Despite their motivation and the simplicity of faith-driven tiny habits, sometimes people get stuck. They find it can be hard to consistently do what they want. Part of your belief matrix may be holding you back. Looking to understand more about why this happens and how to address it? Learn how to capture, challenge and change thoughts holding you back.
This is the sixth video in a series on how to build a stress recovery plan.
Personalized coaching can take you deeper, but these tools provide you the foundation for a DIY approach. In the remaining episodes of the series I'll get into other aspects on how to use these tools more effectively and introduce a few more exercises.
Hello! I'm Shara McCall with Whispering Fields Wellness. Today in Grace Over Grind, I'll address what happens when you get stuck implementing tiny habits. Sometimes despite your best intentions and greatest efforts, those small behaviors just don't end up occurring quite the way that you planned. I'll share the story of someone who followed the process that I've laid out in this video.
[00:00:23] Video series about how she got unstuck to achieve her goals of reduced stress and improve work life harmony. Let's start with a prayer for today. Lord, thank you for bringing my dear friends to listen today. Please help them find the motivation, guidance, strategies, and tactics to reduce stress and improve work life harmony.
[00:00:47] In our lives, there are times when it is difficult to do what is right. Maybe there is a negative coping habit we keep repeating, like alcohol use. But don't want to? Or maybe it's a positive coping habit that we are working toward, but we just can't seem to do it with our own self will consistently. We all get to that place and need your help, God, to help do what we cannot do on our own.
[00:01:10] Help us through these moments. Also, shine your light on any deceptions we tell ourselves or believe that prevent us from doing what is right. Grant us clarity to recognize how our beliefs and thoughts can hold us back from doing what is right and what is in your will for us. Through you we are made stronger and able to take the right action.
[00:01:31] I pray all is well with every listener, healthy in body, renewed in mind, and strong in spirit. May they know your will and your love as they grow greater in Christian character. In Jesus's name, Amen. This week, I'm focusing on what do you do if you are getting stuck with implementing some of your tiny habits.
[00:01:52] The examples in the exercise that I'll cover today focuses on how to uncover and start addressing how beliefs, thoughts, and feelings can be transformed to better align with your identity driven habits. Let me introduce Penny Pleaser! Everybody say hi Penny! When I first met Penny, she was having a couple of problems.
[00:02:15] After work and family, she never had enough time for herself. Besides work related stress, digestive issues and fatigue were the things she wanted to tackle. Breakfast was a whole grain fiber bar as she drove into work. Lunch was a protein bar while working. Multiple cups of coffee with low fat non dairy creamer kept her going all day.
[00:02:36] And dinner was whatever she had the energy to microwave, or one pot meal to whip up, or pick up on the way home. So they usually sat down to eat dinner around 8 p. m. And while she scheduled 7 hours of sleep and was exhausted, going to bed at 10 p. m. she did not sleep well and was frequently hot. So, as we were talking and going through, she decided that instead of drinking most of her calories in sugary coffee drinks and barely eating, she wanted to focus her tiny habits on getting dinner sooner, so digestion wouldn't impact her sleep, and eating a more well rounded breakfast and lunch, which might make dinner a little less heavy on her.
[00:03:15] So once Penny established what her coaching goals were with me, we went through and identified her Christian identity statement. She decided that she wanted to focus on her body as a temple to the Holy Spirit and that she could only love others as well as she loves herself. She used the parable from Matthew on taking care of the log in her own eye before dealing with the splinter in someone else's eye to be what she focused her design of her habits around.
[00:03:46] This would enable her to make some better choices and start setting some boundaries on her time and energy for critical self care. Her choices now are just making it too hard for her to fulfill her purpose as a spouse, a parent, her support to others. And this was not about being selfish, but loving. She could not continue to be too tired to get involved with her loved ones, and too involved with work to have time to spend with them.
[00:04:14] So as we went through and did the tiny habits and went through this a couple of weeks, she was most successful were changing her coffee order and keeping what she kept as readily available snacks and getting to a 15 minute focused breakfast and lunch. Getting dinner earlier though, she wasn't making much progress.
[00:04:31] That was a difficult one for her. So as she went through the stress journaling, she uncovered a pattern. She wasn't just putting her family's needs before her own. She was doing the same thing at work. As a recognized expert who is easy to get along with, she was regularly doing favors for others in front of her own work.
[00:04:53] Most of the time, her boss didn't even know because they just would come straight to her with these requests. And what was easy for her to do in an hour or less, it might take some of these people that were still learning it a couple of hours, or using the reports that she provided, someone could do their own analysis, that she was regularly asked to custom format the data and report it in multiple different ways to make it easier for whoever was doing it.
[00:05:18] the person that needed it. So depending on the week, she'd found that it was taking about five to 10 hours of her work time was these discretionary favors that she would do for these other people. They were needed to get done for the business, but they weren't her responsibility to get done. They just came in and they asked her because of her expertise and that it would take her less time than them to get it done.
[00:05:42] It's not getting the desired outcomes of being home earlier and able to eat dinner earlier. So that she could get more sleep, but from this pattern that she found in her journals, we needed to dig deeper. She needed to better align her underlying beliefs and thoughts with her desired identity so that she could end up doing what was right for her.
[00:06:03] So just as Jesus took time to withdraw and rest and make sure that his disciples did, she also needed to, because at this point she was still worn out and exhausted and on edge from stress and overwork. She was not helping herself. her co workers or the company. She needed healthy boundaries and collaboration in a different way that would allow her to be more effective at work.
[00:06:28] By making the right changes to her thoughts and her beliefs, she could still be recognized for the traits that she was proud of, her expertise and being a team player, even with stronger boundaries. So to progress her On her tiny habit of eating dinner sooner, we had to work more closely on developing an alternate set of responses when someone asked for a favor.
[00:06:58] We narrowed it down a little bit more to just a few people who were regularly taking advantage of her kindness to work on getting to the point of being able to say maybe, at least, instead of an automatic yes. And then developing a strategy to address custom requests better. That one we handled outside of Tiny Habits since it was just a one off deal that we'd come up with.
[00:07:21] So today I'm going to share with you some additional ways that you can take your stress journal entries, just like she did, a little bit further to address where there are negative thoughts and limiting beliefs fueling your stress and preventing you from doing what is right. Whatever is basically getting you stuck so that you can't implement your tiny habit the way that you designed and planned it.
[00:07:43] So before I get into the exercise today, let's do a quick reframe of Penny's stories using the tools that I've shared so far from prior episodes. And if you haven't looked at those, please do so. And I've also included the downloads for any of the worksheets and the journal templates that I'm referencing in the description below.
[00:08:01] So from the story that I shared, you can see how Penny, one, recognized God's plan for her as best as she knew. Um, She identified a Christian identity statement that resonated with her vision of work life harmony and what it meant for her to thrive and flourish in body, mind, and spirit. She selected specific areas to work on that would have a high impact and fit the time and energy she had to dedicate to this effort.
[00:08:27] Then, two, she examined and tested her ways, which was basically comparing her current habits, For her newly designed habits. So using a habit cloud, she identified more precisely the behaviors that she wanted to change to become more like who she wanted to become, and less driven by a work centered identity.
[00:08:47] She designed her new tiny habits with a clear anchor, starting behavior, and a plan to celebrate. Then she moved into step three. Act in his will to do what is required, which is all about implementing, monitoring, and adapting the plan as you go through and do it. So she implemented her starter habits and got them established by making small adjustments each week as she reviewed her progress.
[00:09:11] And in several of these we saw she made some really good progress. Then she went into the fourth step. She persevered and grew. So she, this is all about training and iterating. So once you have that habit established, that starter behavior, she continued to train until it became more habitual. And then added the next right action and incremental behavior to build her routine.
[00:09:37] So like I said, she ended up taking what was initially just eating a bar as she was driving to work. She found time to eat at home and slowly increased that amount of time where she actually focused on just the one thing of enjoying her food at a time. Um, and she iterated through that and just continued to grow that behavior.
[00:09:57] So through her weekly process of reviewing her habit tracker and her journal of stress triggers, that's how Penny found and recognized that she was getting stuck on this one behavior of being able to get home a little bit sooner and wasn't making as much progress as she wanted. So today we're going to go through an exercise that I've borrowed from Dr. Daniel Amen. He's a brain health expert and it is a simple way to capture a thought in the challenge it and change it. And it's all through this faith centered identity that we've been talking about that we're anchoring the habits in and this whole stress recovery journey. And the goal is not to turn every stressor, negative thought or limiting belief into a positive piece of inspirational motivation.
[00:10:42] You can't live in this false toxic positivity. It's just not healthy. But we want your thoughts being able to go from negative and limiting and preventing you from growing and changing to be more accurate and realistic. We want you to see through the deception and the lies that you or The opposing forces, depending on your particular viewpoint on this, is telling you and is holding you back.
[00:11:07] So let's jump into the exercise. It starts with capture. From your stress journal entries, you want to go through them and pick an area of focus. And then when you feel more comfortable with this approach, you can then use this technique at the moment to specifically capture a thought and go through these four different questions.
[00:11:28] Just It's a time that it crosses your mind. But to learn it, it's best if you just grab something from your stress journal and pick that item that's been coming up with some regular frequency. Then you want to end up challenging it. So there are four questions as I mentioned about this. One, is the stressful or negative thought true?
[00:11:48] Two, can I absolutely know that it's true? Three, how do I react when I believe that thought? And then four, who would I be without that thought? Or how would I feel if I didn't have that thought? So those are the four questions to challenge it. And then the next thing that you do is you're going to change it.
[00:12:15] So with the answers to those questions, you want to try and look at this from that Christian identity statement, from God's perspective, as best that you can. Filter, Your answers through those two lenses and see where you can end up focusing your change efforts around. Maybe there's some affirmation work, maybe there's some action plans.
[00:12:38] So it all kind of depends on the scenario with what that change looks like. So let's go through today's example. So capture. So, from the stress journal, Penny identified that when she's asked to do a favor or a special assignment for someone that's not part of her regular work, some of the thoughts that she notices are that she's proud that someone asked her and that they value the work that she does and she wants them to continue to think well of her.
[00:13:06] And when she looked a little bit deeper into that, like what would happen if she actually said no, it came up that she believed that they wouldn't like her or would think less of her work and value her work. No, work less just because she said no. So this is what we decided to run through the exercise so that she could get to feeling more comfortable with saying no or maybe to these extra requests and setting up a healthy boundary and figuring out different ways to collaborate with people.
[00:13:40] So then we move into the next phase, challenge. So on this one, we're going to go back and forth just in a dialogue between Penny and I so that it's easier to follow and to understand. So, the first question. Is it true that the person wouldn't like you if she said no when they asked for a favor? Yes, it's possible that they wouldn't like me.
[00:14:05] John held a grudge and was nasty that one time I told him no, because I was already on the way out for the day and he wanted it, like, now. He wasn't going to give me enough time to be able to turn it around, so I just told him no. So now to the second question. Can you absolutely know that it's true that everyone asking you for a favor won't like you if you say no?
[00:14:30] Come to think of it. I told Julie no once. I was leaving for an emergency. I needed to get out immediately and She was okay with me saying no. She went ahead and said thank you and appreciated that I gave her a little bit of time to give her some suggestions on how to do it and She went ahead and did it, and I headed home to being able to take care of it.
[00:14:51] So I did tell her no, and she didn't end up changing her opinion of me. And moving on to question three. How do you react when you believe that the person asking for the favor won't like you if you say no? I automatically just say yes when somebody asks for a favor. So, what I'm also noticing though is, you know, I've been trying to work on becoming more aware of my emotions instead of just shoving everything down.
[00:15:22] That there are certain cases that as I'm doing the favor for someone, I get resentful because Why am I doing this again when they are perfectly capable of it and it's part of their job? Their emergency shouldn't make it mine. And then there's other cases when Later, I'd notice I'd be super stressed out I wouldn't have given much thought to it as I was doing the activity or the favor But then like when I look at my own work and what I need to do And how my work plan for the day is impacted.
[00:15:53] I just get stressed up and And then I get to thinking about what am I giving up for my family to get yet one more thing done at work. So I think I've been aware of some of this, but I just never said anything other than yes. Except for those two cases that I told you about before. And then the last question.
[00:16:17] Who would you be without the thought that people wouldn't like you if you said no to a favor? What first runs through mind is selfish. so much. Putting my needs before others, that's just not what I'm comfortable with. I know I'm still working on that belief. And as I try and view it from who I want to be, someone that cares for my needs enough that I'm able to give back to others, and particularly my family, I really am better off without that thought.
[00:16:51] It's not like I'll be mean or nasty when I say no. I'll just avoid over commitment, resentment, and being able to have a better balance. More time for myself and my family. It'll let me be able to work more effectively as well. Taking on all this extra work is really not helping the company either. So many of these people need to improve their own skills and by doing it for them, they're just not developing and improving in the way that they need to.
[00:17:23] So, as I was working with her, it did take a couple of iterations and going through a couple of different scenarios to put those responses together. This is a bit of a compilation, but so you can see the power and the simplicity of these four questions and what can come up if you're persistently going after those repeating negative thoughts and limiting beliefs.
[00:17:44] So, moving on to this next phase, change. With all of this information, here's what Penny decided to do. She decided that part of what God wants her to be is someone who can say no. This way she can better support others as needed. She can change the thought to, even if people, even if some people don't like it when I say no, it doesn't change who I am.
[00:18:13] Or that God loves me. And it doesn't impact the opinion of people who are closest to me. That's what she held on to. So moving forward though, her action plan was with a few target people. Her starter habit was to train herself to automatically say maybe, and ask for a few minutes to look at it, to see how it would fit with her workload.
[00:18:37] Then she would take a pause. Uh, Um, Um, Um, practices of conversion. We think most people who are working in a partnership, such as you have two partners below you. So you are highly likely to be working together because we think for the most part, you are basically your own two partners. Next. So the P Course is, or in order to help others, With a few people, she offered to end up working near them so that that way, as they did the assignment, as they did the task, that she'd be there to answer any questions and offer suggestions in terms of how to be more efficient.
[00:19:14] So that way, that person was learning and growing and developing their skills while she was still able to do her work. And ultimately, what this happened is that she was able to redirect some of these help requests or other work to these experts. Transcripts. Her boss really appreciated her initiative in regards to how she was developing others and allowed the team to be more effective.
[00:19:38] Overall, there are still plenty of times that she said yes, but it was not out of fear of being rejected, but based upon what her time and energy was that she had available and the importance and the urgency of the request to the team. So ultimately, in the end, she was better able to manage her time.
[00:19:59] Overall, reducing her work hours because she stopped taking on these discretionary favors for others. It allowed her to eat her dinner earlier with her family and get better quality of sleep. Personally, I love how these tiny changes have such a cascading effect. Ready to try this for yourself with one of your stressful situations or negative thoughts?
[00:20:21] If you have any questions on this exercise, email them to Sharon at whisperingfieldwellness. com
[00:20:36] So here's the four questions again. Is the stressful or negative thought true? Can I absolutely know that it's true? How do I react when I believe that thought? Who would I be without that thought? Or alternatively, how would I feel if I didn't have that thought? That's the four questions that are part of the challenge.
[00:21:00] So in summary, by changing who you are and what you believe through this process of leveraging identity driven tiny habits and stress journaling, you can effectively change your thoughts, beliefs and behaviors. These strategies take very little time and energy daily and can result in time in major transformation aligning yourself more closely with God's plan for you and leaning on your Christian faith.
[00:21:26] It allows you to reduce stress. Improve work life harmony, and eventually thrive and flourish as he intends for you. In the next episode, I'll cover more on cultivating awareness of internal stress triggers. These are the perceived stressors based upon thoughts, feelings, sensations, and personal association.
[00:21:48] I want you to be well equipped to be aware and able to handle a variety of stressors. If you haven't already, click the link to download my habit building guide so you can begin to reduce your stress. It all starts with being clear on who you want to become and then proving it to yourself with small wins.
[00:22:07] Because the Lord prompted you with his wisdom on how to get closer to him, take small steps towards something you know is a better path. Or, if this series and working through the downloads have you thinking that you want to work with me, you want to go deeper than do it yourself effort, click the services link below.
[00:22:27] As a Christian stress recovery coach, I'm here to help you explore more of what underlies your stress and imbalance and ensure that you have the motivation and accountability to make the changes you desire in your life. Only you and God know how to heal your stress. I can come alongside to support and encourage you and share a few strategies and tools to help you with mindset, lifestyle, and diet changing.
[00:22:51] See you next episode. Have a blessed day.
NEXT VIDEO IN SERIES: When your mind plays tricks on you (aka Internal Stressors)
RELATED: Create Faith-Driven Tiny Habits
The journal templates mentioned in this video are found here.
As mentioned in the video, you can get a jumpstart on building faith-driven tiny habits based on what's stressing you out. Check out this guide to take steps toward your goals of reducing stress and improving work-life balance!
If you love the approach shared in the video and are ready to slow down and find more balance and harmony in your life, do you know what to do to take the first steps toward stress recovery? Book a free consultation about how stress recovery can help you!
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