77: Clearing Out Your Old Thoughts for Good

Welcome to The Wealthy Mom MD Podcast, a podcast for women physicians who want to learn how to live a wealthy life. In this podcast you will learn how to make money work for you, how you can have more of it, and learn the tools to empower you to live a life on purpose. Get ready to up-level your money and your life. I’m your host, Dr. Bonnie Koo.

Welcome to episode 77. So one of the things a lot of my clients struggle with once they understand that their thoughts create their feelings, which create actions and their result is what to do when old thoughts pop up.

And I think there’s this sort of misunderstanding or maybe wishful thinking, and I had the same wishful thinking too, that once you understand that thoughts create feelings, that suddenly only amazing thoughts will come to them. Meaning once you start creating new thoughts that the old thoughts will just kind of go away and that we’re going to reach some kind of brain nirvana.

And that doesn’t happen. So, sorry to break the news to you. I used to think so too and I was like, “What?” when I found out that that’s not what happens. Because as long as you have a human brain it’s going to offer up thoughts and some aren’t useful.

And so I thought I’d do an episode on how to think about this so you don’t make it a problem when old, unuseful thoughts pop up, because they will. And so I can kind of still it into one sentence, is that it’s what we think about these thoughts the determines how we feel, not the actual thoughts themselves. Not the actual presence of these thoughts. Kind of meta, right?

And so this requires us to understand that there’s us, you, and there are your thoughts. Now, many of us think we are our thoughts. I want you to see yourself as the watcher of your thoughts, you are not your thoughts.

Now, this concept is so important when it comes to understanding and managing your risk tolerance for investing. And so this is why we spend so much time on this inside of Money For Women physicians. Because so many of you might feel afraid or have self-doubt come up for you whenever you start looking into investing in the stock market or whatever you’re looking to invest in.

What if the only thing that has happened is that you believed these fear-based thoughts? I remember when I first started investing, or looked into rather, investing in real estate, immediately my brain said things like, “This seems complicated. You might lose money. This might not work out.” Lots of thoughts like that and I believed them.

And so it took me some time to actually invest in real estate because of that. And not only that, I made the presence of these fear-based thoughts mean that this was like a sign that I shouldn’t actually do it. How many of you do that too? And I want to offer that there’s another way to look at these fear-based thoughts.

So first I want to remind you that our brain, our human brain is specifically designed to keep us alive. And because of that, anything new is pretty much automatically labeled at possibly dangerous and a threat to our survival. I know, logically it sounds super silly, but that’s just what it does.

And you may have heard me talk about the motivational triad, but one of the three things is that it wants things to be easy. It wants to be efficient because in order to maximize our chances for survival we want to make sure we have enough energy to, I don’t know, outrun a lion or something if something like that actually happens to us. And so it’s always trying to conserve energy, AKA it’s pretty lazy.

And so one of the ways it tries to convince you that you shouldn’t learn anything new that’s going to take up a lot of energy is to basically offer up fear-based thoughts. And so what do you do when they come up? Because they will.

And I think some of us think that well, once I make a certain amount of money, once I have a certain amount of money, whatever that amount is for your, maybe it’s one million or five million, then you’re never going to have negative thoughts about money.

But that’s not the case because circumstances, the amount of money you have does not determine how you feel, it’s what you think about the money. And a number isn’t going to magically make your thoughts better about money.

And you might think that’s not true, but let’s say you’re an attending right now and you have thoughts that you don’t have enough money or that it’s not enough. But once you have a certain amount it will be fine. But just notice how your thinking probably hasn’t changed much from being a medical student, from being a resident, to now being an attending.

I think many of us have this false belief that once we became attendings that all of our money problems would kind of disappear. But it didn’t, did it? And so the one skill you need to learn in terms of how to deal with this, well there’s really two, the first one is to just notice that it’s a thought. And that you can choose to believe it or not.

I know, it doesn’t seem like you have a choice, right? Once you’re aware that it is a thought and something you can choose or not, then you can decide if you want to keep it or not. And many of you probably don’t want to keep these fear-based thoughts about money and so you have to learn the art of redirecting your brain.

What I mean by that is you redirect your brain to different thoughts. Because here’s the thing, when you have fear-based thoughts about money, you’ve probably been thinking about them or thinking them for decades. And so it’s going to take some time and practice to not only create new thoughts, but to actually believe the new thoughts.

And so this art of redirecting our brains to different thoughts, I think of it as like these are weightlifting sets or reps. Like if you’re weightlifting, I wish it was the case that you can just want a six pack and have it, but you got to do the work, you got to do the reps. And the same is true for our thoughts.

And so many of my clients create these new thoughts that they love, that they believe and then a day or two later or maybe a week or two later their old thoughts start creeping back in and they think there’s a big problem, as if it stopped working. And no, all that’s happened is that your brain offered up an old thought.

And think about it, it’s very easy for your brain to offer up that old thought because it’s been thinking it for so long it’s very efficient. And so you just have to put in the time, the reps to redirect your brain to the new thought.

Another way that I can explain this concept of redirecting your brain is giving yourself or giving your brain equal airtime. So many of us spend so much time giving airtime to all the sort or negative thoughts, all the ways things can go wrong. But we don’t take the time to give equal airtime to how it could be right, and how it could go so well, and what possibilities could be possible.

And I also want to remind you that it’s kind of normal for our brains to focus on the negative. It’s kind of what it’s designed to do. Remember, it’s constantly scanning for what could be wrong or what could be missing because it wants to make sure we stay alive.

And for us physicians, we’re kind of experts at this, right?  Because when we’re seeing patients, we always have to be thinking about not just a differential, but make sure we’re not missing the thing that could kill the patient or the worse thing it could be, right?

And so I actually think it might be even harder for us in some ways because in our jobs we’re trained to actually do this all the time. And obviously that’s a skill that works very well for us as physicians, but it’s a skill that’s quite detrimental for actual life, and especially money.

And so I would just suggest if this is a completely new concept for you, just take the time to give some equal airtime to different types of thoughts. Like instead of focusing on what could go wrong or what’s not possible for you, what could be possible for you? How could this go well? Could it go well? Is that possible? If it is, let’s spend some time thinking about how it could go well.

I already hear some of you saying, “Yeah, but...” And most of the times the yeah, but goes something like this, “Yeah, but if I think about how it could go well, the I might be disappointed.” But here’s the thing, you’re already disappointed right now. Do you want to keep being disappointed? Do you want to at least explore the possibility of having what you want?

And lastly, I just want to remind everyone that it is 100% normal to not want to do this. Even though logically you might want to do this. And because remember, our brains want to be efficient, it doesn’t want to learn anything new, and this takes effort.

Kind of like this morning when I looked at my calendar and saw it was my day to do some weightlifting, specifically upper body. Immediately my brain is like, “Ugh, we don’t want to do that. Let’s just scroll on Facebook and hang out there or scroll on Instagram.”

So it’s 100% normal for your brain to not want to do the work of redirecting to think about what’s possible because it’s going to take energy and effort to do so. And it’s 100% worth the effort of doing the work.

Remember, as long as you have a human brain, it’s going to offer up unuseful thoughts. And this is one of the many reasons that I have a coach that I meet once a week. And I literally refer to it as my weekly brain clean out.

Because even though I’m a coach and I know how to coach myself, I still have a human brain and human brains will always offer up thoughts that may or may not be useful. And I will sometimes believe those unuseful thoughts.

And this is one of the reasons why we offer a weekly coaching call inside of Money For Women Physicians, so that you can come and get your brain cleaned out on a weekly basis when it comes to money. Because remember we have decades and decades of unuseful money beliefs hanging out in our brains and it’s going to take some time to clear those out and replace them with some more useful ones.

And as you do that, the you start taking action from a more positive place. Actions like investing in real estate or having the courage to ask for more money at your job or doing something else if medicine is not what you want to do anymore.

Because it is easier to just keep doing what you’re doing now, of course it is. But if you want a different result, different outcome of where you want your like to go, your money to go, of course it’s worth the work to get there.

Okay my friends, I will talk to you next week.

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