Well. Hello everybody. Welcome to this episode of Monica chats, and I am excited that you’re listening to this episode because if you’re listening to this in real time, then you definitely know about what’s happening here in the world. So at the time of this recording, we are in the middle of the Corona virus, covid 19 Pandemic, and I know it’s been affecting all of us in one way or another.

And. Particularly, especially being able to handle our emotions. I feel like if you are at home and you are social distancing at home and you’re quarantining and all of that, then you’re probably okay. In feeling your emotions a lot more and being alone with yourself a lot more than you normally would unless of course you’re on the front line.

So of course, thank you to doctors and healthcare professionals, grocery store clerks, delivery drivers. I mean, I know I’m not listing out everybody that’s still working. Out there. So thank you all for doing that. If you are, and even if you are doing that or if you’re not, then this is probably a time where you’re getting lots of time to be alone with your emotions and your thoughts.

So if you are somebody who doesn’t like being alone, or you just don’t like yourself, then we’ve got to get to the bottom of that. It’s stemming from what’s happening inside of your head. So. Your thoughts lead to your feelings. So if you want to learn how to like yourself and get into the practice of really loving yourself, then you’ve got to know what those thoughts actually are.

So that’s why I’m so excited for you to be able to listen to this episode today, because in this episode, we’re going to be talking about all of that, of course. But I’m also going to show you how to do that with a concept that I created called BFF thoughts. So this is a concept that I kind of started formulating after I had a recent session with a client.

So. In this session, I had challenged her to start to become aware of her thoughts because we were talking about how to be less miserable in her day job. She has big goals and she has dreams of becoming an entrepreneur and starting her own business, but she’s still working the daytime grind, right? To be able to support herself while she is bringing this new career and new purpose to life.

So. In this session with her. I had asked her, I’m like, okay, so . We know that your feelings are stemming from your thoughts. And so in order to be able to change your feelings and to feelings that you actually want to have, we need to be aware of the thoughts that you’re having. And so after a little bit of back and forth about this and asking open ended questions, we got down to the point of figuring out why she wasn’t wanting to do that, why she was resisting doing that.

And the answer became very clear. It was that. She didn’t want to do that because she didn’t like being alone with herself. She didn’t like listening to her thoughts. And so since then I had really been. Thinking about a way to paint a picture around how to be able to start to like yourself and really treat yourself as your BFF and things like that.

So that’s why I created concept BFF thoughts. So we’re going to get into all of that, but before we do, I want to make sure that you are subscribed to this podcast. I don’t know if you’ve. Just tuned in for this episode, or if you’ve been listening for a while, but definitely make sure to hit the subscribe button wherever you are listening, because I’m bringing on guests more often now for Tuesday talks, and I’m not doing it every Tuesday.

It’s more like a little bit of a random Tuesday here and there, but I don’t really post about it anywhere else and I don’t send emails about it just to let anybody know. Um, so the only way that you’ll actually know about these episodes is making sure that. That you are subscribed to the podcast. And with that, we’ll go ahead and get into how to start to like yourself and what BFF thoughts are.

Okay. So let’s get right into it. So if you don’t like being alone with your thoughts. It’s because you’re not treating yourself in a way that would make you want to hang out with yourself. I mean, you don’t like being around yourself. You know, when we think about being with friends, we like what they’re saying.

We like the energy that they’re projecting, right? So we need to make sure that we are projecting that our energy, and we are saying those things to ourselves. So before we get into all that, let’s do a little bit of statistics here. So did you know. That we have about 60,000 thoughts a day. I mean, I think we, we have more than 60,000 thoughts.

I think it depends on the situation in the day, but usually a lot of people agree that’s where we kind of lie. So some of these thoughts are random, like, you know, that could be about your drive to work. Um, it could be totally random thoughts. Like, I need to do laundry and wow, I really need to take the dog to the vet.

You know, stuff like that. But most of the time these thoughts consist of thinking about ourselves. We think about our potentials or our fears or anything like that. Most of the time they are us pointing out to ourselves where there’s something missing. So I want you to try to take a guess as to how many thoughts you have about yourself and really how many thoughts that you have about yourself that are negative.

I mean, how many of those would you guess that there would be if most of your thoughts are negative about yourself then? I mean, really, if you think about it, it’s no wonder that you don’t like being alone with yourself. It’s no wonder that you don’t like being with yourself because I mean really, who wants to hang out with somebody who’s being a bitch to them all day long?

I mean, I’m just going to be real. I’m just going to say it. I mean, that’s pretty much what that is. Nobody wants to be around somebody that. Is mean to them. That is rude to them. That’s a bully to them. I mean, what person actually likes to be around that? So of course it would make sense anytime that you’re alone to scroll your phone incessantly, right?

I, there is no judgments there. I have been there, my friend, but you know, there’s no wonder why. Every moment alone, you would do that. Or if you have long stretches of time where you’re alone to watch TV, binge TV, you know, have to constantly listen to music, whatever it is. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not seeing those things are bad.

I’m just saying, if you’re using those as a way to avoid hearing what’s happening inside of your head and really just being alone with yourself and in the quiet. That’s what I’m really talking about here. So before we get into how to change these thoughts about you, let’s do a few definitions. First, BFF thoughts, or for those who don’t know what BFF stands for best friend forever is what that stands for.

So really the concept is best friend. Thoughts. I want you to think about this. Have you ever wondered why you are always just so full of advice for all of your friends? Like you have the best advice for anyone around you that may have a problem or something going on in their lives or something like that.

But you’re never sure what to tell yourself. Like you never know how to solve your own problems or how to make yourself feel better. Things like that, right? If you’ve ever wondered that, it’s because you’re not thinking like you are your best friend. So I know you’ve heard of the phrase or the idea that you should treat yourself like your best friend.

And that basic idea is the foundation for BFF thoughts. So really these are thoughts that you intentionally think about yourself, that encourage you and reminds you of how awesome and worthy you are and how much value you have. Just inherent value you have. These are all thoughts that you on purpose.

Think about yourself to yourself. Now don’t get a twisted. These are not fake friends. Thoughts. So you know, the fake friends. That we have. Everybody kind of goes through this or like acquaintances or things like that where these are kind of like friends who are always being fake. Nice to you. I know you can’t see me, but I’m air quoting that they’re like fake nice to you.

Um, they do that just because they want to avoid conflict or just make it easier or things like that. Right? Like it’s not genuine niceness. It’s just try to pass the time, niceness really. Things like that. And really this is where a lot of people go wrong in the treat yourself, like your best friend idea, right?

Like treat yourself like you’re, you are your own best friend. This is where we get it wrong. Because oftentimes when we think like, Oh yeah, you know, I should treat myself like a best friend. That makes sense. Then we just go on to be fake nice to ourselves, right? And. Again with anybody in the world and you come up to them and you hear something that they’re saying, if their energy is off, no matter what nice thing they’re seeing, you don’t believe them.

Right? Like if they say it in such a way that has, you know, kind of a fake energy behind it, or a desperate energy or graspy energy or something like that. You just inherently know not to believe that. So it’s the same idea with yourself. If you are doing the same thing with yourself and you are being fake, nice with yourself.

To try to manipulate yourself into doing something. I have usually done this when it comes to cleaning the house, or I don’t know, something I really don’t want to do, like grocery shop or something. I’m like, Oh, this is, you know, you’re so great at doing this. Like, we can do this. Like that’s a manipulative energy for sure.

And I can always sense it in myself and it never, ever helps me actually do the thing that I want to do. But on a more serious note, if you are using that same energy when it comes to really important goals will in your life like, yeah, you can write a book, you can do it, and you don’t actually like main it, and there’s like that fake niceness behind that.

Then of course, you wouldn’t actually believe what you said, right? So there’s the BFF thoughts and then there’s the fake friend. Thoughts right? That we went into. And then now let’s talk about the front of me thoughts. So I think this is where a lot of you lie, and this is where I lived for a very, very long time.

So these thoughts are just like a real friend to me. So they’re nice on the outside, but inside they are snarky as hell and they’re self-sabotaging. Kind of like the front of me who is nice on the outside. Again, this is past the fakeness. Nice. Right? Like of course, yes, it’s fake. Nice. But there’s, there’s more deception and there is, um, just more malice underneath it.

These are thoughts like these are front of means who really secretly want you to fail. But in public they put on a nice face. You see what I mean? So this could be pointing out when you make a mistake as a judgment of your abilities. So I’ll give you an example of this. Um, I don’t know if you’ve ever made a mistake trying to do something you’ve never done before, and you may have not done it the way that you like to, or you made a mistake or you failed, or whatever the case is.

And then you say something like, well, see, I knew I couldn’t do it. I was stupid for even trying. If that sounds like you, then my friend that is a friend of me thought you were not, you were probably giving yourself kind of those fake nice thoughts or front of me thoughts like beforehand, like, Oh, I can do it.

You know what I mean? Like that really kind of fake niceness. Um, but then right when you fail, that’s when the front of me snarky comes out and it’s like, well, see, I told you you couldn’t do that anyway. Right? Like, we don’t need any of that. We don’t need any of that inside of our minds. Like these types of thoughts are not going to help you achieve the things that you actually want to do.

So now that we know the basic differences between these types of thoughts that we have, let’s talk about why these BFF thoughts are important. When we think about why these are important, we’ve got to think about the most important relationship that you will ever have with anybody ever. It’s not your partner.

It’s not your kids. It’s not your parents. It’s not you know, your family. It’s not your coworkers. It’s not your subordinates. If you’re a manager, I mean, none of it. It’s none of those things. There is. All of those things are not the most important relationship to yourself. The most important relationship is with yourself because.

This will be the longest relationship that you ever have. You have it from the moment you’re born and then you haven’t until the moment you die. It doesn’t matter if you like yourself or not. You cannot get rid of yourself. You can’t separate yourself from the inside of your head. I mean, so this is why it’s so important to learn how to like yourself and eventually to love yourself ASAP.

Like we gotta get this right. Ball rolling as soon as possible. So that’s number one. Number two is why BFF thoughts are so important is because your results STEM from the thoughts that you have. So to break this down where results come from, your thoughts create your beliefs and your beliefs drive your actions and these actions you take, they yield your result.

So if there are results in your life that you aren’t really liking or you want to change, or you just want to improve, then we’ve got to change the way that you’re thinking, right? Because again, these thoughts become the beliefs and you don’t take actions unless you believe that there is something to come out of it.

This can go for both positive and negative quote unquote things. So if you are believing. That you won’t, losing weight is always just the easiest example to go to. So if. You want to lose weight, but you don’t actually really believe that you can, then your actions will match that, right? Your actions will match the thoughts and beliefs that you’re having.

So if you’re having the belief that you can’t lose weight. What thought is repeating in your mind over and over and over. That’s becoming the belief. It’s probably a thought like, Oh, this workout doesn’t even matter anyway. Like I’ll never actually lose the weight, et cetera, et cetera. Right? Like you can see where I’m going here.

So that’s why it’s so important to not only recognize how you’re thinking and what you’re thinking, but we’ve got to be able to change what you’re thinking. And repeat. Thoughts that actually serve you over and over and over until you believe those positive reinforcing thoughts. And then that’s what’s going to STEM the belief.

And that belief will drive you to take action, and those actions will come up in your results. So really the easiest way to do this is to think about BFF thoughts. So. Your best friend forever, right? Your BFF, but your best friend supports you in your ambition, even when there is no evidence of your ability to do it yet.

So hopefully you are this type of friend, but let’s say that you have your best friend comes up to you and it’s like, Oh my God, my biggest life desire. Is do become an interior decorator, right? Like, let’s say their biggest desire, they’re like, man, I’ve been dreaming about becoming an interior designer and I watch all of these shows and it’s something that’s been in the back of my mind for a long time, and I really don’t want to die without even trying to go out and be an interior decorator.

I keep using decorator and designer like interchangeably. Um, clearly I am not either one of those things because I’m not totally sure what the difference is between them. Anyway, so. Your best friend comes up to you and says that, right? Are you going to shoot them down? I’m just be like, Oh, I think there’s too many interior designers out there and I don’t know if you really have what it takes like do, does anybody even really want to see something you design like, no, you would never say that.

So why are you saying it to yourself? Right? I mean, I know. I get it. It’s easy to, that’s where our mind originally goes, but we’ve got to think about ourselves as our best friends. Like that doesn’t, you know, displace any of our other best friends. Right? But again, our relationship with ourselves needs to be the most important.

So if we’re thinking about what we would say to our best friend, you would support them. In their journey of becoming an interior decorator. Even if they have never decorated a house before ever, if they’ve never even done it for free, if they’ve never even mentioned it before, right? Like you would support them.

You are not going to shoot them town even when they have no evidence that they’re able to do that. So, right. That is the same kind of idea that we need to implement here. If you have a big goal, you’ve got to believe in your results ahead of time. You’ve got to believe that you can do that. Okay, so let’s talk about how to actually implement the BFF thoughts and really how to actually believe them too.

So this may sound like it’s making sense. You may be nodding your head along and you’re like, okay, that sounds good. Like I logically get it, but you’re, you may not totally be sure how effective thinking like this actually is. So if that’s you, then let’s . Really talk about the real meat of learning how to like yourself, which is actually the implementation of putting in your BFF thoughts.

So firstly, you need to become aware of the thoughts that you’re having. So we’ve talked about this already, but you need to know what is happening inside of your head. We can’t keep . Buffering with music or bingeing on TV or scrolling your phone every time you have a moment alone. Just because you don’t want to sit in the boredom.

You don’t want to sit in the thoughts, right? Like we’ve got to be come aware of what’s going on in there. So we need to be able to evaluate if these types of thoughts that you are having, once you recognize what they are, we’ve gotta be able to see if these are types of thoughts that are actually going to help you in your.

Goals and they’re going to help you actually achieve the results that you want. And especially if there’s something that you would say to your best friend, right? So if they are great, keep them, keep repeating them to yourself. Keep doing that enough to where you start to really believe it. But if these thoughts are not what you would say to your best friend and they are not going to actually help you go out and take actions that would yield the results that you want.

Then we’ve got to tweak them to be able to sound like a BFF thought. So remember, thoughts are just sentences inside of your mind. I learned this from Brooke Castillo. I absolutely love her and her podcast. I will make sure to link it below. So you’ll hear a lot of the same kind of themes throughout my show and that, um, she is so awesome.

You definitely need to check her out anyway, she is the first person where. She defined what thoughts were in such a simplistic, like no duh kind of way. Right? So these are, these thoughts are just sentences in your mind. So really, if you think about it. If are sentences in your mind, then you can edit them just like you would edit your sentences if you were writing an essay, right?

If you were writing an essay and you reread that that sentence and you’re like, ah, I don’t really like the way that sounded, or that doesn’t sound good, you can go back and edit it. It’s the same thing inside of your mind, just because a thought may have popped into your mind without you actually actively thinking that thought.

Cause that just happens, right? Sometimes we just passively have thoughts and you’re like, where the hell did that come from? That does not mean that it’s written in stone. Right. It’s not anything like that. We can go back and edit that thought to a thought that will actually help us. Am I saying thought too much?

I feel like, you know, like when you write a word so often or you say a word out loud so much that you’re like, is that even a real word anymore? That’s kind of where I’m getting to with thoughts. All right, so let’s get back to it. So, so now that we know of that, the second step to actually implementing BFF thoughts is to write out the thoughts that you would say to your best friend if she were going through the same thing as you, if she has the same goals as you, the same type of life.

I mean, all of it. Recently, I challenged myself. To write the 100 thoughts that I want to make sure that I have each day. So this was actually a challenge from my coach and I will make sure to link her in the show notes as well. She is awesome. Her name is Stacy Baymon. If you are a life coach as well, you definitely need to listen to her anyway.

So she was challenging everybody to be able to. Just decide ahead of time what thoughts you needed to have in order to achieve what you want. And I think she said a hundred because she knew that it would be such a struggle after 20 the first 20 to be able to actually write out. 80 more thoughts, what do was, but I will say once I did that, I was able to have something written in stone where I could actually come to again and again and again.

Anytime that I started to have thoughts that didn’t serve me, thoughts that weren’t going to help me with my goals, things like that, I could always come back to those original 100 thoughts that I knew I wanted to have every single day. So. I challenge you to do something similar. It does not need to be a hundred, but definitely do a number that pushes you.

Like don’t just do like, you know, your first five thoughts that you would say to your best friend to encourage them like that. That’s going to be like top off the top of your head and you’re not even gonna think about it, right? Like you’re just like skimming this stuff right off the top. We want to actually go deep here and make you really actually think about it and just really turn your brain on, right?

So. Just like being able to have to think more deeply. It’s going to force your brain to open up an entire new torque territory that it’s not actually really used to so. Again, my number wasn’t 100 but you know, maybe your number is going to be 30 or 50 or something like that, but write these thoughts out.

Write out these thoughts that you would say to your best friend if she came up to you and talked about how she wanted to be an interior decorator, but she wasn’t believing in herself, and she’s not creative enough, I don’t know, et cetera, et cetera. That’s just an example. But yeah. Use that kind of idea and apply it to whatever your thoughts and whatever your desires and your goals and your dreams are.

Right? Make these thoughts 150 2030 thoughts. This thought list. Go ahead and write out every single one of those thoughts that you need to have in order to form the beliefs that drive the actions that would actually yield the result of the thing that you want. So when you do this, like I said, when you are kind of forcing yourself to think deeper and you are forcing yourself to just have to.

Think outside of your comfort zone and not just skim off the top of your head. It’s going to bring on inspiration. It’s going to feel like inspiration just shows up out of nowhere. And then you have all of these great ideas that just kind of seemingly just popped into your head from nowhere. But I will tell you.

This is coming from your thinking. Inspiration actually comes from your thinking. It comes when you challenge yourself. It comes when you force your mind to expand open. There’s a book that I read recently called big magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. If you have not read it and you are a creative. In any field whatsoever.

You have got to read this book and it’s so good. Anyway, she uses an analogy that I actually love that would fit this really well. She talks about how when she kind of forced herself to think more broadly and just expand her mind, it was like she took him the jaws of life, you know, the jaws of life where you kind of have to stick in a car to pry it open or whatever that firefighters use.

It was like, she, um. Put those jaws of life inside of her mind and like cranked open her mind, but in a good way. Not like a horribly violent kind of way, but you can see where I’m going with that. All right, so moving right along after you write out the thoughts that you need to have daily in order to form the beliefs that you need to have, et cetera, et cetera.

Right now we need to. Have these thoughts that you want to think. Take that same list and say them out loud multiple times a day, and I’m not talking about just reading them silently inside of your mind. I am talking about like standing at the podium, the reading them aloud to yourself. Okay. It does not have to be a podium.

It can be sitting on your bed. It can be the first thing you, when you wake up. It could be used standing in the mirror. I think that would be incredibly effective. Um, especially if you are struggling with things like self image or self esteem or anything like that. I mean, it’s gonna feel uncomfortable as hell, but stand there with your list.

Look at yourself in the mirror and repeat these thoughts every single day. And I’m talking like multiple times a day too, because again. When we’re talking about beliefs, they come from thoughts that are repeated in your head over and over. And again, these are just sentences in your mind. So the more and more you repeat these sentences over and over to yourself, the more your brain starts to hear them, the more you start to actually believe them.

And the nice thing about this too is when you do this, no matter if the kind of negative limiting beliefs, you know, these limiting kind of, um, thoughts pop up, like, ah, I can never do that. I can never do like things like that. It doesn’t matter how many times those naturally pop into your mind from your subconscious.

If you drowned them out with the types of thought that you know you should be having and the types of thoughts that you want to have, then they’ll drown out all of the other subconscious limiting ones that you don’t want to have. Those ones will start to become less powerful. As you start to believe the ones you are intentionally thinking, these thoughts that you wrote out on this piece of paper, these are the ones that you’re intentionally putting into your brain.

Okay. So I know that was a lot. So I’ll do a really quick recap just to kind of, uh, bring this to a close. So here’s a recap of BFF thoughts. If you don’t like being alone with yourself. It’s because you don’t like the thoughts in your mind an AKA. These are the sentences in your mind. You can edit these sentences into thoughts that actually help you live the life that you want to, no matter what area of life it is, whether it’s career, your relationship, your money, and finances, your just your general self-esteem doesn’t matter these sentences.

Right? These thoughts, they will turn into beliefs that will help propel you to get the life that you want. The easiest way to think about doing all of this and the way to make all of that seem less overwhelming to do, is to think about what you would say to your BFF. Or your best friend forever. That is in the same situation because really, you should be your best friend forever.

You should be the one that you want to hang out with the most, right? I mean, I know we get tired of hanging out with the wa like you know one person after a while, right? So I’m not saying like sit in silence every single day until you have to go communicate with another human being. I am not talking like that.

That is weird. That’s not where I’m going with this, but what I’m saying is, is that. You shouldn’t try to avoid being around yourself. That’s where I’m getting at with here. Okay, so how do you do this? How do you start liking yourself? How do you start loving being around yourself. Firstly is to become aware of your thoughts.

So my favorite way is to just have a notebook next to me and start writing down the thoughts that I have about my life and myself verbatim. I’m talking like strict verbatim, like word for word. What types of thoughts are roaming around in your mind unchecked right now? Okay. And I’d say do that for at least a week.

Um, if you’ve done any sort of thought work before, it could be less. But again, we really just want to see what types of patterns are popping up for you. So after that, once you start to become aware of the beliefs and the patterns that you’re having and aware of the thoughts that are creating your beliefs, especially now we need to rewrite the thoughts.

So literally write the thoughts that you want to be having about yourself every single day and repeat them multiple times a day. Okay. So that is it for this episode, and quite frankly, this is probably my favorite episode that I’ve recorded so far. Um, I, you know how I was talking earlier about how inspiration just kind of pops out of nowhere once you start like forcing yourself to expand your mind.

That’s exactly where this concept came from. I was like, it just came down like little cherubs, you know, like the skies parted and the cherubs came out and they were just seeing it like, huh. And I was like, Oh my God, I have to explore this more so. Anyway. Long story short, this is why this is my favorite episode, so definitely make sure to check out the blog post and that transcript and all the links that are mentioned in the show notes, and you can get those over@monicafrederick.com slash or just click the link below in the description below this episode and.

Before I go. If you want to become not only aware of the thoughts and the emotions that you’re having, but you want to truly learn how to have a handle on them and get the results in your life that you want, then I’m inviting you to set up a one-on-one console with me. So what this is, it’s a virtual video call.

It’s free, but it’s still crazy valuable if I do say so myself, because here’s where we’re going to go over. We’re going to go over number one, what you want and not just what you think you should want. I think there’s so many of us that think we should do this or we should want this, and we try to force ourselves to want something that we don’t actually want.

So we’re going to talk about what you actually want, what’s stopping you from getting what you want. What excuses are popping up, obstacles, things like that. And then lastly, we’re going to talk about the steps that you need to be taking in order to move the obstacles out of your way to get the results that you want.

No matter. Like I said, if it’s your partner, your job, your emotions, your self doubt, whatever you name it, right? We’re going to talk about how to get those out of your way. So schedule a, your free console and the link at the bottom of this episode. I will make sure it’s at the very bottom. You can’t miss it.

So click that. You’ll be taken over to my scheduler and you can pick out a time that works for you and we will chat about what’s going on in your life. All right, my friends, that is it for this episode and I will see you next week.