if you don't feel within yourself, a deep sense of love, gratitude and joy with your life, it's because of your thoughts and more specifically the lack of control you have over your thinking Welcome to the having it all podcasts, the show about what it takes to live. An abundant loving life. My name is Matthew Bivens and each week I'm helping you get out of your head so that you can truly have it all. Let's do it. Yeah, yeah, what's going on? My awesome friends, wow, it's been a minute since I've said that and boy does it feel so amazing to be back on the mic with you? Welcome to the having it all podcast, I am Matthew Bivens, your balanced lifestyle coach and this podcast is the place to learn how to level up your beliefs and practices so that you can have it all and truly live your abundant loving life. If you're tired of feeling stuck and you're looking for a path towards more clarity, confidence and purpose, then my friend you are in the right place, today is an awesome day, It is an awesome day because this is the first new episode I'm doing on the podcast in about 3.5 months, yes, I took a sabbatical, which I'll get into that more in a little bit and if you're new to the show then over the last few months you've been hearing me rebroadcast older episodes from the having it all archive and so today I've got a fresh one for you and my intention for our conversation today is really to get you to take a good hard look at yourself and face some truths that you may be running away from.

But before we dive into that, I actually want to talk a little bit about my time away from the podcast and then share a couple of announcements. So as I just mentioned, I've been away for 3.5 months and that was something that I have never done in the history of this show, which first, And I think it was back in 2016. So we've been going on five years and 365 plus episodes. Um, that's when I decided to take this break out around the 365 episode mark. And you know, it was something that I, I just felt moved to do. And I said, you know what, I'm gonna go ahead and put this thing on pause for a couple of months. I've got plenty of episodes in, in the, in the, in the catalog and I'm just going to take a break and allow my mind to just disengage from the weekly routine of putting on a show like this. And I learned a number of things about myself and one of the things I learned about my creative process is that when my creativity becomes wrote and routine, it really loses what, what makes it special.

And after five years of coming up with new topics for you and producing the show every week. you know, things started to become routine, right? I mean, I have my workflows and everything that helped me to get this show produced each week, but even just the process of thinking about what to talk about was starting to get routine and you know, overall my creativity was suffering. Like there's an endless amount of topics that I can get into on this show, truly, there's so many things I can talk about, I can dip into my own life, I can talk about things that I'm observing and others that was never the problem topics was never the problem, but my inspiration was starting to become impacted and that was a problem. So I took a sabbatical to just reset, to refresh, to get out of my weekly routine of producing the show and and to just gain some perspective. And it was incredibly beneficial for me and I highly recommend it to anybody out there who is a creative person or who just finds that, you know, when you're in that routine and you're doing something again and again and again, that you're feeling less inspired or things are starting to feel stale, whatever it is, if you feel that you need to take a sabbatical figure out some way how to do it, and I will be very honest with you shortly into stepping away from the podcast.

I was very open to the idea of just being complete with the show altogether. I I entertained it. I thought, you know, I've said a lot, I've put out a lot of amazing, free, valuable resources and content out there and I think that I've covered so many different topics over the years that pretty much wherever you're at, whatever you're dealing with, there's some episode that can address it in some way. So I, I toyed with the idea of returning back to you all and saying, hey everybody, I'm complete and it's been a, it's been a fun ride, but I promise you that's not what's happening and that's not what one of my announcements is going to be. But I just want to share that, like, just being truthful with you. I definitely toyed with the idea of completing the show, but the reason why I came back is because I started this show to explore, to learn about myself, to share what I'm learning to share, how I'm applying the things that I'm learning and to talk about my own breakdowns in my breakthroughs and I'm still having all those things, I'm still learning, I'm still applying things in my life.

I'm still walking my talk, I'm still experiencing breakdowns and I'm still experiencing breakthroughs and I love having this platform to reach and to connect with other like minded people people who do believe in their own greatness and believe in facing their fears and taking leaps of faith, you know, folks who are ambitious who feel like they have more to give, who know that that greatness is lying within them and it might be dormant in some areas and you just got to figure out how to unlock it and you're just bold enough to go for it. And so I, I really enjoy this platform to connect with you all. And I also love having something that I get to be creative at on a regular basis. So that's why the show is back on and I'm very, very excited to be here because I've got some more things to say. Now I have a couple of announcements I want to share with you and the first announcement is that I'm going to be moving to one new episode per month published on the first Tuesday of each month.

Up until now I was doing a new episode every single Tuesday, but moving forward into the rest of this year and 20, and beyond. You will get one new episode from me published on the first Tuesday of each month. And my intention with these episodes is that they're going to be juicier. The production value is going to be higher and better. And it's really gonna, the episodes to really leave you thinking more and thinking deeply and inspire you to act. And so that's my commitment is I want to just increase the quality of these episodes, which means I'm going down to one per month and on the other Tuesdays of the month. I'm going to continue with the re broadcasts and pulling some episodes from the having it all archive because it doesn't matter if you listen to those episodes before each time you listen to them again, you will get something different from them, Particularly if the first time you heard the episode was back when it published in 2016, 17 or 18. Now that was a lifetime ago. So it's really great to listen to them again because you'll get some new stuff.

So I'm going to continue my commitment to keep content coming to you every single Tuesday and the first Tuesday of the month, you can expect a fresh brand new episode from me. My second announcement is that I'm going to be accessible moving forward only through my email, you will no longer be able to connect with me on instagram and that's just because I am moving more and more away from social media. I am, I am taking my accounts offline as best as I can and so up until now you, you were able to send me messages and DmS and stuff through instagram but I'm going to move away from that. So email moving forward will be the only way to get in touch with me. My email is Matthew Matthew begins dot com and I received them. They come right to me and I answer every single email. So it is still a fantastic way to get in touch and you can still send me voice notes and videos and all that great stuff. And if you have reached out to me on instagram and I haven't gotten back to you, I will keep being patient.

It's just, I just don't go on those platforms instagram or facebook or any of that stuff anymore. So I'm going to be moving away from those places and you keep sending me messages, just do it through my email. All right, let's get into today's topic and to kick things off, I'm going to share with you an idea if you don't feel within yourself a deep sense of love, gratitude and joy with your life. It's because of your thoughts and more specifically, the lack of control you have over your thinking today, I'm going to shine a light on what is probably the biggest thing keeping you from loving your life and having it all. And that's undisciplined thinking, undisciplined thinking is like being a victim to your thoughts, undisciplined thinking leads to feelings of angst and fear and worry and anxiety and resentment and pain and having those feelings consistently.

An undisciplined thinking when left unchecked will be what sabotages you from having it all and really feeling that deep sense of love appreciation and gratitude for your life and everyone in it. And I've had my own experiences recently that have shown me really where where I was at, in my own mental discipline and those experiences laid out in front of you very plainly how chaotic things can get within my own mind and within my own body when my thoughts are left unchecked and I'll dig into more on that in a minute. So I want you to ask yourself this question. How disciplined am I with my thoughts On a scale of 1 to 10, one being? I have very little to no discipline with my thoughts. They just go out and they my mind thinks about whatever it wants to, it wanders all the time, I can't control it. 10 is I am a master and mental discipline. I have self mastery in the area of my thoughts in my thinking, So how disciplined are you with your thoughts?

1-10. Another question is how effective am I at steering my thoughts in a direction that I want them to go in. So that means if you're having a negative thought that's making you feel scared or worried or anxious, how effective are you in steering that negative thought towards something more positive that has you feeling better. And my last question for you to think about as we kick things off is how comfortable am I being with my own thoughts. So, I want to talk about this study that I heard about recently that I thought was so just crazy and interesting and fascinating and the I heard about it on the website science dot org and the study demonstrated that people would prefer to give themselves an electric shock Than to be with their own thoughts for 15 minutes. Yes, prefer to shock themselves then be with her thoughts for 15 minutes.

So here's how they did the study. It took hundreds of undergraduate student volunteers and they kind of broke them up into a couple groups. They asked them to sit with their thoughts for 6-15 minutes. One group of the volunteers was giving was given a prompt to think about, You know, think about your favorite meal, think about a sporting event. The other group was given no prompt at all. They were just told sit and be with yourself, be by yourself for 6-15 minutes. And of those two groups, half of the people in those two groups were uncomfortable sitting with their own thoughts. It's like, okay, half the people where they are either bored or they were just uncomfortable with it. The other half are perfectly fine. They could just be with their thoughts. They can think about whatever they were cool. So that's not too crazy to think about. Now. They upped the ante, the researchers upped the ante and they said, okay, let's get another group of people and let's give them these options. So Sit for 15 minutes with your thoughts.

Just sit with your thoughts for 15 minutes and you can do that or you can choose to press this button that's going to deliver an electric shock So that you don't have to be with your thoughts for those 15 minutes. And what they found was that 67% of men and 25% of women chose to shock themselves Rather than be alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes. They chose to shock themselves, meaning they wanted the idea of having no engagement and just being left alone with their thinking was was too scary or intimidating or comfortable that they preferred to have the physical stimulation of a shock that they could focus their mind on. They would prefer that Than just being with themselves for 15 minutes. Now, that's a pretty interesting conclusion. And at the end of the article, when I read this, there was this quote, I'm going to read to you that I think sums up nicely where we're going right now. And the article said if we knew how to steer our thoughts in a pleasant direction and enjoy the experience, maybe we wouldn't hate to be alone with ourselves.

I want you to think about that for a moment. Think about how you answered those questions earlier. Right? How discipline are you with your thoughts? How effective are you at steering your thoughts in the direction you want them to go? How comfortable are you being with your own thoughts? If you were in that study, what would you have chosen? Are you able to sit for 15 minutes and just be with yourself and be with your own thoughts? What does that idea scare you or make you feel so uncomfortable that you'd rather shock yourself to feel something and engage with something, anything other than what's going on between your two years. Because what I'm here to tell you is that undisciplined thinking? Your inability to steer your thoughts away from what doesn't feel great and towards what does feel better. That's what's keeping you from having it all. That's what's keeping you from looking at your life and everything in it. And really feeling deeply that there's a sense of love and joy and gratitude and peace about all of it is because our mind, our thoughts and when you don't have discipline in your thoughts and you allow your thoughts to go wherever they go a lot of times they're going to go into the past and connect with memories and things that don't feel great.

And then you are at the whim of your thinking. You're at the whim of those thoughts. So, I'm gonna do something now that I haven't done before on the podcast and I'm actually gonna splice in some clips, some audio clips from some very, very smart men and women who are talking about the importance of of disciplined thinking and the power of your thoughts because I don't want to be the only one. The only voice that you hear right now telling you these things and telling you how important it is? There's a lot of other people out there who are talking about this very same thing. And so we're going to hear from three of them today. So let's go ahead and play the first clip. This one comes from dr joe dispenser. You've heard me talk about him on the podcast before, joe dispenser is a researcher. He's a lecturer, He's an author. You can find his books all over the place, his videos all over youtube. And the clip I'm going to share with you today comes from this video called How to use a vision board to reprogram your negative beliefs. So let's go ahead and listen to this clip. Every time we have a thought we make a chemical.

And if you have uh an unlimited thought, you will feel unlimited. And if you have a self depreciating thought, you'll feel unworthy and your brain instantaneously fire circuits that signal another part of the brain to release peptides are chemical messengers that signal hormonal centers. And when we get that arousal from the thought that we think uh those thoughts sometimes weaken the response weakens the physical body. So turns out that the emotions that are created from the thoughts are the signaling mechanisms of the body, thoughts of the language of the brain, and feelings are the language of the body and how we think and how we feel creates our state of being. So it turns out that the thoughts based in the stress hormones based in survival. Those are the thoughts that begin to push the genetic buttons that create disease. In other words, a person wakes up in the morning and the brain is a record of the past.

The first thing they do when they wake up in the morning is they start thinking about their problems and those problems are memories that are etched in the brain that are connected to certain people, certain objects or certain things at certain times and places. So if you believe that your thoughts have something to do with your destiny the moment you think about your problems, you're thinking in the past right now, every one of those problems has an emotion associated with them because we've experienced them. So the moment you remember your problems now, you feel unhappy now you feel anxious now you feel fear. So the moment we feel those emotions, it takes a thought and feeling a memory or an image and emotion a stimulus and response and we start conditioning the body emotionally into the past. Now, the body is so objective that it doesn't know the difference between the real life experience that's creating that emotion and the emotion that person's fabricating by thought alone. The body's believing it's in that environmental condition.

So if the environment signals the gene and that's the truth and the end product of an experience is in the environment is an emotion. We're signaling the same genes and genes make proteins. And if you keep signaling the same genes, you start down regulating the genes and make cheaper proteins and the body begins to break down Now, that's an unconscious process. So what goes along with that is the moment the person feels that emotion of unhappiness or whatever it is, uh the brain checks in with the body and says yeah you're feeling pretty miserable, you're suffering. And we tend to generate more thoughts equal to the feeling that we have. And so then we get caught in this loop of thinking and feeling. So if we can't think greater than how we feel, our feelings have become the means of thinking and we're thinking in the past, that's some heavy stuff right there and I'm going to break it down so that we can extract exactly what dr joe dispenser is saying in that clip. First of all, he said, thoughts are the language of the brain and feelings are the language of the body.

Thoughts from the brain, feelings on the body and how you think and how you feel. That creates your state of being. You've heard me talk about being this on this podcast before, right? The difference between doing and being and now we have a formula to put underneath what it is to actually be. You're being this, your state of being is your thinking and your feeling and your feelings a lot of times come as a result of your thoughts and you can test this if you right now or to think about a situation in your life from your past that was very scary or very traumatic or create a lot of anxiety within you and you thought about that hard enough and you put yourself back into that space, What do you think you would feel? You would feel those same exact emotions and feelings that you did back when it happened? You would feel the fear, the anxiety, the stress, all of that stuff. So your thoughts can trigger different feelings within your body and those two things together make your state of being.

And so I really loved how dr Jody spends a gave that example of waking up you wake up in the morning and you think about your problems right? You think about something that you're going to face later on that day or later on that week or you think about something that happened back in your past and what does it do? It triggers an emotion, it triggers a feeling. So the thoughts that you start thinking about those problems started thinking about trigger of feeling. And that puts you in a fear based state of being, thoughts and feelings is your state of being. So that fear based state of being is feeling unhappy or anxious or worried or scared or whatever it is and that has happened to all of us. And that is what really for me was highlighted recently as to where I have an opportunity to tighten up my thinking. And so here's my example. Several months ago, I was faced with a an opportunity to have a confronting, difficult and very raw conversation with a loved one, an opportunity for me to speak my truth and speak it authentically from a loving place, but also also with conviction and instead of attacking it head on, which is how I want to show up.

When I'm faced with something like that, let's just go face it immediately. Instead of doing that, I put it off and as the days dragged on, I started to notice that I was feeling more and more anxious throughout my day. I was more and more irritable, was less patient at a harder time focusing on the task that I was working on whatever I was engaged in the moment. I kept going to that conversation, I kept thinking about that conversation that I was going to have and then I was feeling anxious and I was feeling amped up as if I was having the conversation right then. And then one morning I woke up and before the cobwebs that even cleared from my mind, I felt my heart starts to race immediately. My heart started racing too and my stomach started to churn like I felt like I had to go use the bathroom immediately, just like the moment that I became conscious that I was awake and my body started to go into these slight little tremors like that excited energy.

Although it wasn't an excited anticipation, it was, it was from fear, it was from the discomfort, the anxiety and I was experiencing exactly what dr joe dispenser described you. Wake up, think about your problems, triggers an emotion and a feeling and it puts you in a certain state of being. And what I realized about that within myself is that it happened almost unconsciously and it happened because my thoughts immediately first thing in the morning they went unchecked. I didn't have that discipline first thing in the morning to steer my thoughts in the direction that I wanted them to go in. And so they just went, they went and latched onto the the first or the biggest problem that they could think about and boom automatically. I'm in this heightened state of fight or flight is really what it felt like. And so remember what we just heard in the clip, you generate more thoughts that are equal to the feelings that you have, which means if you're feeling stressed or angry or scared, that's going to trigger more stressful, angry and scary thoughts which triggers more stressful, angry and scary feelings which just keeps you in that loop.

And I love how dr joe dispenser ends that clip, he says if we can't think greater than the way we feel then our feelings have become our means of thinking and that's how this ties into being more disciplined with your thoughts because that's what discipline thinking is about, It's thinking greater than the way you're feeling. You might be feeling crummy, but you recognize that you know what if I keep thinking crummy thoughts, I'm going to continue to have crummy feelings. So let me think greater than how I'm feeling. I'm feeling crummy, but I can have thoughts that are of gratitude. I can have thoughts that are of abundance. I can have thoughts that are even of just something that's neutral to get me back to a neutral state instead of continuing to go down the rabbit hole of feeling crummy. That's what it means to think greater than your feeling. So, I have another clip for you. This next clip comes from Abraham Hicks. Once again, someone, you've heard me talk about a lot on this podcast and Abraham Hicks, She's an inspirational speaker and author, a teacher.

And this video. This clip comes from a video called practice and expectation that pleases you. Do you know how everyone creates? We've said a lot of words here today, but I'm gonna give you a really simple statement. Everybody is creating their own reality. But you know what the factory is in the reality. You're creating your expectation. What you just said to us is I have a desire but my expectation is not up to speed with my desire, then that begs the next question. Well, where you're getting your expectation? Well, I'm basing it on what I've been observing and what I'm observing isn't what I want, but I've observed it so much that it's my expectation. So that suggests that you want to look someplace else, change your expectation. Practice an expectation that pleases you. So when you think about it, think about anybody that you know, what's your expectation? Well, jerry used to say Abraham, I swear I did not expect negative things from that person till they showed them to me.

And after they showed them to me, then yeah, I'll admit I started to expect it. And we always said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. There was an expectation before the expectation before the expectation before the expectation. And we don't want to go back to all of that. There's not enough life time for any of you to do that. Just know that if things aren't working out for you, the way you want them to is because you've got an expectation that's in the way that you've got to change and what's the expectation and expectation is a belief. It's a thought that you continue to think so. You gotta think some different thoughts. It could not be a simpler thing. But then you say, how can I think of thought that's different than the reality that I'm watching. And we say you've got to accept that there is another reality and you've got to accept that there's a part of you a big part of you, a dominant part of you that's looking at that other reality and you've got to tune in to that part of you, which means you gotta catch it early and you gotta practice it early in the day, and you got to notice that when you deviate from it and when you find yourself not believing it, then you've got to distract yourself from it.

Don't hit it head on. The worst time in the world to try to change an expectation is when the world is proving to you that your expectation is right, when work isn't coming, that's not the time to practice a new expectation. You're just going to practice the expectation that doesn't serve you. But if you feel frisky or your mind is quiet or you feel peaceful or you've been meditating, you gotta find some way to tune into the expectation that your inner being has for you. So what Abraham Hicks is telling us is that it all comes down to your thoughts, She said, the number one factor in the reality that you're creating is your expectation. And what is an expectation? Well, it's a belief that something that's going to happen a lot of times based off of something you experience in your past or what you've experienced or seen with other people and what is a belief, a belief is a thought, you continue to think. So if you're holding expectations, that something won't happen for you or that you're not capable of doing something, then what you have to do is shift off of that thought, which is creating what you're experiencing right now and shift onto a different thought that can help you create what it is you want to experience.

And so once again undisciplined thinking is what's keeping you from making your desires a reality. And I don't know if you caught it, but did you hear some of the key phrases in in the Abraham Hicks clip we just played, she said words like tune in, catch it. Practice it notice it, guess what? All of those are action words, they're all about taking action and doing something because if you have undisciplined thinking and your thoughts right now we're going in unchecked. The way to change that is not to just wish for it and sit back and wait for it to happen. No, you've got to tune in, you got to tune into your thinking and then be able to catch it when you do have a thought that's making you feel crummy. And then once you catch it, you have to practice shifting over to a different thought into a different stream of thinking that makes you feel better and then you have to continue to notice when you keep slipping back into those unchecked thoughts and you have to continue the practice over and over and over.

Like what does it take to practice an expectation, what it takes is choosing to do it because practice often requires choosing to do so even when you don't want to do it, even when it's not convenient, even when the circumstances haven't lined up just right, you know, it's about having that desire, that thing that you want to experience in your life and then catching when your thoughts are not supporting that desire and choosing new thoughts, I'm not here to tell you that it's easy. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, what I hear tell you is that it is possible, it is possible and if you can get down to the root of why it is, you aren't fully in love with your life, you can get down to the root, then you can address it and it's my firm belief that so much of it, if not all of it comes down to your thinking, comes down to your thinking.

So the final clip I want to share with you today comes from a man, his name, is she hanging, he, he is a Shaolin master and he's the headmaster of the Shaolin Temple europe, which is located in Germany and this clip is pulled from one of his videos called how to control your mind for success, we can take any successful person nowadays, everybody can find someone who is successful in something, I don't think that this person reached his success or reached his position where he is at the moment without having some guiding principles in his lifetime and one of them certainly is structure. So that means any successful person nowadays, I don't think he reached that point by just doing what he wants during the day, maybe right now he's in the position that he can do what he wants, but how he got there is not by doing what he wanted, he put himself a structure, he put himself a guideline and no matter how he felt during the day, this was the code, this was the mission and this is what he kept.

If you feel tired or not, yeah, if you are in the mood to do it or not, you had your structure and you kept it. So that also means at the same time some people have to structure, it's written down, but then they still say okay, but yesterday I actually really worked hard enough, I think today I can really allow myself to rest okay. For some people it's working, but other people are still having this willpower and the discipline, let's say it's one week plan, the week is not over yet, so we still keep going. I am, yeah, this is what I mean, when I say, become more disciplined with your thoughts, discipline is keeping your standard, keeping your structure as she hang, he says that in the last clip, discipline is setting a standard and making an agreement with yourself that you are going to do something or show up in a different way and holding that agreement no matter what, even if you don't want to, even if it's not convenient, even if it doesn't feel good in the moment and your mind and your thoughts are telling you to do so many other things, you still hold that agreement because you're disciplined.

It's like if you have a certain type of eating that you're choosing to do and let's say, you give yourself one treat per day. In that case, discipline is choosing to put down the cookie even though you really want the cookie, but choosing to not eat it because the standard you're holding for your life is to have just one treat a day and you've already had your treat. So you got to do the same thing with your thinking. If you're going to change the areas of your life that you want to change. So what does that actually look like in practice? Because if you don't know anything about my podcast, it is about putting these things into practice. These are all great ideas and they're fun to listen to, but it means absolutely nothing. If you can't go out there and put it into practice and activate it. So here's how you put these things into practice in your life and what I'm about to share is exactly what I'm doing and what I have been doing to create a greater sense of discipline around my thinking each day first you got to deliberately tune in to how you're feeling all throughout the day, not just once or twice in the morning or evening, but periodically throughout the day, you need to pause and ask yourself how am I feeling and why?

Once you have a sense of what you are feeling, you got to figure out what thoughts have led to the feelings you're experiencing and you don't ever have to wonder, you know how it is you're feeling because your body will tell you your body is going to tell you how it is feeling. Your body simply prints out whatever the mind tells it to your body is a thermometer is not a thermostat, It reads the environment, it reads the temperature of the room, it doesn't control the temperature of the room. So just tune into your body and then figure out what thoughts, what were you thinking two seconds ago, that created that feeling of anxiety in your body. Next you've got to start catching when you're allowing certain thoughts to play in your mind that are making you feel stressed or worried or angry or scared or whatever, anything, It doesn't feel good. You guys start catching it. This is where the discipline really comes in to catch those things because you could be, you know, 60 minutes into a thought that has been playing in your head, creating all these crazy feelings and emotions and don't even be aware of it.

So by deliberately tuning into how you're feeling, you will start to catch when you're thinking has gone astray and you know that because your body is gonna start feeling funky and when you do catch those things then you want to practice pausing in those moments and doing what Abraham Hicks said, thinking different thoughts. So in those moments when you pause, like you caught it, Oh man, I've been feeling stressed out for the last 22 minutes and it's because I've been thinking about this big deadline I have at work. Oh my gosh, I can't get my mind off it. Okay, In that moment, start guiding your thoughts back to something that changes how you're feeling from a negative to a positive. Doesn't even matter what it is, Think about puppies, or think about having sex or think about going on vacation, It doesn't matter at all. As long as it changes how you're feeling for me, the pause happens with a few deep breaths, a few deep breaths and then I move my thoughts onto literally anything else, right?

And I get it onto something that is pleasant or even just something that's neutral, right? That's about like coming into the present moment, paying attention to how my feet feel on the floor, how my clothes feel on my body. And so as you start to gain a little bit more experience as you practice this and you gain a little more mastery. Then you'll notice more and more when your thoughts start to wander and that's where your discipline really starts to kick in. Just say my thoughts have wandered, my body is feeling off now I'm going to guide my thoughts back and choose a different thought, think different thoughts because you know what? You are in control of your thoughts, your thoughts do not control you, but it's just like a muscle that hasn't been worked out in a long time. If you do not practice controlling your thoughts, then you will be controlled not only by your fearful thinking, but also by the fear that's present in the environments that you're in. And the people that you surround yourself with, think about that because your environment and the people you hang out with absolutely can insect fear all within you, anxiety all within you, worry all within you, happens all the time.

People turn on the tv, leave it running all day long and it's full of fear and judgment and anxiety and stress and doomsday and then their bodies feel a certain type of way. But think about this analogy, I love sports. So I got to bring the sports analogies. So think about the professional basketball player who was playing on the road in the opponent's arena, it's the big game, it's the end of the game, fourth quarter game is on the line, They step up to the free throw line and they got two shots to win the game and the crowd is going crazy right there in their opponents arena, the crowd is going crazy and they're doing every single thing to try and distract them to try and throw them off to try and get in their head. But the player is cool, they're confident and they sink both free throws to win the game. In this example, the player was in control of their thoughts, not the crowd, which meant that the player was in control of their feelings, not anyone or anything else.

That's that mental discipline. You can call it mental toughness, you can call it mental fortitude, you can call it whatever you want, but it's the ability to choose what you think, which results and you feeling in certain types of ways, which influences your overall state of being, that's what we're playing for here. And so even if you're saying to yourself right now, I don't even have the belief that I can do any of this. I don't have the first belief that I can choose a thought that's greater than the stress or the fear that I keep fixating on. How can I change If I can't even do that one thing. Listen, you gotta start somewhere, you got to start somewhere and a big part of it might be putting yourself around people or putting yourself in environments that do believe in you, where the conversation is different, where they believe in the possibility of you being able to choose a thought greater than your feelings and your emotions. And so if that's you, if you're just like not really confident in your ability to do this and I want you to start in one very, very simple place and I want you to start by checking in on your thoughts first thing in the morning, first thing in the morning when you wake up tomorrow, check in on your thoughts and make a commitment to yourself that you're not going to step foot out of your bed until you have tuned into what you are thinking and how you're feeling and you've asked yourself is my current state of being, going to set me up for an awesome day, just start there and if you are in a state where it's challenging and you're having a hard time tuning in and you don't know how to change it, then that's where you reach for the podcast, reach for the Youtube video, call the person who is a motivator in your life.

Bring in those tools to help you when your mind is not strong enough to be able to steer those thoughts towards something else. Then bring in outside tools as I wrap up this conversation, I want to recap to you the action items that are going to help you to put these things into practice and the very first thing is commit to the practice. If you know that undisciplined thinking is what's keeping you from truly loving your life, then commit to practicing, shifting your thoughts off of the fear that stress the worry onto the hope, the possibility to love and commit to that practice because without a commitment, this stuff doesn't even really matter, you gotta commit to it, you have to raise your standard and say to yourself no longer am I going to allow my thoughts to be completely undisciplined, allow my mind to want to just go wherever it wants to go no longer am I going to be afraid of being with my own thoughts? It starts with a commitment to yourself, that sounds something like that.

So once you've done that, then you will figure out the next steps, I've given you several to start with, right deliberately tuning into how you're feeling throughout the day, catching when those thoughts are creating feelings in your body that you aren't enjoying practicing, pausing in those moments and choosing thoughts that feel different, thinking different thoughts, Right, waking up first thing in the morning, tuning in with yourself, checking in with those thoughts and guiding them towards thoughts that are going to serve you. Those are all little things you can do, but start first with your commitment to yourself because that's the biggest thing that's going to ultimately create the change that you're playing for. So please if you got something from today's conversation, please share it with one person who needs to hear it today because you might just give them the tools that they need to transform their life. And if you have any questions, thoughts or feedback for me, email me, shoot me an email Matthew at Matthew Bivens dot com.

Thank you so much for tuning into today's episode. This truly was a treat. I love being back behind the mike talking to you about having it all. It is something that I believe with all of my heart that each and every one of us can have it all as everything to do with our thoughts, our beliefs, our paradigms, all the stuff that goes on in between our ears and I just love digging into this. This is really what life is about and it's a beautiful, beautiful thing. So, I'll be back on the first Tuesday in december with a brand new episode for you and remember keep tuning in every Tuesday because I'm going to continue dropping some gems from the having it all catalog and with that, I just want to say thank you. I appreciate you. I love you. My name is Matthew Bivens and here is to you having it all. Okay. Mhm. Quick note about the having it all podcast. I am not a doctor nor a licensed therapist. I'm a guy with a story and a passion for conscious conversation. My thoughts, opinions and beliefs are my own. So please consult with your doctor or healthcare provider regarding any questions or issues you have related to your personal, physical or mental health.