “Why am I beautiful in my current body exactly how it is?” “Why have I always been worthy of love”; this challenges the focus of your mind, opens the perception to changes and possibility.
When you state this question you give yourself over to the question and you allow it to sink in. You might meditate on it. You write it on the mirror, on a slip of paper in your wallet, you record it on voice memo and listen to it every day. You put a sticker on your desk that prompts you to remember to ask yourself this question.
Then, take a step into the truth of this question. Perhaps this means I thank my body every day for the life that it allows me to lead. I thank the parts that I used to compare for being uniquely mine. Maybe I read an empowering book or treat myself to something that doesn’t have to cost money, but that I had a hard time treating myself to before… time alone, time reading, a nap and being “unproductive”, or it can be something that costs money, getting a haircut, massage, going out with a friend for tea.
The thing with these afformations is that the questions that create afformations are truth which don’t require a different person. Remember, you are not what you do, think, or feel. You are the experiencer of this life through your thoughts, feelings and actions. So these thoughts are true or are a choice to be true for you, they just require tweaks in the way you experience life, your thoughts emotions and actions. When your brain believes it is true for you then it will shift your emotions, and your actions will be dramatically easier to fall in line and enforce it. But you must continue to ask this question. And the more you practice the question, the more it will push out the limiting beliefs and lies you have believed which have been keeping you feeling like crap, and your brain will keep providing evidence to prove this empowering truth to be true for you.
Success happens because of compounded action from better thoughts which result from better questions.
You are here because you asked a question. You struggle and grow because you ask questions. All you love in life you have because you asked a good question. You are already capable of this sunshine, you ask questions all the time, and even though they are often empowering, the moment you are aware of it is the moment you gain back your power. Now you have something you can do about it now. Imagine if you asked yourself powerful questions intentionally daily? It is human psychology, not wizarding. I’m not Harry Potter and this work has been so powerful for me. I hope this week you are noticing the qustions that run on autopilot. I hope you are able to see them as natural and normal, and choose to turn them into powerful questions that fuel you to embrace who you are. You have got this my friend.
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Just so you know, I am working on a workbook which will help you let go of other people’s opinions to really step more into your life and your power with freedom and peace. I will keep you posted if you’re on my email list. To get on there you can text imperfect to the number 22828 or go to theradicalimperfectionist.com and sign up for emails. I’ll also send you a free rewrite your story worksheet.
I hope you have an amazing week my friends and enjoy this work. Until next time, this is Holly Ann Kasper. The radical imperfectionist.