Does Anything Good Ever Happen to Me?
Hey there, this is Bethanie, your coach. I'm so excited to be with you today!

I want to talk with you about saboteurs in your brain, and it's an answer to a question that some people ask themselves all the time. Are you a person who ever wonders if anything good ever happens in your life?
Why might it seem that after a good start, things eventually just don’t work out?
I have noticed that more and more people I get to know and work with, and meet, have this thought. There are people all over the world who believe nothing good ever happens to them. That things just don't work out. When they get their hopes up, or when you get your hopes up, things get in the way. Someone will stop your progress, or someone will block your direction that you're trying to go.

Whatever it is that seems to be getting in the way of your dreams, some of us have even stopped dreaming, or setting goals, or wanting to do anything new in the future.

For you, I want to speak directly to you today with some experiences that I've had in working with some of my coaching clients.

As a teacher, as an educator, I often get people in my classes who just want to learn something new. And they come, and they learn something new. In my younger professional life, it was that they would learn how to play a musical instrument. And then as I got older, and I moved into the online college world, it became music appreciation.

And even then, when people would come to learn something musical, we never really got into the automatic thoughts that we have about ourselves. Sometimes, we cover them when we're talking about your study skills. Or how you can be a better student, or how you can take this knowledge and go out into the world and do something with it. But, it's in coaching other people that I have learned so many of us have these thoughts, believing that we are bad or that we are fundamentally flawed in some way.

Or there's a reason that we don't get “picked” for things, or that people just don't like us, or maybe nothing good ever seems to really happen on its own. If it happens, it's luck.

But if you're trying to make it happen, it's just not going to work out. I want to reach out to you today because I don't believe these thoughts are true.
Here is an explanation about what gets in the way.
In fact, over the last year, I came across a system of thinking called the Positive Intelligence operating system invented by a man named Shirzad Chamine, who was a Stanford student; and he had an experience that you might be able to relate to.

He was interacting with some classmates in a group, and he learned that they did not like him. They didn't like the way he behaved. They thought he was arrogant, and they were really offended by the way he behaved.

He had no idea.

He actually did not realize the impact that he was having on other people. And then, when he got to the bottom of his thinking, his realization was that he had an inner mental “judge” that was criticizing him in his own mind, all the time.

Have you ever noticed that happening in your own mind? We talk to ourselves all day long. Our brain is constantly talking to us. It's giving us suggestions, ideas, promptings.

It's giving us inspiration, creativity, motivation, and it's giving us criticism, judgment, suspicion, fears, reasons, we should not try things. And, in some of us, that voice is exceptionally loud.

We're going to call that your inner judge. And when you try something new, and maybe you make a mistake, that inner judge might say, “that was stupid... don't do that again.”

Now, my inner judge doesn't exactly speak to me in those same words. But for a lot of people, that's exactly what the inner judge sounds like.

If that's your experience, I want to point out that this voice inside your mind is not coming from your loving, rational mind. It is part of your brain that's looking to protect you.