1. Facts vs. Thoughts

0:00 Hey, what’s up everybody? It’s Jennie the LDS mission coach and this is the LDS mission podcast episode number one, facts versus thoughts. As members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, many of us work and prepare our whole lives to go out and serve missions. Whether you’re preparing to serve a mission, currently serving a return missionary or a missionary moment, this podcast is for you. There are unique challenges that come along with going through the mission experience. But if you are ready for epic confidence, ready to love yourself, and to learn the how of doing hard things, than Let’s go, I will help you step powerfully into your potential and never question your purpose again. It’s time to drop the struggle. Embrace yourself, embrace your mission, embrace your life, and embrace what’s next. Hey, everybody, I hope you are doing well. So excited to start this podcast. I have been thinking about it for a long time. And now we’re here. I had toyed with a lot of episodes, that can be my number one episode for the LDS mission podcast. I actually hear from quite a lot of you. Both like serving missionaries returned missionaries, preparing missionaries, missionary moms, a lot of you reach out to me and I know there’s some stuff that are difficult about being on the mission or being part of the mission experience or even coming home from a mission. I know that many of you struggle with companions. I thought about doing that as my first episode. I know that many of you struggle with confidence. I know that there’s some tough stuff with decision making, especially as a return missionary that that feels overwhelming, like, finals are stressful. There’s a lot of that that happens. And we’re gonna get to all of it. We’ll get there for sure. But I wanted to start at the beginning of my coaching journey. I want to begin at the moment that changed my life. It was the fall of 2017, my son had my oldest son had left on his mission to the Louisiana Baton Rouge mission. And I was feeling completely lost. I was feeling at the mercy of my emotions. I was feeling discouraged. I was feeling like confused. Can any of you guys relate you missionary moms? It was tough when my oldest son left on his mission, I think because it felt like a closing of a chapter to me. Net that now my kids were starting to leave the house one at a time. And I had this thought like, and they probably won’t ever come back. They’ll come for short periods of time, but not long periods of time, which changed during COVID. Alright, everyone was home for a good little chunk during that time, which I’m super grateful for. But back then. I just felt really like out of sorts. I didn’t know how to be a missionary mom was having kind of a rough weekend and my husband out of nowhere says, Hey, I think I’ll run down to the Jazz game. We live in western Idaho, Boise area. And so it’s not super unusual for my husband to say, Hey, I think I’m gonna take my second oldest son, his name is Danny.

3:25 I think I’m gonna take him to the Jazz game. We’re gonna go for the weekend. Which, you know, now I feel like okay, cool. I’m totally fine with that. We’re, we’re huge jazz fans in our family. It actually took me a lot of years to come around. But all of my family has been jazz fans for a long time. And now I’m on board the bandwagon as well. And so back then though, basketball and him going to a Jazz game just felt super annoying. The day earlier, I had had a bit of a cry fest with my husband. In the bathroom. I remember it very distinctly. I told him I didn’t know what to do now that the kids were leaving. I didn’t know how to feel. I didn’t know what Christmas would be like without my oldest son. I mostly was starting to wonder like once all of the kids leave. What am I even going to do with myself? What am I going to do now? Oh, and by the way, my youngest daughter actually the same time as my son left on his mission. My youngest daughter’s daughter started kindergarten. So it’s kind of a big year. There’s a lot to kind of think about and process and I started to wonder who the heck I was and what I was going to do with the rest of my life. So I was kind of crying. And then I said to my husband, I don’t even know like, what do I even do? And he said, a couple of words that have changed my life and he said, You know what? I wonder if you need a life coach. I was the day before. Well, the next day is all of this stuff is going on and I’m feeling all of these emotions. and frustration that he’s leaving, that he’s going to the game and he’s going to leave me with all the little kids and I’m going to be lonely and all of the things that I was thinking and like drowning in my own emotions. In that moment of frustration when he told me he was going to the Jazz game, I pulled out my phone real quick, I did a quick search on podcasts for life coaches. And I found one of my mentors, Jody Moore, who I love the first episode that I listened to changed everything for me. What she taught me was really, really simple. And it’s what I want to teach you today. In our lives, we have two things. Okay. We have facts. And we have thoughts. Now facts are just the things outside of us. They’re like how hot it is. It’s the things people say, it’s the things that people do. It’s our past. It’s our reassignment, it’s our companion. It’s basically anything that can be proven in a court of law. Anything that anyone in the whole world could agree with. Those are the facts. Okay. We also have in our lives, what are called thoughts. And thoughts are what we think about the facts of the story. Now, if we were to write a novel, that only had facts, being a very boring novel, like I went here, so and so said, this, right, I, we moved to this city, I started this thing would be very boring. Okay, I came home from school, it was finals week, very boring novel. But when we add in our thoughts, and the way that we perceive all of those things, our story gets very interesting. It’s kind of what makes life like, more exciting, more juicy, also more painful, in many ways. Our thoughts are what give meaning to the way we perceive our lives. Now, this is this is was the turning point for me. Most of the world believes that the things outside of us can make us feel something like remember when you were taught on the playground, did Susie hurt your feelings as if someone’s words could make us feel something, but people’s words and the facts never make us feel anything? Like ever?

7:52 The only thing that makes us feel anything ever, is what we think about a situation. Now, the way I like to illustrate this is a couple of years ago when my grandpa passed away. And the facts of the story is his heart stopped beating or he quit breathing or whatever happened that day that made him pass to the other side, he passed, you know, passed away and went to heaven. The facts, there were the facts of the story. And it wasn’t like when he passed out of nowhere. I just felt like oh my gosh, I feel so sad. I was actually just at home, like getting my kids ready for school, going about my business. You know, just making lunches and do the thing doing well, who am I kidding? I don’t make my kids lunches. They have to make their own lunches. I was just going about my day helping them get ready for school. It wasn’t until my mom called. And then she said to me, Hey, grandpa passed away. And then I started having thoughts. I had thoughts like, Oh, Grandma, you know, that’s so sad for her. She’s really gonna miss him. And then I felt sad. And then I thought thoughts like, well, actually, I’m gonna really miss him too. And then I felt a little bit of grief. And then I had thoughts like, oh, he lives such a full life. And then I felt some gratitude and some happiness. So again, it wasn’t the fact itself, that thing that happened that caused me to feel anything, it was only my thoughts that caused me to feel a certain way. So as I listen to this, I have this aha moment while Mike my husband, Mike was getting ready for the Jazz game and kind of packing stuff up and getting ready to run out the door. I had this aha moment. That was like wait a second. him going to the Jazz game can’t make me feel anything. Crazy, right? Like the only The thing that makes me feel anything ever is my thoughts about it and my thoughts at the time and we’re like, this isn’t fair, he shouldn’t leave me, I’m gonna have to take care of the kids. This is some kind of huge injustice or something, or he should be there for me, kind of a situation, which made me feel like frustration and anger. But then I realized, I don’t have to feel any of these emotions. If I don’t want to, all I simply have to do is change the way I’m thinking. And I can change literally change the way that I’m feeling. And it happened in an instant. This is what coaching does, you guys, it changes our perception of the world. In an instant. I was actually on a call with a client this week, when I taught him this exact concept of facts and thoughts. And he like pretty much sat back in his chair, dropped his pencil onto his notebook and was like, wait, what? I have power over my own emotions. And the answer, my friends is yes, you have power over your emotions, you have the ability to think whatever you want to think and believe whatever you want to believe. It’s called agency. I sometimes believe stuff that I have no right to even believe like, in Santa Claus. Yes, I believe in Santa Claus still. But I choose that thought, because it makes me feel good. It makes me feel like there’s goodness on the earth. And it makes me feel abundant. So you get to choose your thoughts. And in that moment, on that weekend, as my husband was leaving, I felt peace, because I realized that I was in charge of my emotions, with what I think. Now granted, sometimes, we’re not going to think amazing thoughts that make us feel amazing all the time. You have a caveman brain, which we’ll talk about more later. But sometimes you’re gonna feel lousy, sometimes we’re not gonna like ourselves, sometimes we’re gonna feel self conscious. Sometimes we’re gonna feel guilty. All of these things are true. Sometimes we’re going to feel less than sometimes we’re going to feel sad and frustrated and irritated with our companion or with our roommate, it’s all totally fine. I want you to know that that is fine. That’s part of the human experience is experiencing all of those emotions. But what I also want you to know is that you are in charge, you can take your power back, just notice that what you think creates what you feel.

12:52 And it’s the best news ever, because you can think absolutely anything that you want to it’s like a platter we can choose to think like a like a whole buffet a smorgasbord of options of what we can choose to think and our thoughts, create our feelings you are in charge. Your roommates can’t make you feel anything, your companions can’t make you feel anything. Your boss, the weather, none of those things make you feel anything, you get to choose how you feel with the way you think. So this is what I want you to do. Next time you notice that you’re having an emotion, maybe it’s happiness, you notice that you’re hanging out with your friends, or your companions or girlfriends, if you’re a missionary mom or your husband or whatever, you notice that you’re starting to feel happy. Now, this is kind of mind blowing. So stick with me, I want you to notice that it’s not the person or the people that you’re with that make you feel happy. When we slow it down, when we slow our experiences down in between the thing that happens, the fact and the emotion that you feel, there’s always a sentence, words that our brain has come up with that create an emotion and in a situation where you’re hanging out with your friends. You might have felt like, this is really amazing. I feel seen, I feel heard. I’m having the best time. And those thoughts make you feel happy. And next time you notice an emotion like sadness. I want you to slow it all down. It’s not the fact that you’re alone on a Friday night that makes you feel sad. You can be in your bedroom. alone on a Friday night and it’s not That’s not what’s causing your sadness. Your sadness comes from your thinking. And when you slow it down, you’ll notice there’s a sentence in there might be something like, Gosh, I wish someone would ask me out. Oh, it’d be nice so much more fun if I was hanging out with friends tonight. Those sentences are what’s causing your sadness, but you get to choose. Notice the thought first and you get to choose your thoughts on purpose, and then choose your emotions on purpose. It is the best news ever. So go out there pay attention to your thoughts. Notice what emotions they are creating for you. And this alone is life changing. Everyone Have an amazing week, so good to be with you. Take care. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast today. If you want to learn more about what I do, you can go to Jennie dildine.com. Or just come hang out with me on Instagram at Jenny dot the LDS mission coach and Jenny is spelled with an I E and remember no matter which part of the mission experience that you are involved in, just know that Jenny the LDS mission coach is thinking about you every single day