Why you should get uncomfortable

Hope: (00:00)
Do you wanna wake up feeling like you’re stepping into who you’re meant to be into the best possible version of you? What if I told you that the key to your best life, health and happiness are all around you? You just have to find what works for you. I’m hope Pedraza and I believe that there isn’t just one way to live a healthy and meaningful life, and that all you need is a little inspiration to make changes that last from the inside out. Each week I’ll be sharing tangible tips and inspirational interviews to help you on your journey. These are the steps to take to improve your life and live with purpose. This is hopeful and wholesome. Hey y’all, thanks for listening today. I wanted to take one of my first few episodes solo, well solo episode, to talk about why you should be getting uncomfortable.

Hope: (00:47)
And I’ve kind of made this, my motto, my credo for 2020. 2019 for me was what I like to call my year of learning. So 2020, I have dubbed my year of doing and that’s doing all the things that I’ve put off or told myself I didn’t have the time for, didn’t have time to commit to it, have time to plan for it, or just couldn’t do or just place limits on myself to get done. And why do we place limits on ourselves? I do it all the time. I’m sure you can say the same. And a lot of times it’s a subconscious thing. I don’t even realize that I’m doing it. There’s a few reasons and I’m pretty sure that all of them at some point have applied to me. So first we worry about what people think. And you might think you don’t. I know I’ve said this plenty of times.

Hope: (01:35)
Well, I don’t care what people think about me. So well, truth is that many times it’s such a subconscious thing that we don’t even know that we care, that we care about what people think about us. And for me, it’s not so much feeling silly or foolish in front of people. Like I don’t really care about feeling dumb. But it’s my perfectionist mentality that if I don’t have it done perfectly, then people are gonna judge me for it not being done perfectly. I have to call myself a recovering perfectionist because for me, this is one of the hardest things to change about myself. It’s this feeling of having to do everything perfectly and have to do everything right and I have to wait to do things until I’m doing it perfectly and doing it right. And this really is the most important thing to change about myself in order to make changes in my life and to get to that next level, that next level that I’m striving to get to.

Hope: (02:29)
And I’m sure you could say the same for yourself. So it’s more about getting out of your own way, blocking out the idea of what other people think matters, and then move past that limitation. Another reason we place limits on ourselves is because of our limited mindset. Now I have, and I do from time to time struggle with this one as well. Our brains, our subconscious mind put limits on how much we can do, how much we can get done, how much, much we can make, how successful we are, what we think we can become. We put these subconscious limits on ourself in our own mind. This is a whole other topic for another talk for another day. ’cause I could go on about this for hours. But much of this comes from subconscious beliefs that we’ve told ourselves, the subconscious beliefs that we believe about ourselves, and even from our genetic predisposition to these thoughts, they’ve been genetically ingrained in our brains to think this about ourselves and to get past these limiting beliefs, we have to open our minds to believing in any possibility and every possibility and that we’re capable of anything.

Hope: (03:36)
And I know this sounds so incredibly cliche and trite and dumb and silly, I feel silly for even saying it, but all of these cheesy, inspirational things that you’ve heard your whole life, that hey, you can do anything you’re capable of, anything and really, really do have a threat of truth in them, they really are true. Truly believing that anything is possible is the only way to get past those limiting beliefs. And it’s not only saying it to yourself, but truly believing it and feeling it, feeling that it’s your truth. It is your truth, your credo. Another reason that we place limits in ourselves, the one that I kind of wanna focus on, I wanna harp on is because we don’t want to feel uncomfortable. And again, this is one of those subconscious things where we don’t really know that we’re telling ourselves that, that we don’t wanna feel uncomfortable.

Hope: (04:25)
This is the truth. I read it an article a while back in ink magazine, that stability is a shutoff switch for your brain that really hit me. Stability is a shutoff switch for your brain. Actual studies have been done to show that if you are not at least a little bit stressed about the outcome of what you’re doing, that your brain shuts down learning like it just shuts it off. And I have to tell you about this one study that I read about this study where these scientists taught some monkeys to hit a target for a reward for juice. Like they hit a target and they got some juice. So sometimes the odds of hitting the target were fixed, like they knew what they were gonna get and the monkeys were rewarded 80% of the time. And then sometimes the target was unpredictable. So they didn’t know how much or when they were gonna get rewarded.

Hope: (05:15)
The scientists then measured the brain activity in these monkeys while they were playing with the targets. And it showed that if the monkeys could predict how often a target would pay off the part of the brain associated with learning, basically shut down. And then when the monkeys couldn’t guess what happened, their learning centers lit up. So why is this important? First of all, I think that’s completely fascinating and I think we should focus more on that about how our brains work when we’re doing something that we don’t expect, that we don’t know the outcome. So why is it important? First of all, you’re opening your brain up to absorb more information. So when you’re in an uncertain or a volatile environment or situation, your brain opens up and you can absorb more information. So your brain is more open to learning new things and then you’re also changing your brain.

Hope: (06:08)
Now, I talk a lot about Dr. Joe Dispenza, and I’m sure I will talk about him a lot more. And one of these days I’m gonna get him on this podcast because he is probably like the smartest human I’ve ever come into contact with. He’s like a wizard. Like I just completely fascinated by him and everything that he’s doing. But he studies neuroscience and he talks about the latest research in neuroscience and then shows that you can change your brain by just thinking differently. You’re literally changing your brain by just thinking differently, different thoughts. He says that what we’re conditioned to believe about ourselves affects our performance. And what we’re programmed to think other people think about us affects our performance. And that includes how successful we are. So it’s like the placebo effect, right? Like we’re just doing what we think people expect from us, or what we expect from ourselves.

Hope: (06:56)
It’s like pre-program conditioning us that that’s what’s gonna happen. So the limits we’ve put on ourselves are literally wired in our brains. So the process of changing, causing changes in your life requires a sort of unlearning and then relearning. So that means you have to get uncomfortable. It means you have to break the habit of being yourself, which by the way is also a great book by Dr. Joe Dispenza. And you have to create a new mind. And this is where real growth and change happens. It’s getting out of your comfort zone, getting out of the world, a familiarity of what we’re familiar with, what we’re accustomed to, and what we’re comfortable with. It’s getting outside of that. And that’s where real change happens. And this, in my opinion, is what life is all about. Life should be a process of growth and change because that’s how we become better.

Hope: (07:47)
That’s how we become better moms or dads or sisters or daughters, sons, business owners, whatever. It’s how we become better human and it’s how we can thrive in life and live with purpose. That’s the premise of this podcast. It’s what it’s all about, is finding a way to live with purpose. And it’s all about change and growth. So how can we build these opportunities for learning and for variety and for uncertainty in our lives to rewire and change our brains? So a few things that I thought of that you can do to kind of help rewire your brain. First is traveling abroad, which I realize at the time of recording this, we are all quarantine in our houses and we can just kind of dream about it and visualize our, our traveling dreams. But traveling abroad, you learn so many things when you travel abroad, you learn things about other cultures, other people, other values.

Hope: (08:43)
You’re kind of getting outside of yourself in the little bubble that you live in and you learn about yourself and you learn about your own limitations. So I think traveling abroad is a great way to kind of rewire brain and another way, some other ways that maybe we can do this now that way while we’re uh, quarantined, is to change your routine. So driving a different route to work, going to lunch in a different spot, doing a different workout than you’re used to, changing your, your daily routine up, doing something different. It kind of jolts your brain into learning mode and makes your brain have to change. You don’t see any changes in your brain if you don’t change anything about your day. And it’s things that you’ve been doing the same day after day after day. So just changing up little things in your routine can help your brain go into that learning mode.

Hope: (09:27)
You could also start a new project or master a new skill, even if it doesn’t turn out great, even if you consider it a failure, you still learn something by just trying something new and trying to master something new. And then another thing that you can do is talking to people who disagree with you. I think a lot of people shy away from this because they don’t wanna argue or they wanna, don’t wanna feel like their beliefs are wrong or that other people are trying to make them feel wrong. But it’s not the point that it’s not about that. Talking to people who disagree with you as a way to open yourself up to new ways of thinking. It can help teach you empathy and builds connections with other people. And it kind of brings in that connection that, or that thought that we are all connected even if we don’t think the same, we don’t have the same beliefs and values.

Hope: (10:12)
I think it’s still important to understand and appreciate other people’s beliefs and values. So just talking to people who think differently than you or that might disagree with your own beliefs, it can create those new neuro connections in your brain to help you think differently. Even not necessarily that you’re gonna believe what they believe or agree with them, but it does make you think differently and it makes you kind of have to rethink how you look at things. So I leave you with this, my friends. What can you do to take yourself outta your comfort zone and get uncomfortable? How uncomfortable can you become? And then what changes are you gonna see as a result? And when you find them, I wish you would let me know ’cause I’d love to hear about the changes happening in your life. And I hope this leaves you with a little something new that you’ve learned and you’re starting to, to rewire your brain and and create some neuro connections and really see some amazing changes in your life.

Hope: (11:10)
Thanks guys. Thanks for listening to Hopeful and Wholesome Y’all. If you found value in this week’s episode, please subscribe on iTunes, wherever you get your podcast, and leave a review to let me know what you thought. I love to know what you find useful in these episodes so I know how I can provide the most value I can to my listeners. And if you have topics that you wanna know more about, I’d love to hear those as well. So shoot me a message on Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn. It’s at the hope Pedraza, or visit my website hopeful and wholesome.com. Thanks Y’all.