In this episode, I dive into a topic near and dear to my heart and mind!! The voices in our head!  How do we respond to them, do we listen to ourselves or talk to ourselves, and which is better?   Understanding the growth mindset and closed mindset work of Carol Dweck is really helpful, as is knowing the 4 questions devised by Dr. Daniel Amen to eliminate the ANTS in your head!  When you understand the 5 Ds that hold you back, and how to counter them by John Gordon and the 2 things you need to be happy, as well as the 3 rules of everything being figureoutable by Marie Forleo, you can do anything!   All of what I share today is what I have learned and put into practice in the last 6+years since I left the corporate world and forged my own path to where I am at today. Living a life I have designed that is full of purpose and passion, joy and happiness, every day.  If I can do it, you absolutely can too!!  I also share some of the books I read to get me started on this journey.  Enjoy the show! 

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Melissa is an Integrative Health Practitioner helping people get to the root cause of their health issues.  Melissa neither diagnoses nor cures but helps bring your body back into balance by helping discover your “toxic load” and then removing the toxins. Melissa offers functional medicine lab testing that helps you “see inside” to know exactly what is going on, and then provides a personalized wellness protocol using natural herbs and supplements.   Melissa’s business is 100% virtual – the lab tests are mailed directly to your home and she specializes in holding your hand and guiding the way to healing so that you don’t have to figure it all out on your own. 

Melissa has been featured at a number of Health & Wellness Summits, such as the Health, Wealth & Wisdom Summit, The Power To Profit Summit, The Feel Fan-freaking-tas-tic Summit, and the Aim Higher Summit, and has guested on over 30 different podcasts teaching people about the importance of prioritizing our health and how to get get started. 

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Imagine getting up every day full of energy is if you were in your 20s. Again, what would that be? Like? What would that be worth to you? What is your health worth to you? Think about it. Your health isn't everything. But without it,

everything else is nothing. And yet too many of us are taking it for granted. until something goes wrong. No one wakes up hoping to be diagnosed with a disease or chronic illness. And yet, we've never been taught how to be proactive in our health through our school system, or public health. As a registered health coach and integrative health practitioner, I believe it is time this information is made available to everyone. Combining new knowledge around your health and the ability to do my functional medicine lab tests in the comfort of your own home will allow you to optimize your health for today and all your tomorrow's don't wait for your wake up call.

Welcome back to the don't wait for your wake up call podcast. I am your host, Melissa Daly. And today I'm going to be talking about the growth mindset. And the thoughts that we have in our head. There's a great book called the Growth Mindset by Carol Dweck. And I read this six or seven years ago, and it was really helpful to me at the time, because I was actually still in the corporate world and working with a boss that had a closed mindset. Whereas my previous boss had had a growth mindset. And it was such a huge adjustment for me. And in understanding the difference between the two helped me tolerate the closed mindset. And what are growth mindsets and closed mindsets? Well, the growth mindset individual is somebody who believes that there is unlimited knowledge in the world, and one person cannot begin to know everything. And so in the work environment, for example, the growth mindset person believes that, you know, they're gonna hire experts in all the different areas of their work, and then rely on those experts to provide them the information that is needed in decision making, because they can't begin to know at all. Whereas the closed mindset person believes that they have to know it all. And that if they don't know it all, it makes them look bad or weak or not good enough in the job that they're doing. And so that person, very often will take other people's work as their own, they're afraid to say, I don't know, they don't want to be hiring experts in their field because they have to know it all. And they feel it makes them look bad if somebody knows more than they do. So as you can well imagine, it's a very different work environment. But we don't just have our growth and our closed mindset in our work environment. We have them in our learning environments, we have them in our sports, environment, social environments, and we can actually have different mindsets in different aspects of our lives. So another example from the book was the growth mindset in sports and the closed mindset in sports. So the growth mindset is in basketball with Michael Jordan, you may know that he was cut from the grade 10 basketball team, he didn't make the team. And he went home and told his mom and his mom said, Well, you're just gonna have to practice more, you're just gonna have to try harder. And so he would stay after school every day and shoot 100 consecutive baskets. And he didn't leave until he'd shot 100 consecutive baskets. And if he got to 99 and missed the 100th, you would start over again. At number one. That's the growth mindset of I can always get better. There's always room for improvement. There's no limitation on my ability, I can always improve and look at where he got to write. The closed mindset example is actually John McEnroe. And we know him from tennis, and he is most famous for his tantrums on the tennis court. Where if you lost a match, it was never his fault. He didn't take responsibility for it. It was the courts fault. It was the weathers fault. It was the

the judges fault. It was the opponent's fault. It was everybody else's fault. But his because in his closed mindset, he believed that he was born with this talent Isn't, and it's just what it was. And no amount of practice was actually going to make him better. Therefore he didn't take responsibility for his own tennis career, it was just that he was gifted it. And when things went wrong, there was somebody else to blame. So those are two examples. If you haven't read the book, it's an excellent book. And it's just fascinating how the human mind works, right? Between shifting between growth mindset and closed mindset. And what is also impacting our mindsets? Well, it's the way that we talk to ourselves. And we have anywhere from 20,000 to 70,000 conversations with ourselves every single day. And I like to teach people to talk back to those voices in our head. Because when we begin to be in control of our brain, rather than letting our brain be in control of us, we can move forward and take action to get out of our own way. So it's all about talking to yourself, instead of just listening to yourself. And I want you to stop for a moment. And just think about the way that you do talk to yourself on any given day. We are so prone to beating ourselves up, criticizing ourselves, calling ourselves stupid idiots, whatever the terminology is that we use. It's not positive. And just stop and think for a moment. If you talked to other people, the way you talk to yourself, Would you have any friends at all? And is it time to start talking to yourself, as if you were talking to someone you loved? If we don't question our thoughts, our brain believes them to be true, and file them away in our subconscious mind. And our subconscious mind is a filing cabinet. With no judgment, there is no filter, every experience we have every thought we have simply gets filed as is. And we all know that when you say things enough times, it becomes true, we believe it to be true. So we need to stop these ants running around in our head. As Dr. Daniel Amen calls them, they are automatic negative thoughts. Because we've been thinking them for so long, it's become the habit, it's what we know. And we stack these thoughts. So it does take practice. But when I first started learning all about this, I was really fascinated about the brain and how it works in our subconscious mind, our conscious mind, even our super conscious mind, which is where creativity happens. And that doesn't work at the same time that our conscious mind is working. So we have to let go of trying to problem solve in our conscious mind, in order for our super conscious mind to get creative and resolve the problem for us. And it makes sense because so often we have a haws when we're in the shower, when we're driving in the middle of the night, we wake up with answers. And those are all times when we've tended to just let our mind wander. And we've stopped having our conscious mind focus on something and it stops and the superconscious gets going.

But coming back to the way we talk to ourselves, it takes practice to stop talking to ourselves so negatively, because first we have to have awareness around the fact that we do this. And then we have to start catching ourselves in that moment, right. And it could be something as simple as I know, when I first started practicing this, I stubbed my toe. And as I stubbed my toe, I just kind of said to myself, Oh, you stupid idiot. And then I had to catch myself and say no, you're not a stupid idiot. Why did you stub your toe? You stubbed your toe because you're rushing? Why are you rushing, and then break that down so that I could learn from that experience? Plan my calendar better so that I wasn't in a rush, rush rush mode. And then when I get out of that mode, I'm less likely to be injuring myself. So it does take time. But something that you can also be doing as you get awareness around the way that you talk to yourself is to just ask yourself these questions. Is it true? So for instance, is it true that I'm a stupid idiot? No, it's not true. Right? But depending on what you've said to yourself, you might not be super sure on the answer the first time around. So then ask yourself, Is it really true? Because maybe the thought that you had was I'm unlovable? Is that really true? No, there isn't a human being out there that isn't lovable. Right. But it's something that we might have, you know, learned or had that belief since childhood. And so it's really hard to undo. Then you can ask yourself, How do I feel when I believe that thought? Right. So you might feel sad, depressed, isolated, lonely, if you believe that thought that I'm unlovable. And then the next question is, how would I feel if I didn't believe that thought? Well, now I might feel happy, excited about the opportunity. You know, I'm cared for engaged connected. Right? So these four questions are really powerful in helping you shift your mindset and the around the thoughts that you're having in your head and the conversations you're having with yourself. So just to repeat them again. Is it true? Is it really true? How do I feel when I believe that thought? And how would I feel if I didn't believe that thought? You see, it's the thoughts that we suppress, that hurt us. What you suppress turns into depression, what you sweep under the rug will reappear later in life. As I mentioned, humans stack thoughts, either negatively or positively. And if you are unconscious of your inner dialogue, it can set off a negative train of thoughts. So we want to be really conscious about our inner dialogue. And, as I said, start talking to ourselves as we would to someone we love. And here's the thing, the emotion of gratitude outweighs the emotion of that negative thought train. When you were in your head, you are dead. When you are in your heart, you are smart. That was said by motivational speaker, Nick, I can't say his last name, Nick, Santa NAS, tassa. And it's true, right? When we're in our head, we are doing so much damage to ourselves unless we are conscious of the thoughts that we are allowing into our head. And that gratitude practices incredibly powerful, as is a mindfulness practice, it helps you get out of your head and calm your mind calm all of those whirling thoughts. The gratitude practice is a piece of that where you can, you know, write down before you go to bed each night, three things that you're grateful for every day, this is something I've been doing for six years now. And it's really powerful, and changing how you view the world. Because our brain is charged with keeping us safe. That's its number one priority. And in order to do that, it is looking out for danger.

But what happens is when it's always looking for danger, it's focusing on the negative, the fear, right? When we instead create a gratitude practice, where we write down what we're grateful for, at the end of each day, we start to train our brain to look for things that we're grateful for, and remember them so we can write them down at the end of each day. And in a very short amount of time of doing this, your brain starts looking and recognizing and holding on to the positive in your life instead of what it needs to be afraid of. And where we put our focus causes that to expand. So who wouldn't want to be focusing on the positive and the good in our life, because that just creates expansion in that area of our life. Now, you might not want to do your gratitude journal in the evening, you might want to do it in the morning, you might want to do it at lunchtime. You might not want to write it down. You might want to set a timer on your phone or recite them out loud People are doing social media post about it. Whatever your practice is that works for you. So you do it is fine. I particularly like doing it before I go to bed, because it allows my brain to go to sleep happy. It gets me out of the stress state, I've let go of any thoughts of to do lists and all of those other things. And my brain goes to sleep happy on these thoughts of gratitude. And I sleep better as a result. And if I wake up in the middle of the night, my brain doesn't automatically go straight to the things I have to do the next day, my brain goes back to those last thoughts that I had. And so allowing my brain to go to sleep happy, allows for better sleep, which allows for me to be more stress resilient the next day. And again, it's just a positive cycle moving forward. So a gratitude practice can be extremely powerful. And it's so easy to do. It does take a habit, habits take 30 days to instill, figure out what works for you so that you can make this work every single day. And notice the positive effect that it has on your life, as all of the goodness starts to expand. Other things that you can be doing to calm the mind and promote a mindfulness practice for yourself are things like yoga, meditation, tai chi, Qi Gong, going for a walk in nature, taking a bath and putting in some Epsom bath salts, simply, you know, reading a book for pleasure, right? All of these things allow us to stop that negative train of thoughts, calm the mind, have an intention around what we want to be thinking how we want to be feeling and step into that. So it's very, very powerful. You know, there are only two things that we need to be happy in life. One is contribution, hugs for other people complimenting others, volunteering, being of service, because we actually suffer when we only focus on ourselves. Humans are social beings, we need to feel connected to other people. And when we only focus on ourselves, we start to disconnect. And that has a suffering, and it's much harder to find happiness from that place. And then growth, we are either growing, or we are dying. We're either moving forwards, or we're moving backwards. So invest in your growth. That too, is an incredibly powerful thing. And when you're investing in growth, you are with like minded people that are also wanting to grow, focused on positivity focused on community focused on working together. And that really will move you forward. You don't want to live in a place of what if, because what if will never bring you answers in your life, it will bring anxiety to your soul. Your perspective can be your power, or your prison. So you need to get out of the what if and that worry stage and take action.

And with each step of action, things will happen, things always happen. But that will continue to help you move forward, it may not be in a linear line. And where you end up six months from now may not be where you thought that you would. And that's okay. Because throughout this whole journey, you are learning and growing. And, you know, through that becoming happier as well. And in my journey to health and wellness and being an integrative health practitioner over the past six years, if you'd asked me six years ago, where I would end up I would never have said this, I had no idea this is where I was going. But I was open to being guided. And I was investing in personal growth and really enjoying that process and the people that I was surrounding myself with and I'd meet one person and that would lead to another and that just led to all of these doors opening and me landing in the place in this place where I absolutely love the work that I do and being able to help people heal and educate people in their health, all the things that I didn't know just six years ago when I was in the corporate world and just you know, busy working 60 hour weeks and raising my family. So it doesn't matter where you think you're going to end up. You just need to start. And as humans we will often play the blame and complain game. We choose this to avoid taking responsibility for our current situation. Instead, we need to shift our perspective into what we can control. This is where we can release anxiety as now we have control and can do something about that situation. Using a phrase like, easier said than done, is not helpful. And yet, how many of us use that all the time? And I know I've said it many times in my life. Yeah, that's easier said than done. And what is it doing is passing the buck. It's actually a prison perspective, because it's holding us in a place of inaction. Because we've basically just said, Yeah, I've said it, but I'm not doing it. Because that's not possible, right? That's the message we've said to ourselves. So it's a prison perspective, keeping us stuck. Instead, we want to be saying, I will figure this out. And as Marie Forleo says, Everything is figured out double. This is your power perspective. And fear that we all let creep in. Because as I said, our brain is trying to keep us safe. So it wants to notify us of things that it thinks might take us out of our comfort zone where it knows it can keep us safe, because we're alive. Anytime we start to stretch outside that comfort zone, our brain starts chirping to us, talking at us, saying, Are you sure you want to do this, you're gonna be okay, you might fail, you might not succeed, you might not be safe. You don't even know what you're doing. And very often, we'll get into all of those thoughts. And not realize that, yes, it's our brain trying to keep us safe. But we don't get to move forward when we stay in our comfort zone all the time. And we allow those conversations of our brain talking to us to become fear that holds us back. Instead of talking back to our brain, and asking ourselves those questions, is it really true if I go down this path? Is that what you're telling me? really true? Yeah, probably not. So fear is the most fatal pandemic of all, because fear gets us stuck, and it stops all action, there is nothing worse. So don't take advice from your fear. Don't let fear, destroy your dreams. Choose love, compassion, connection with others, and design the life you love. Create a tribe of people around you who lifts you up, instead of those who bring you down. Because you are the combination of the five people you spend the most time with? Who are you spending time with? How do they talk to you? Do they encourage you? Do they tell you you can't do that? And here's the thing, if somebody tells you that you can't do something that has nothing to do with you, that is all about their own perspective, and whether they think they could do it. And it comes out as you can't do that. But it's because they don't think they can do that. And guess what, you're not asking them to do it. They're a different person, they have different expertise than you. So don't listen, when someone tells you you can't do that. Because if you have a desire to do it a dream of passion, you're going to figure it out. Everything is figured out.

But who are the five people you are spending the most time with? Do you need to change that up? Do you need to find a more supportive network or friends. And if it's family do you maybe need to spend a little bit less time with some that are holding you back. And very often family will hold us back because they don't want to see you hurt. They don't want to see you fail. But from failing, we learn, right? It's just a learning opportunity. So that you can pick back up and go, What did I learn from that? Okay, and move forward and try again. We don't have to be afraid of failure, it can be our greatest teacher, but so often out of love, our families hold us back. And we have to be willing to say no, this is what I want to do. And I want to move forward. And let me try and let me fail. And let me get back up and try again. The only real failure is in not starting at all, or quitting. So I want to share with you some work from John Gordon, and the five ds that sabotage us. First of all, we have doubt. We get doubt stuck in our head that can cause inaction. There's also distortion or the lies that we tell ourselves. There's discouragement. We give up when we're discouraged. And as I said, we can often be discouraged by others and we've listened to what others have to say and it's not about us. What they're saying is all about them. We get into distraction, which moves us away from what we're supposed to be focusing on. And then there's division When we're anxious about something, we feel divided and separated from ourselves. And all of these things can keep us stuck and stop us from moving forward. But when we wake up every day and you love your life and you choose happiness, that's when we can move forward. Don't be that person that rises and whines. Focus on love, and it will drive you forward in your purpose, your passion, love is the antidote to fear, because it casts out fear. If you love it, you won't fear it, right. And here's how you counter those five DS, we turn doubt into trust, we trust ourselves, I want to do this, I can do this, I can figure this out. We turn the distortion or the lies into speaking the truth to those lies. So speaking back to those conversations we're having with ourselves in our head. We turn discouragement into encouragement by encouraging ourselves and others, we turn distraction into focus on what matters most. If it feels like a big problem, break it down into smaller sized pieces, so that we can focus on getting started with what matters most and moving forward. And then division, unity with self. And love, is what we replace that with connecting to your true inner self, and what you want to achieve in this life. You can become less, or you can become more, it's simply a choice. Marie Forleo has three rules of everything is figured out double. The first one is that all problems or dreams, or figure out double. And as Harv Eker of the millionaire mindset likes to say rich people are bigger than their problems. And poor people are smaller than their problems, which means you just need to grow bigger in your personal growth journey so that you become bigger than your problems. Number two, if a problem isn't figured out double, it's really not a problem. It's either a fact of life, or a law of nature. And number three, you may not care enough to figure this problem out or achieve this particular dream. And that's okay, find another problem or dream that ignites a blazing fire in your heart. And then go back to rule number one. And I love what Les Brown says, expect good things to happen. And they will you are always where you are supposed to be at any given time. Get curious, what is it you need to learn here to move forward. And know that you are never given more than you can handle.

Gandhi said, Learn like you will live forever, live like you will die tomorrow. And I love that a mentor I had said probably five years ago I heard this and it resonated so much. He said that we are put on this earth to never stop learning to provide service to others, and to find our passion, our purpose and live it. And that meant so much to me. And I was on my journey at the time when I heard that. And it just fueled me even more to keep going and find what it is that I was supposed to be doing. Which is right here. Being an integrative health practitioner, sharing education around living your best life. The fact that you can heal from chronic illness, the body is a powerful healing machine. When we create the environment for it to heal it can. And the fact that just because your genes might predispose you to disease doesn't mean you're automatically going to get that disease, it comes down to the environment you create inside your body. And that's 90 to 95% of that equation. So that's very powerful, you have control, and you have the ability to create a body that is inhospitable to disease. We have so much more power over our health, our mindset, our whole Mind, Body Spirit journey than we've ever known before. And sharing this with people is really meaningful to me. Because when I was in the corporate world, I didn't have time to learn it. But listening to it in a podcast or reading it in blogs, or having a practitioner that guides me through my healing journey that is powerful and meaningful to me. So that's how I pay it forward and give back. So I want to share with you some books if you like this subject and like to dig in more for those that are viewing on YouTube, you can see this book here by Marie Forleo, who I just referenced her three steps to everything being figured out or three rules.

Marie Forleo, everything is figured out Hubble is the title of that book, it's a great read, she writes really well and tell some great stories in it. I also reference Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T Harv, Eker. Another great book with simple action steps that you can take as you build your wealth, and your money blueprint. And then another one, this is by Bill Burnett, and Dave Evans, designing your life. These guys are university professors, engineering professors, who saw that so many of their students would graduate from university but then have a really hard time figuring out what they were going to do with their life beyond University. So they started a program called Designing your life. And it's a great book in terms of, again, recognizing how you can choose to live the life that you want to live and design that for yourself. So thank you for listening. And thank you for being part of my don't wait for your wake up call podcast community. Next week, I have a fabulous guest, Ken Streeter. And we will be picking up this conversation talking more about life's purpose, passion, the concept, the Japanese concept of IKI, Guy and more. So I invite you to tune back in, as that will be another fabulous episode. Thanks for joining me. Until next time, before I let you go today, I want to let you know about my next health, kickstart and detox program. Starting on Tuesday, January the fourth 2022 There is no better time to start looking after your health than the start of a new year. And no better way than to do it in a guided group community. During this program, I will guide you through a three week functional medicine detox, you do not start until after session one so you can learn how to do it and be set up for success. And then I dive into nutrition and the right way to eat for your body and busting up some of those nutritional myths that are out there. We also dive into digestion because it's not just about what you eat, but about what you absorb. And I dive into sugar because it is in everything these days. Where is it sneaking into your diet? And what can you use instead. And we finish up with how not to retox after your detox because of course if you've done all of that hard work, you don't just want to go back to your old habits. You want to take your new habits with you to continue on your health journey throughout 2022 and forevermore. And this is information that you will be learning not only for your benefit, but that you can then teach to your loved ones as well. So check out the link in the show notes to learn more about this program. If you haven't done my discover your toxic load quiz, do that. And I look forward to seeing you in the program.