Fix Negative Patterns With An Abundance Mindset
SHOW NOTES
We all love being hyped up, and you don't have to give up the people in your corner who do that. But if no one around you, in real life or online, ever tells you the harder truths, that's not support, that's a blind spot. In this episode I get straight with you about why we avoid feedback and what it costs us. The secret isn't magical thinking or pretending everything always works out. It's an abundance mindset in the real sense, a growth mindset, the belief that you can still change, which is what gives you the emotional room, what I call your window of tolerance, to actually hear what's true about you without falling apart. Because the difference between the people who keep growing and the ones who stay stuck usually comes down to exactly this.
Warmly,
Linda
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Meet Your Host!
Linda Sanderville, LCSW, RYT-200 is the founder of Satya Counseling & Yoga LLC. She specializes in concierge therapy for female founders and public figures, helping high-profile women navigate public scandal, executive burnout, and the values that will define the second half of life. Based in Albuquerque and serving clients virtually in DC, Maryland, Virginia, and beyond, Linda combines clinical expertise with somatic wisdom to help leaders reclaim their truth.
Read below for full transcript.
[00:00] — Intro: Too Many People Afraid to Tell You the Truth
Hi, I'm Linda, an emotion coach and hypnotherapist who also loves a good sunrise yoga class, listening to the belly laughs of my baby boys, and hunting down the best vegan donuts. This podcast is for ambitious and high-performing women who want to feel fulfilled in all areas of their life. I'm here to give you practical tips and mindset shifts that will help you put your self-love skills into action. Welcome.
Okay, unpopular opinion. You may have too many people around you who are afraid to tell you the truth. I'm including people in your real life and people that you find or follow online. The good news is you don't have to give up entirely on listening to those folks or having them around you. After all, we all need to be hyped up, we need to be given our flowers, we need to be encouraged when we feel discouraged. I know I do.
So the good news is that you can still overcome your chronic negative patterns that maybe these folks aren't telling you about, even by just gently embracing some of the things that are true about you or for you that you currently struggle with. So you can still have those yes folks in your back corner, you can still have your hype men, hype women, and you can take the steps to start gently embracing the things that maybe you're not doing so great with right now. So you can use an abundance mindset to actually get you there, with that gentle embrace of the hard stuff. If that sounds good, then listen up.
I'm going to tell it to you straight. And I want you to know that I have no stakes in buttering you up. I only want to see more people healing and blossoming and creating more love in this world, because we all know that it needs it. Now, I'm a psychotherapist by trade, along with being a yoga teacher. And so I'm very close to the ways in which people struggle, the ways people suffer or long for things or have great disappointments. I know all about that life. So I'm not one who's going to sugarcoat things to you, just so you know where I'm coming from. But along with not wanting to sugarcoat those things, I'm also a very hopeful person, actually. And I think that all of us can be a little bit more hopeful, even as we stay grounded in what is actually true and what is actually reality.
[02:45] — Abundance Mindset Is a Growth Mindset, Not Magical Thinking
Linda: So you know, I think for starters, I just want to make the point that many of us may believe that having an abundance mindset is having a mindset where we think that everything always works out for us easily and all the time, or that we're going to be millionaires by next month, or that just by thinking it, the love of our lives is going to appear on our doorstep, like knocking on the front door and be like, can I come in and build an incredible life with you? So I'm not talking about magical thinking. I'm actually talking about an abundance mindset as having a growth mindset.
And what a growth mindset allows you is to actually take personal responsibility for your errors, mistakes, regrets. And you can do this, and I can do this, because when we have a growth mindset, it gives us perspective. We can still have hope that we can continue to grow and change, even as we understand that we have made mistakes, that we do have regrets. It's the ability to see that we can grow and change that gives us the freedom to accept what isn't so great right now.
So if you think about it like that, this abundance mindset of, oh, more is possible, growth is possible, change, healing, progress, those things are all still possible for me, no matter where I find myself today in this life. And it makes room for positive possibilities. While the opposite of a growth mindset does, well, the opposite. With a fixed mindset, we feel too uncomfortable to really get very far. And that's because when we have a fixed mindset, then we believe that there's something scary and impossible to overcome about who we are, like who we are fundamentally.
And so the idea of taking responsibility for something that we did wrong, for our mistakes or things that we struggle with, like not being a good friend or being a poor listener, or being really impatient with people and snapping at them and having kind of a nasty attitude sometimes, if we have a fixed mindset about who we are, that we're always going to be this way and there's nothing we can do about that, then taking ownership for those kinds of qualities feels really uncomfortable and scary. And honestly, most of the time, we just won't do it. So that's why having that abundance mindset is really powerful.
[05:21] Your Window of Tolerance & Hearing Hard Feedback
Linda: I'm going to go into some therapist speak for a minute here. When you have an abundance mindset, what it also does, why the growth mindset is so powerful, is that it gives you this expanded window of tolerance. And your window of tolerance is like, how much discomfort can you sit with and be present with, and still move through it, still confront it for what it is, be with it, as opposed to running away from it and just riding that out.
So like, your friend tells you, hey, I feel like you really haven't been there for me lately. Some folks will tell you, oh, that friend is asking for too much, they should understand what you're going through, they're not being very sensitive to your situation. That may all be true. And it's quite possible that you really haven't been a good friend lately.
I know there's times in my life, even right now as a mom of young children, where my hands are literally so full most of the time that I can't always be there for my friends the way that I was when I was single, the way that I was like, you call me day or night, you text me, I'm going to be there. It's different now. Even though I don't want to be any different. I love my friends just the same, nothing changed. But it is harder for me. And I know that I'm not always as great of a friend as I would like to be. But being able to tolerate that discomfort, like, I know, I want to be that really great friend, but I'm not, it lets you take in information that people are telling you that is actually true.
And just a random side point. The more that you are willing to actually hear people out when they try to share something with you that's uncomfortable, because no one likes bringing this stuff up, right, unless we're talking about the odd person who just likes to create chaos and drama and conflict, we're not talking about those odd ones out, we're talking about, in general, people have a hard time bringing up difficult topics.
So if someone is trying to share with you, when you know that they don't normally do this, and they're trying to share with you something that's hard for them or something that they don't really like, or that they need to be different or at least need to talk through with you, if you can be sensitive to what they're saying and not immediately reactive, or over-personalize what they're sharing with you, or get mad at them, it gives them a lot more room to trust you with other things and with deeper things.
If you are someone who wishes that you could be closer to people, but when they bring up difficult things to you, you have a hard time taking it in or making room for that, just to be honest with you, I'm telling it to you straight, that might be part of the reason why you're not feeling like you're as deeply connected to people as you would like. Because they get that sense from your reaction. And they're like, okay, I'm not going to go there again with this person, because it's too risky. The average person finds it really hard to bring that stuff up anyways.
So anyway, back to the window of tolerance. When you have a growth mindset, your window of tolerance is bigger. And again, that goes back to it's because you are more hopeful. When someone points out something about something that you did, or even something in your character, like an ongoing thing, maybe your sister is like, hey, girlfriend, you really haven't changed much in this one area. It might be easier to write her off or be like, what's her problem, it's just because blah, blah, blah.
But it might be that she's actually seeing something in your character. And you can benefit from that person's perspective, their long-term perspective of you, and you can take out from what they said that is actually true, and then you can grow and become better. And who doesn't want that? So with the window of tolerance, that's larger, and you can grow this over time. Just because you're uncomfortable with this stuff today doesn't mean you have to be a year from now or five years from now, a lot can change. And it really all just takes practice.
So it allows you to become more positive, more capable, and actually much more confident over time, when you can practice that mindset that says, I am growing, I am changing, progress is possible. So I don't have to be destroyed by this piece of constructive criticism or this feedback that I'm getting.
[09:49] The Difference Between Growing and Staying Stuck
Linda: All right, so I share all this with you today as, you know, a therapist who has worked with many incredible people. I might be biased, but I think my clients are really amazing. But it's one of the differences I've seen with the folks I work with who are able to overcome really major difficulties, no matter what their story is, or no matter what toxic relationships they were into, or their own personal vices or their bottom-of-the-barrel experiences. It's the fact that they either already had, or through our work together they developed, an abundance mindset that enabled them to invest in their ongoing progress and to see change and to become more confident. That's really one of the key things that differs the person who is able to do that from the one who just stays stuck.
So if you want to become much less afraid of when things go wrong, or your partner says something, or your boss says something, if you want to become much less afraid about that, it's going to be because you know that that's not a permanent, fixed thing, that you will be okay, and that you can learn and grow and improve. Because we are all naturally always changing. You can be changing for the worse, or you can be changing for the better, but we're always changing anyway. So when you can take that feedback, or that thing that somebody says, and know that, well, it's not permanent about you, if it's true, if it even is true, it's certainly not necessarily permanent, and you'll be okay.
So that's my words of wisdom for you today. If you're having some trouble figuring out how to get from the idea of, okay, I need to work on this thing, to actually being able to change in that area, make sure that you look down the description box, or look in the show notes if you're listening to this later. You can look at my course, Self-Love Skills.
It has a breakdown of all the different steps that I've worked with clients on in these different areas, to get them to where they're trying to go, when they feel like they don't have a roadmap for how to get from the present moment to that future version of themselves that they really want to be. It goes over a lot of those core basics that I've used with clients over and over and over again. And it'll really help you to shortcut that journey, so that you're not sort of floundering or wasting your time with things that aren't going to really make a difference in the way that you think or that you act in your relationships. So be sure to check that out. And I will talk with you again soon. Bye.
You hung with me to the end, my shero. If you benefited from this episode, please say thanks by leaving a wonderful review. It helps me know what's helping you the most and allows more like-minded women to find and learn from this podcast. We don't want to keep all the good stuff for ourselves. See you next time.
[Editing Note: The Love Yourself Liberated! group program is not currently available. If you are interested in this content and guidance, it is now exclusively provided through my concierge psychotherapy practice, Satya Counseling & Yoga.]
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