Welcome to the Mindset Coach Academy podcast. I'm Lindsey Wilson and I am a high-performance mindset coach, a mom, a former professional athlete and an entrepreneur. I help coaches and high performers optimize their mindset to improve their coaching, their performance and those of their athletes and their lives. Here you'll learn all about mindset, how to live it, how to teach it and how to sell it.
Hi guys and welcome back to the Mindset Coach Academy podcast. My name is Lindsey Wilson and today is Mental Monday.
Mental Monday, if you don't know, is where we talk about one tip, tool or technique that you can implement in your life today or this week. Something very simple. We're gonna be on for like five minutes and talk about one thing. Okay, today what I want to talk about is the downside of gratitude. I wrote about this recently in our newsletter and you know it's interesting because I'm 42 years old and this particular piece of gratitude I sort of just realized at least about myself.
Now I talk a lot about my own experience with mindset coaching because I think I have a lot of the personality traits that many people do that are in sports. We tend to want to push through things. We tend to want to take action. We tend to be hard workers and so I feel like a lot of times when I talk about these things it resonates with you guys because we're not all the same but a lot of us have these personality sort of tendencies if you will and so for one of them for me I'm learning about gratitude. You know we hear a lot about gratitude and of course you know we talk about it in all of our trainings too. Gratitude as a practice as a mental training tool is a very valuable one.
It's something that can really help you move through some negative feelings at times but what I'm noticing about myself is I often use gratitude as a way to avoid feeling. So here's what it sounds like or looks like in my life. Something difficult will happen. It will be a situation that is difficult and I have a lot of feelings about it and in that feeling I will often want to move quickly through the feeling so I won't do one of two things. I either take massive action you know like I just go try to solve the problem with action or with hard work. Many of you can relate to that or and gratitude is sort of an action too.
I practice gratitude but I do it as a way to not feel so I almost do it like a hurry up get over yourself like suck it up this isn't that bad. I use it to minimize and for me I am not the kind of person that maximizes things like I actually do the opposite. I minimize things. I try to see the bright side of things. I try to make them not a big deal. I try to just work through it. And so when I use a tool that minimizes on top of my already minimizing of it, it ends up making me miss the feeling part. So again, this is my experience. And I wanted to share it because maybe you're doing this too, where you have a situation and you have a feeling about that situation, and then you kind of use gratitude to tell yourself to suck it up.
Like I just move so quickly to like, what are you complaining about? You have fresh water, your kids are safe, you have a warm house with the heat cranked up, like knock it off. And that is not untrue, right? That gratitude piece is not untrue. And remembering all that I have and doing that gratitude practice can be really, really powerful. It can move you quickly to a positive state. And I've experienced that in my life. I've had, you know, a shitty day turn into not so shitty day by practicing gratitude.
So the gratitude itself is not the problem. The problem is I use it almost too early. Like I use it as a way to just like move through my feelings.
I mean, I was joking in the newsletter that it's my drug of choice. You know, some people go and they like have a drink so that they don't have to feel whatever they feel. I use gratitude sometimes. I just go straight to like, this isn't a big deal.
You know, I have a roof over my head. And the minimizing piece of it doesn't allow me to feel. And when we don't allow ourselves to feel, it's like pushing an inflated ball underneath the surface of the water.
It pops up in other ways. So for me, gratitude itself is still a great practice. But I have to make sure that I use it at the appropriate time. And usually that appropriate time is not right away.
Not for me. Again, maybe you are the type of person or you have someone in your life that does tend to make things bigger and more inflated than they are. That's just a character trait, maybe. Maybe for you gratitude does work in the, because it right sizes. It's like a comparison thing. It right sizes the problem. But for me, I do the opposite.
I minimize it already. So if I minimize it and then try to use gratitude to minimize it more, I end up just like circumventing the feeling part entirely. So for me, it's about allowing myself to feel.
And sometimes that's as much or as little work as just saying, I feel sad about this. I feel scared. And I am also so grateful for what I have in my life. I am grateful for this coffee. I am grateful for a warm house.
I am grateful my kids are safe. I am grateful for whatever. So again, it's not that the gratitude practice itself is the problem. It's that I use it too early, too quickly, not in the right order. So if you're like that, make sure whatever happens, the situation you allow yourself to feel, allow yourself to feel, and then use gratitude as a way to move towards a more positive feeling. All right, I hope this was helpful.
If it was, or maybe even if it wasn't, but other ones have been, please go rate and review and subscribe to our podcast. It really does help. And I will see you again next week for more mental Mondays. Bye for now. Hey guys, here's what
