Welcome to the Design Your Dream Life podcast where it’s all about designing your life on your terms and now your host, Natalie Bacon.

Hey, how are you? I am so excited to be talking with you today because we’re going to be talking about mindset hacks and it’s so appropriate because my mind is just exploding right now. I just got back from business training with my life coach and business mentor Brooke Castillo from The Life Coach School and I just have to say that there is nothing better to me than getting around people who are doing what you want to be doing.

It’s so inspiring. It’s so motivating and I am really just happy to have had the opportunity and cannot wait to do more of that in the future. One thing I just want to mention is that I used to go to conferences for the purpose of like making friends and getting around other people doing what I’m doing, but it was just in kind of a social way, like almost like a moral support, like we’re in this together kind of way and now it’s totally different.

The way that I do it now is much more intentional and I have a strategy for what I want to get out of the conference and how I want to use my time while I’m there just to make sure that it’s really, really worth it and it requires so much constraint on my part and just being very intentional about not only how I spend my time while I’m there, but also what I choose to do with all the information when I get home.

So all that is to say I am a rebranding all of my courses. Super exciting. You may have noticed I redid a lot of my free courses on the site and the paid courses are next and then the coaching will launch. I know so many of you have asked about when is that coaching launching soon it’s coming. It’s coming.

If you want to get on that waitlist, you can go to Nataliebacon.com/coaching and reserve your spot there for when it opens up. I’ll send you an email. All right, let’s jump into what we’re going to be talking about today, which is mindset hacks.

I’m obsessed with mindset work because I truly believe and know to be true that what you think causes the results in your life. And when I learned this, like my world exploded because I realized I was already creating all of the results in my life. So if I just want a different or new results, I just had to shift my thinking because that would ultimately change how I was feeling, which would cause me to act differently. Those actions are what get you the results. So in this episode I want to just go through some of my favorite mindset hacks and hope that you can take some of them with you knowing that some of them are going to work for you more than others. And some will resonate more with you. Like some I just absolutely love and others I just know work but I don’t use as much.

So the first one, and this is just important for everyone, is to become aware of how you’re thinking. So I want you to watch your thoughts and notice that you are not your brain. And this is sort of the first step of all mindset work. You’re becoming the watcher of your thoughts. You’re separating yourself from your thinking, from your brain, and you can just say, Oh my gosh, what am I thinking? And get that awareness. It’s really, really useful. What I’ve found to be really useful too is to do this with feelings. So you’ll sometimes experience a negative emotion and it’s like you even instead of trying to experience it or resist it or react, whatever, you can just separate yourself from that feeling and just notice it.

And it’s really, really cool because it shows you how you’re separate from your thinking or your feeling. And that detachment kind of eases you into it without freaking out. So once you become aware of how you’re thinking, which is great, right? But if you become aware of like so many people who I talk with, it’s like, okay, I’m aware of it and this sucks. Now what? Like it’s not just enough to become aware of it. You might notice like, Oh my gosh, I’m really hard on myself. Or I’m saying you know all these negative things and you want to change it.

Well, the second mindset hack is for you to decide intentionally what you want to believe. So your brain has been programmed unconsciously. Most likely, you probably haven’t done all of this intentional conscious programming before. So all of your programming up to this point has just been unconscious. Whether it’s from your experiences, you know what people told you, or modeling anything like that.

But you can actually decide to change your programming and you can decide intentionally what you want to think. So I want you to ask yourself what you want to think and tell your brain what to focus on. If you don’t, your brain will default to what it’s good at. And what it’s good at is what it’s done a lot of which may not be creating the results that you want in your life, right?

So if it’s constantly, you know, repeating something that you’ve made a habit and you don’t want that to continue, you’re going to have to intentionally tell your brain to focus on something new and different. And this is kind of like creating your future from your future. You decide what results you want, you decide only to say yes to things that move you in that direction, et cetera. So this step is really just about getting clarity about what it is you actually want to believe and do this for every area in your life. I really think this is useful because you might find that it’s really easy for you to come up with abundant mindset thoughts when it comes to a certain area of your life. And then you might be stuck in scarcity for some other areas, which I think is super fun.

Like for me, I am in a very, very abundant place with money. So I just have all these amazing thoughts and when I hear people in scarcity, I’m like almost shocked. Like I can’t even imagine believing that. So if you’re in scarcity, just decide intentionally what you want to believe. So an example would be like, okay, well I think that money is my security and money is difficult and I’m, I don’t have a lot of money or something like that.

Whatever your money thoughts are and decide instead if you want to believe like money is easy and there’s always enough money and I have enough money and I love my money, I love my money by the way. Like that’s one of my favorite things to think about. Like I’m just like, Oh, I haven’t looked at my money lately and I want to point out that this isn’t reflective of the dollar amount.

Like even if I’m having a lower income month or the balances in my account are lower than normal, I still feel that way. And that’s like when you know you’re in true abundance is when you feel really steady regardless of the circumstances. So decide intentionally what you want to believe.

Next I want you to consider using affirmations. And I say this a little bit with hesitation because it’s really easy to listen to something like this. And then be like, okay, well money is easy and then you’re just going to go around repeating. Money is easy all day long. But if you don’t actually believe that money is easy, it’s going to have the opposite effect on your brain.

You’re not actually going to start believing that money is easy. I want you to decide intentionally what you want to believe and then practice thoughts that are in between what you believe now and where you want to go and use those as affirmation. So like if you think like money is very difficult, but you want to believe that money is easy. Come up with a thought that you can repeat as an affirmation and practice. That’s sort of a bridge thought. It’s like in between and it’s more neutral than a negative thought, but it’s not all the way to the positive thought. You know? Maybe you actually believe that money doesn’t have meaning until you give it meaning.

So money only has the meaning. I give it. If you believe that, then you can use that as a thought and an affirmation and say that over and over, and the goal here is for you to constantly be moving toward the positive, abundant thoughts. So once that becomes something that you really, really believe, then you come up with a new bridge thought and you’re moving over and over.

This is what I did with money. I never was in abundance with money until the last couple of years, and it really stemmed from all of this work that I did, and it has nothing to do with how much money I make, which is super awesome because it just, it’s a place that it’s taken a while to get to and it’s all through this mindset work. So you can do it for any area of your life, which is amazing.

Okay? The fourth mindset hack that I want you to do is to ask your brain questions. I have an entire podcast episode and post about this, but I couldn’t leave that out because asking your brain questions is my favorite thing to do. It works so well because sometimes you might find that you’ll have trouble coming up with affirmations or bridge thoughts or sentences that you want to believe.

So instead you would ask your brain a question and you would choose one question and you ask it kind of over and over. I like to do it at night right before bed. So my brain focuses on it while I’m sleeping. Um, so you might ask yourself, how can money be easy? Or how can I make money means something positive? Or how is my debt working for me? Or what does my debt make possible? If you remember, I used the questions technique to get into the $18,000 coaching program.

And I remember I’m sitting there in my coworker when I found out that it was going to happen and just literally blowing my own freaking mind because it actually worked. Like I couldn’t believe it worked. I was like, Oh my gosh, this is real. And if you didn’t listen to that episode, what I did was I just asked myself over and over how I could get into this coaching program without paying for it.

And I woke up one morning super inspired to email the founder of The Life Coach School Brooke Castillo and ask her if I could work for her. At first she said no and I was like, okay, I will keep thinking of something. You know like I was, I was so committed to the result that I just had to figure out the how. Right? I didn’t let her no, stop me. So basically I just use the questions technique to manifest my way into an $18,000 coaching program, which is super fun.

So whatever you want, if you’re trying to figure out how, just ask your brain questions. Be careful with this one. As I said before, that you have to ask positive, abundant questions because if you ask negative questions, like if you ask your brain, why am I so broke? Like your brain will come up with the answer, right? Your brain is like a computer. It always is going to come up with the answer. So I constantly use questions. I think it’s one of the best mindset hacks out there. Like I just love it. Okay.

Mindset, hack number five, practice being your future self and use a trigger every day. I really love using the shower as a trigger. So every time I get in the shower I practice being my future self. I think about the thoughts that I would have as my future self. And I think about how I would feel as my future self.

So I’ll think about what it feels like to have a seven figure business making $2 million a year and like what do I feel like and what do I think about? And using a trigger helps you do it every day. So like the shower, right? I take shower every day. So it’s just a trigger. So if you can find a trigger, I really like the shower, but if there’s anything else, like sometimes people use doorways, you know, you could remind yourself like, I’m amazing or I have my own back, whatever it is, practice being your future self and use a trigger every single day and you’ll start to become that person. Right? So it’s like the way that you become your future self is by becoming that person now and causing the result in your life instead of waiting for it to happen.

All right, number six, remember that you can believe anything. I just love this. This is so good. Like I literally, it gives me chills every time I think about it. No matter what has happened to you in your life, no matter what happens to you in the future, you can believe anything and your life is going to reflect what you believe.

So what do you want to believe? What do you want to believe about money? What do you want to believe about your future? What do you want to believe about your business and relationships? These beliefs will determine how you feel. That feeling will determine how you act. And then that action will determine your results. And you know, a lot of people will come and say, well, this is delusional. And I always say, okay, well if you think that it’s delusional, why do you think that you’ll live forever? Right? You could die tomorrow, but you choose not to believe that you choose to believe you’re going to live, but you might not.

Right? So just know that everything we believe in a way is delusional, right? We just choose to believe really supportive, delusional thoughts, which makes the future amazing. So I want you to remember that you can just believe anything you want and this is the most freedom that there is. It’s knowing that there are no rules. Even if everyone told you that you are going to be a certain way for your entire life, you can just decide you’re not going to be that way. Like effective immediately.

I remember distinctly when I first learned this and I just felt so empowered. I was just like done with everyone’s opinions of me. I used to be like a people pleaser and cares so much what other people thought of me and I was just done, like just done. I was like, I’m going to do what I want. I’m going to do it my way. And it felt so good to just have that confidence and that certainty that like I have my own back no matter what. And that is like some good stuff when you can really know that you can believe anything you want. So know that no matter what anyone’s saying to you, no matter what their opinion is of you, you get to decide what you make that mean.

All right? Mindset hack number seven. I want you to constantly be going through the day running a model in your head. Now the self coaching model is what I learned to become a life coach, which is that your thoughts cause your feelings your feelings cause your actions and your actions cause your results and circumstances are neutral. What makes you a really good coach and what makes you a really emotionally stable human and able to deal and work through problems on a day to day basis is constantly knowing that circumstances are neutral and you can make things mean whatever you want.

So when something happens, right, whether it’s just like traffic is bad or you’re sick or it’s something more serious, like you get a diagnosis or you lose a job or your partner leaves you, whatever it is, run a model through your mind. Know that your thoughts cause your feelings, your feelings, cause your actions and your actions cause your results.

This is really empowering because what it does is it gives you your power back. So let’s say someone cheats on you. They didn’t do that to you, right? They did it. And you get to decide what you make. I mean, and I love remembering this because it feels like they did it to you, but you can think about everyone else in the world and they’re not affected by whatever happened. They’re not feeling the negative emotion. Just you are right. And what’s the difference? You are having thoughts about it, right?

And you’re probably someone who wants to make it mean something when your partner cheats on you, of course, right? That’s what it means to be human. The power is in knowing that it’s you who’s causing that discomfort. You know, that devastation. Whatever it is. So that gives you the power to move through it and out of it on your own timeline. But it doesn’t give that power away to the person who did the cheating, right?

So whatever it is, just start to run the model in your head. Thoughts, feelings, actions, results. And I actually coach myself every morning and I do this. I’ll write down thoughts, feelings, actions, results, circumstances for whatever. You can just pick one thing. A lot of times whatever is working or not working in one area of your life will carry over. So it’s something you don’t have to think too much about in terms of what to choose to do it for.

If you’re going to actually coach yourself and write it down. But even if you’re not going to write it down, just have this running in the back of your head throughout the day when things happen. You know, that’s a circumstance, okay? It’s really, really helpful.

All right, mindset hack number eight, always think about the words that you say. This sounds so obvious and yet I catch myself saying really silly things. I’m complaining about things like why am I giving this energy? I noticed that when something happens and like I’m a talker, I love to communicate. If you know me or you’ve met me in person, like I’m very extroverted and I just like love all the things. Like I love to chat. Well I noticed that I like don’t discriminate against what I want to chat about and it would probably do me a really good if I would, you know, stop that.

So sometimes I will just give energy to a problem or a complaint by talking about it. And this is true for any area in life, but what I hear a lot is from people complaining about, you know, the haters online, right? And I don’t really do this anymore, but at first I really, really did. But just know that when you have a hater online or a negative comment on your blog or whatever, if that’s your thing, anytime someone does something negative and you think it’s aimed at you or you interpret it in a way that’s like disappointing or whatever, anytime that you are going to talk about that or share it, you’re giving it more energy, right? It’s getting bigger by you sharing it. Now, this doesn’t mean keep everything to yourself and don’t share anything. It just means be intentional, right? Choose that one person or two people who you want to share this with to work through it with and then let it go, right?

Don’t give it so much energy. This is something like preaching to the choir that I really, really need to work on for myself. I love to give things energy that don’t deserve it. All right.

Mindset hack number nine, look at your results in your life. Look at your home where you live and look at your job. Look at your money. Look at your friends, look at your spouse, look at everything in your life, your health, and know that you created it with your mind first. I remember when I first learned this and I did this exercise and I was living in my crappy apartment and I just remember going, Oh my God, why did I create this crappy apartment? Like I created this in my mind like I created this. This is not reflective of me at all. Like instantly I raised my standards and now I love my apartment.

Like I seriously get giddy coming home. I just came home from Dallas. I’m like, I don’t want to leave at all. I just love it so much. So know that you created where you live in your mind first, right? So everything starts with your mind first. You created the relationships that you have. I did this as well, like in past relationships I realized, Oh my gosh, even if it’s the other person pursuing you, it’s like I allowed that to happen.

I chose that and then it’s like, why did I choose that? And it’s helpful to reflect like this because then you can use it to move forward and see what you’re actually choosing, even if it’s not intentional so that you can make better choices in the future. This really, really works wonders. It’s great news. It means that you can create whatever you want and you don’t have to re create more of the same.

Okay. Mindset hack number 10 when something really sucks, add the phrase and that’s okay to the end of it. If you’re feeling really disappointed, let’s say like you got laid off, so you would say, I got laid off and that’s okay. What I find is that when you add, and that’s okay to anything, it just gives you permission to sit in that discomfort or whatever emotion you’re experiencing so that you’re not trying to avoid it so that you’re not trying to react or resist it. Right? It’s like, Oh my gosh, I had a bad day. I’m feeling terrible and I just want to like get away from it. Like I want to change it so much. Like I want a new thought, I want to feel better. But you know what? That’s not the point of this, right? So the world is 50 50 with contrast, right?

There’s good and bad. There always is when you experience negative emotion, when something has gone wrong, I think that adding, and that’s okay is something that softens it. It’s a reminder that you know nothing has gone wrong. Okay?

Number 11 notice that negative emotion is caused by your thoughts. I want you to practice allowing negative emotion and not resisting, avoiding or reacting to it and practice just experiencing it. And I’ve talked about this a little bit before, but negative emotion when you actually experience it, it’s just a vibration in your body. That’s all emotion, right? It’s just a vibration in your body. Talking about emotion and feelings interchangeably here, but particularly with negative emotion, we so much want to react, resist or avoid it, and I want you to practice experiencing it.

So always give the example of someone who’s angry. If someone is yelling, they’re not actually experiencing anger, right? They’re reacting to it. So anger is just a vibration in your body. You can feel very angry and do nothing. This is a really fun exercise. If you’ve never done this before next time, you’re feeling negative emotion, notice it and separate yourself from it and just watch that negative emotion. I like to identify it. Okay, this is disappointment and where do I feel it? Like is it kind of burning? Is it all over? And it just creates this awareness for you so that you’re not trying to escape your negative emotion. It’s very, very, very helpful for your emotional wellbeing.

Number 12 create a separate version of yourself. So what I’ve found with all of the coaching that I do, whether it is directly, whether it’s through the blog, whether it’s in my courses, any of it, when people get stuck on something, a lot of it stems from the relationship that they have with themselves.

So someone will want to start a business and it will get really hard and they won’t show up for themselves, but they’ll show up for everyone else in their lives, right? They’re busy, they have all this stuff on their calendar and I want to see their calendar and know how they’re spending their 25 hours a week on their business and what do you know? They’re really not right?

No surprise there if you’re not getting the results. So when you create a separate version of yourself, like I like to say there’s Natalie and Natalie 2.0 and I make commitments to Natalie 2.0 when I’m doing something and I make sure that Natalie 2.0 is someone who I love the most. I have her back always like she, I love her more than I love anyone else. Right? So think of the person who you love the most and that 2.0 version of yourself you should love even more than you love the person in your life the most.

Right? So it’s an exercise I use in my course to teach people how to love themselves because it always sounds a weird, like what does that mean to love yourself? Right? I love the 2.0 version exercise because it helps you separate yourself from yourself.

So when you say you’re going to record the podcast at night, or when you say you’re gonna work on your course or you’re going to start a side hustle or you’re going to lose the weight or you’re going to go on 20 dates or whatever it is, make that commitment to the 2.0 version of you so that when it’s hard, it’s okay and you have your own back no matter what, right? And you don’t talk bad about yourself and you just know that it’s part of the process. I think this is really, really useful for any area in your life where you’re working on yourself, where you’re trying to see a lot of growth. So make that 2.0 commitment to yourself and have your own back.

Mindset hack number 13 I want you to move up the scale of thinking. So don’t go from I’m not worthy to, I’m amazing, right? I want you to go from I’m not worthy to, I’m a human being to I’m amazing. So this again is where you come up with neutral thoughts, but I want you to do it for the most important areas of your life. And I want you to come up with your current thought. I want you to come up with a neutral thought and then I want you to come up with like the abundant thought and just know the date and what your negative, neutral and abundant thought is. And so you move up the scale of thinking. So you’re not trying to force thinking something that you don’t actually believe.

I have this easel in my apartment right now where I’m going to be teaching when I do teaching lessons and my group coaching. But for right now, since I’m not doing that yet, every day I write a new bridge thought on it so I can see it and remember it. And every time I walk past it I’m like, Oh yeah, I love my new one that I just picked up from. Um, the business training was, is making seven figures is easy.

I love that thought like I had, I’m going to make seven figures and I also had money as easy and those I feel like I’m good on, but now I’m like making seven figures is easy and it is so empowering for me and you’ll know if it’s working because the feeling that you feel when you think that thought is really energizing, it feels good.

But if you’re not there yet, you know if you’re really have um, negative thoughts like I’m not worthy and you can’t get to something that energizes you, just move to a more neutral thought. Like I am a human being. Right? That’s something that you can probably believe even if you can’t believe that you are 100% worthy. Okay.

The last mindset hack I have for you is to rewrite your past. I’m going to do an entire episode on this, but for now, just know that you can make your past mean anything. I love this. I really believe that everyone has had the exact past that they need to set themselves up for their future. This doesn’t matter if you’ve had crazy abuse in your past. I mean, I’ve heard it all. It doesn’t matter if you had a perfect past, whatever your past is, you can make it mean whatever you want.

I had a reader email me recently and she has had a really, really tough past and she was really stuck in self pity and there’s so many people who I know who have crazy pasts, who have made it mean nothing negative about them and have actually made it mean something so positive about their future and the way that they’re going to identify themselves and give back and contribute to the world. Right?

You think about Oprah and Tony Robbins and even Brooke Castillo, it’s so empowering. So I’ll talk more about this, but just know that the past doesn’t exist anymore and it’s just sentences in your head, right? So you can make it mean whatever you want. I just absolutely freaking love this. Okay, so those are the mindset hacks that I have for you. I want to just go over a few beliefs that I say to myself that I think are really, really useful for me.

Just to give a sense of how I do this. In my life. I kind of touched on it a little bit, but I love the saying that nothing has gone wrong. Nothing has gone wrong. Right? I love that. It’s so freeing like because it stops me from resisting reality, right? Like if you don’t believe that you will be at odds with reality and you will have a tremendous resistance to what’s going on.

And this doesn’t mean that when bad things happen, you make it mean something or you don’t make it mean something. I actually don’t believe that everything happens for a reason. I don’t believe that at all. I think that anything that happens is totally neutral and you get to make it mean whatever you want. So I like to say nothing has gone wrong because the contrast of the world, the way that the world was created, regardless of your religion, is that there is good and bad.

Right? And how do we know? Look at the past, look at the creation of the world, look at everything, right? There’s always been bad things happening. Always. Even as we progress, like there’s always good and bad. There’s always up and down. That’s just the contrast of the world, right? So I like to say nothing has gone wrong.

My new one that I just adopted is nothing is too good to be true. I love this one. Like especially when I’m like doubting or I’m unsure, I’m just like no, that doubt’s not necessary. Nothing is too good to be true. So fun for me to believe. Um, this one is kind of related to the first one, which is bad things are supposed to happen, right? Like sometimes it seems so unfair and you know, you hear people say everything happens for a reason, which I don’t really believe, but bad things are supposed to happen really helps me because bad things do happen.

So if I think that bad things aren’t supposed to happen, then I’m literally arguing with reality, which is not useful for me at all. So I just really like to remember like, Oh yeah, bad things are supposed to happen. Money is easy as another one. Right? And right now I, like I said, I’m doing, making seven figures is easy. I just get like chills. I love that one. Love is easy. That one for me took a lot to learn and adopt and it’s been so helpful for me. So take it and use it if you want.

Another one is I have my own back no matter what. Like I’m not too hard on myself, but when I say I have my own back, no matter what it really stops any negative self talk at all. Like Oh I just, I just have my own back. I’m a person who has my own back. Right. I love that. Okay.

The final one that I use is people are always making the best decision that they can in the moment. So this is really helpful because a lot of times we’ll try to analyze what other people are doing or what they’re thinking. And for me, I learned this in an NLP book, neuro linguistic programming book that I read where the author talked about how people are always making the best decision that they can in the moment. And that’s so true, right?

Cause sometimes it’s like I don’t understand why they would do that. You know, you tried to think about it, but you’re always thinking about it from your thoughts and your brain. So something that just helps me is like they’re just making the best decision for them at that moment. Okay. These are my favorite beliefs on top of my mind right now. I use them. I love them. Use these mindset hacks and let them change your life. I’ll see you in the next one. Bye bye.

Thank you for listening to the Design Your Dream Life podcast. Subscribe to the podcast to get the latest episodes sent directly to you. To learn more about designing your dream life visit NatalieBacon.com.