We discuss in this interview:

• The non-physical side of rheumatoid arthritis
• Elissa’s role inside Rheumatoid Support as a mindset coach
• The many influences our mind undergoes through life
• Creating stories about ourselves
• The importance of support and determination
• Visualization exercises
• Proceeding in small steps
• Having a healthy relationship with ourselves
• Avoiding over-compensation in relationships
• Boundary exercises
• Elissa’s Self Care Tips [Download For Free]

Clint – Today, I’ve got Elissa back on the podcast to talk about understanding mindset and how it can facilitate healing. Now, Elissa is a personal development coach, mindset coach, goals coach, and she has been instrumental in helping people within our support group that’s www.rheumatoidsupport.com in being able to address the non-physical side of rheumatoid arthritis. If you want to learn more about her and her incredible personal story, which includes over 50 years of rheumatoid arthritis, as well as making tremendous improvements with her own health on the Paddison Program. But also lots of other discoveries that she made along the way on her own, all sorts of things that we touch upon in that podcast that are not in any other episode. So that’s episode number 218, if you’d like to go back and watch that, it’s How Beliefs and Emotions Shape Our Journey with Rheumatoid Arthritis. If you’d like to go back and learn more about Elissa, her story, and about beliefs and emotions. Today we’re going to talk about mindset and how it can facilitate healing. If we don’t get the mindset right, it’s like a stack of cards, isn’t it? We can just collapse into a heap and want to give up.

Elissa – Yeah, exactly. And I think it also helps with getting through the really tough times with pain and also the diet. There’s a huge aspect of that too with I think with mindset.

Clint – Absolutely. So why don’t we get started with your sort of plan here of what we should cover? We also have got a few of our members on this call as well who may wish to ask some questions along the way, and we welcome that. In fact, we’ve got some questions coming through already. So why don’t you start leading us off into this discussion and then we’ll throw some questions at you as we go.

Elissa – So actually, one of the first things that I just want to talk about, is because it really does underpin everything. And I know that we talked about it a bit in the first podcast, but I’ve drawn on a song which I learned in a workshop I did with Gabor Maté, and it’s called In Your Mind, so it’s about it all goes down in Your Mind. This is really what underpins the whole concept of mindset, is that early in life we start out basically with a blank canvas. We’re little people and essentially we’re like sponges and we absorb everything in our environment. And what happens to us when we are small then shapes what I call the lens or the like, the camera lens, which with we learn to respond to life. This is what Johnny Cash means in that song that you start off with the blank mind, and then that mind becomes influenced by everything that happens around it and it forms its own camera lens, with which then it goes about and reacts and responds to life. I believe from my own experience with Rheumatoid that many of those beliefs and experiences, culture, and education, that I had shaped some of the way that I responded to my rheumatoid when I got it.

Clint – What were some of those beliefs that you had?

Elissa – So the big one for me, and I know it comes up a lot when I work with people with rheumatoid is, that one of them is that it was partly my fault that I got it. I felt that somewhere in there I must have done something wrong. I also felt for many, many years that I had no say and no choice in my healing journey. But I will talk more about how that belief, particularly the first one that it was my fault, influences things. Because what I just wanted to say is that I think what happens when we’re young, essentially, we all want to feel that we’re okay, that we’re good people, that we’re enough, that we’re worthy of all of the things that we all want to have in life. But some things happen along the way, and we don’t make that connection to ourselves. We don’t feel that we are I’m okay, that we’re enough, that we’re worthy, that we deserve X, Y, Z. And those beliefs, we then look outside of ourselves to get that feeling that we’re okay, so we will and I know I have done this. We achieve, we strive, and we educate ourselves. We do all of these things really too often sometimes to feel that we are okay, that we are enough. Then what happens is we create stories from these beliefs that often aren’t true. I’m not worthy of having a great journey with my rheumatoid. I’m not worthy of being able to embrace this diet that in the beginning can seem like a big culture shock. I think one of the members I was talking with was talking about the grief that comes with when you first start to embrace the healing journey, and when you first start to embrace what it’s like to be diagnosed with rheumatoid, that all of the things that you’re going to have to sort of say goodbye to. But I sort of think that if we can bring this mindset into a different place, then we don’t have to necessarily deal with all of that.

Clint – Well, looking forward to your insights on that. I can share that when I was diagnosed, I was naive to the severity of the condition. I felt that it was a temporary inconvenience to my otherwise outstanding and great career that I had going as an entertainer. And can I just get this thing sorted so that I can get my life back on track? However, when I gained an understanding of the gravity of it, the severity of it, the chronic nature of it, I did start to fall into the mindset that I can get through this, I can do this. Everything I’ve tried in the past to succeed at I have been successful at. So that was very challenged over the years, countless numbers of times.

Elissa – How did you get through those times?

Clint – The support of people around me was one of the major things. My parents have always basically considered, they’ve really just put me on a pedestal in terms of telling me how good I am, telling me I can achieve things, telling me that I’m giving me that sort of love and support. My wife, Melissa, who is basically, kept me on this earth because at times I said to her, you’d probably be better off without me, if I get hit by a bus because I’m just this crippled guy who’s limping around who occupies all of your time with food preparation and I go to yoga every day just to walk. Anyway, look, so my family and my friends who all said, if anyone can get through this, you can, and I fell back onto the mindset that I got from university. The four years at university made me feel like I could achieve things, made me feel like I could accomplish things because I found that way beyond my league. And yet I worked so damn hard because of my deficiency in intelligence and skills. Basically, I had to work harder than everyone else, and I ended up getting the highest accolade in the Department of Math, Physics, and computer electronics. So it was this combination of past experience, I can do this and support around me, I’ve got the support there, it was that. I felt like I’ve got to do this, there’s got to be a way. That was me, that was me just to share between us, right?

Elissa – Yeah. There’s and that’s actually one of the aspects that points that I want to talk about today. So I’m happy to jump to that, that determination mindset because it’s something that I feel is just so important with this debilitating condition. I know I’ve been through those same times where I just completely wanted to give up and had nothing left in the tank at all. I didn’t have as many supportive people around me, so I really had to find that part, there was really nobody else but me for most of my journey. So one of the things that I’ve learnt along the way through some of the work that I’ve done with other people, is to look at what frame of mind do I go into when I have a really tough time? What’s it like? How does that play out in what I’m doing? Does it help or hinder? Because if it does hinder, then one of the things that I found and I still find really beneficial is. Okay, do I remember a time exactly like you did then in the past where I’ve been incredibly determined, where I’ve been able to push through. And many of us don’t have that time. So there was a workshops that I did where they said to us, Okay, if you don’t have a memory of that, do you know anybody else who’s got one? Is there anyone out there that you admire in your world or in the world who you really feel connected to they’re determined mindset?

Elissa – This is for me why I watched that movie Touching the Void because I really connect with that guy. But is there somebody in your life who you know, who you admire? And if there isn’t and there’s another thing that you can do because then we go in to do this exercise. Then, okay, you’ll use yourself in the future. So then the exercise is you close your eyes, you put yourself into somewhere quiet on your own. Close your eyes, and you either go back to that time when you did have that determined mindset, or you go to the person that you really admire or you go into the future and you completely imagine that you are this incredibly determined human being who’s going to make it through this, right? Then what you do is you use all of your senses. So you’re in that situation, you’re visualizing it, and I’ll tell you about a time I had in a minute with it. So close your eyes, what am I seeing? What’s the sky like? We’re about am I? What else am I seeing? What am I hearing? Are there birds? Are there people talking to me? What’s happening in my world? So you bring in the hearing, then you bring in smell, things that you’re smelling and also feeling. When you feel it, it’s then really important to find where in your body you’re feeling it. It’s like, is there an aspect of my body that is holding this experience stronger than another? And when you find it, then you feel what color it is and what texture it has, what shape it is. Is it hot or cold? All of those sort of things. It’s really important to go into this detail because the brain then remembers this and sets up a neural pathway for this. The more you use your senses, this has been scientifically proven.

Elissa – It’s really quite amazing, quite fun to do, particularly, you know, I used to go back to a time where I was rheumatoid free for one year and I did massive amounts of gymnasium work and absolutely had a ball with physical exercise. I can still because I’ve done this exercise so many times, I can still bring it in right now and feel what it was like in that gymnasium where my body was really pumping, and I felt so motivated and so energized and so positive. There are times when I know when I felt incredibly like I wanted to give up. One of them was when I came into contact with Paddison Program anew, and I just thought, I can’t do this anymore I was terrified. I thought I’m going to slip into the wheelchair frame of mind because when I was young, I was told I was going to be in a wheelchair by the time I was an adult. And so I call that my wheelchair mindset. These are the times when you’ve really got to do this sort of exercise when it’s and I know it’s harder to do it then, but the more you bring this mindset in, the more the brain remembers it. It’s like learning those times tables because then eventually what you want to be able to do is say, I’m having a shocking day today. I can’t keep up with the diet or whatever it is. I’m going to quickly access that, I’m going to spend 5 minutes on it. I do it almost every day, that exercise.

Clint – Gotcha. Let me just repeat back so I understand. If we face a challenge and we feel overwhelmed and feel like giving up, then what we can do is reflect back to a time when we have overcome something, and it doesn’t need to be anything to do with rheumatoid arthritis. It can be just where we’ve basically succeeded in some kind of area of our life. Or if we can’t think of one of those, we can look towards someone else and the way in which they overcome something. Or we picture ourselves in the future achieving something of significance. With all of our emotional states, we then engage in that, and then upon few minutes of indulging in that, we tend to have like a little exercise, have developed an ability to maybe then see a path forward or at least be motivated or determined enough to take action.

Elissa – Yeah, it’s really important to use the senses, those five senses that we’ve got. When I do the one into the future and you can do it with anything, you can do it with your diet, you can do it with seeing yourself being able to move your knee. You can really hone in on specific, it doesn’t have to be the whole journey. It can be one very small aspect of it that you want to change. If you’ve got a sore knee, it could be and you’re working with someone like Karl to move that knee. I used to work a long time ago with a man who was a neuroscientist who had a deep sea diving accident and long story short, came up as a paraplegic from that. Because he was a neuroscientist and he spent three months in hospital, he decided that he was going to walk out of the hospital. So he spent the time visualizing each muscle that he needed to be able to use to move his legs. Starting from his toe right up to his brain where the motor section of the brain is, and he walked out of the hospital. So I really do believe that this mindset, it’s also about doing it in small steps, Clint, that everyone doesn’t think, well, I’ve got to achieve this huge thing because the lease is saying. Focus on something small first. So look at an aspect of yourself that you might think, Well, I really don’t have a belief, I really don’t think I’m going to make it through this. I really don’t have a belief that I’m going to get out the other end of this, I can’t cope with the diet. I’m grieving too much loss of whatever food it is that you used to love or whatever. Well, you can take one small aspect of it and work on it with that. It’s something that I really find extremely helpful.

Clint – And I think that having an overarching, deep, deep, deep down belief system that we can be honest about, helps us to identify things that are holding us back as well. This is an exercise that I did in a session on mindset and strategy some months ago. I had everyone who attended that member’s call enter in the truthful, most deepest, darkest if you like, belief system or thought process that they repeat to themselves. And also one that’s that that’s also a positive one. We were seeing in that chat some really confronting and honest dialogue that people repeat to themselves on a daily basis. We’re seeing things like I’m going to end up crippled and people are repeating this over and over and over again in their mind. And things like, I deserve this came up, I deserve this.

Elissa – One of the things I want to talk about, one of the points that I put down was because the relationship that you have with yourself and I know I brought this up last time. But if you do feel somehow that you deserve it, or if you feel somehow that you are wrong, that’s where the difference between shame and guilt comes in. Because if we do feel somehow there’s a belief somewhere, then we create a story around that where I’m ashamed of my rheumatoid because I feel somehow I deserve it. I feel somehow I was wrong, therefore it happened to me. And if that story is there driving thought patterns, driving decisions, driving your healing journey, then you really it’s got to come out because the antidote to shame is sunlight. I had to really own that. I had to sit down and close my eyes and breathe and meditate for a while and think, what is my deepest? When did I first come into contact with that belief? Sometimes it’s important for the unconscious mind to sort of have some connection in the present. Just go back and think, when was the first time you ever felt that that belief, that that limiting belief? Because 90% of our day is spent reacting to the past, which is quite extraordinary. So what you’re talking about, that simple exercise is so potent.

Clint – Well, the next part of that is to change that, because if we’re running that same record over and over again, then it’s very hard to heal if you’re telling yourself, even if it’s non-verbally. If you’re saying I’m going to be crippled or I deserve this, then no matter how many blueberries you eat and how many squats you do, you’re not going to get the life transformation that you’re after. And so in the Anthony Robbins sessions that I’ve done over the years and there have been many, the way he breaks this or he has us all go through this process is he actually has used and there’s been no swearing in this podcast in the past and I’m not about to start now. But you say that belief is BS, but you use the full expression and with as much passion as possible because it is, and then you say the truth is because that belief is the truth. That’s an either an opinion or it’s a fear or it’s something else. But if let’s say you feel like you have this circulating thought, I’m going to be crippled. That is B.S. The truth is that if I do everything that is scientifically supported to support my health and I’m not on counterproductive medications and I keep my inflammation levels low. I get outdoor and outdoors on a regular basis, and I have support and a social group that is loving and caring. I’m going to do very, very well. And that’s the truth, that is the truth. And so I think you’ve brought up such a really sort of core foundational thing here about this disease.

Elissa – Yeah. It’s about then what we do is we self-sabotage without realizing we trip ourselves up. And that also then flows into our relationships, which is one of the other things I wanted to talk about because those foundational beliefs, the first one for me is, what do I feel about myself? Do I value myself? How do I value my healing journey? Is there really a part of me over there that, I’m just paying this lip service. And I’ve had experiences in working with people in clinics where I can tell pretty much straight away they’re just ticking the box to see another person. They know it’s not going to do anything. They’re really sort of only half in it. And it’s really sort of not addressing that really deep stuff. Some of the way that I work is unconsciously, so shifting that stuff on an unconscious level. But just getting back to the relationships because it’s really important. One thing that people can do is first of all, and it’s another exercise that you can do is to sit down with pen and piece of blank paper. And again, like you said before, you beat this is really honest stuff. You know, it’s about, first of all, the relationship that you have with yourself and whether you value that relationship. If you don’t and if the beliefs that sit underneath that, the mindset, because the mindset is your beliefs and your corresponding emotion. So, for example, if I don’t believe that, I deserve to. Get better to have any sort of quality life with my rheumatoid. Then the emotion, the corresponding emotion I might feel with that is shame, embarrassment, all that sort of thing. Then the story I’m going to create around that is I don’t deserve to have healthy relationships with people. So I’m probably going to over give, I’m not going to have good boundaries. Good boundaries. I mean, okay, I’ve done enough, now it’s time for something for me. And often people I see and I know this for myself when you don’t have good boundaries in your relationships, then remember in the beginning I talked about early in life, we miss that feeling. Most of us do and through no fault of our parents, I want to say that up front here, we’re not often fine with people when I’m working with chronic conditions. If I want to go back into their background, you know, they’ll say, Oh, but my parents were great. And I say, look, it’s not about that, what we’re doing here is an objective, compassionate inquiry into helping you have a great life and a more gentle, kinder approach to your rheumatoid arthritis.

Elissa – So what I then will get people to ask themselves is, what are you like in your relationships? Do you know when it’s enough? Or do you just keep, give, give, giving in order to get that feeling that you’re enough, that you’re okay? Because that’s what we do. Now I know that I even do that in my parenting, overcompensate. So it’s about sitting there and looking at that and saying, well, why can’t I say no? So the question to ask is, what do I get from over-giving? Because there’s a game and the game is necessarily a good game, but it’s a game and it’s the same thing with any kind of mindset. I know this with my own rheumatoid when I’m hard on myself, when I don’t feel I deserve, what do I get from that mindset? That’s a really interesting question to ask, and it’s a tough one because the game isn’t a good one. Another way to ask it is, if I want to improve my mindset, what do I need to let go of?

Clint – That’s a hard question to answer, isn’t it?

Elissa – It is. So it’s much easier to say, and I know I can ask myself and say, look, even if I just look at myself as a parent, what do I get when I over give to them life? I try and feel like I’m needed. I feel needed, I feel like I’m a better parent, I feel like I’m enough. And then if you go further with that, at the end of it is I feel like I’m worthy, I’m a worthy participant in this life. That goes always then takes me back to that initial underlying beliefs about myself, that am I worthy? Do I deserve this to be happy to have, the best life, the best version of myself? Do I deserve to be the best version of myself? And as you said in that exercise that you did with that group, when you’re getting into that, because that flows into your relationships and then it flows into the way you relate to your rheumatoid in a healing journey.

Clint – Question from the chat, what if it’s people that you need to let go?

Elissa – Yeah. You did a fantastic podcast with I’m trying to remember her name.

Clint – Elvira.

Elissa – I really resonated with that because that was a big one for me. And I remember when I first started on my journey, which was 45 years ago last week, into my mindset healing journey. That was a big thing for me, I looked in my life to see I had to make some decisions actually in that, or I had to say, well, I don’t know that that relationship is ever going to be healthy no matter what I do. So it’s not beneficial for me and I’m going to have to lovingly and compassionately let go.

Clint – For those people who are wondering about this podcast, go back and our guest was Elvira and she was very transparent and vulnerable in sharing with us about how she actually had to move locations to get away from a relationship that was giving her a lot of interpersonal stress. It was the final sort of breakthrough for her after doing all of the guidelines around diet, exercise, medication management. So that was a major one, all these things matter.

Clint – We got another question in the chat. It’s difficult to stay in a positive mindset, any further recommendations. So we’ll maybe do a checklist of all the things we’ve covered at the end. I’ve been taking a checklist so far, but let’s continue with your scheduled sort of teachings here and then we’ll do a summary at the end.

Elissa – So just quickly on that, before I forget, there is an attachment in my coaching thread that is a self-care regime that is very, very thorough and extensive. That are tips and exercises that you can do to stay in that, to help you to stay on track with that difficult time. So you can look at that.

Clint – That’s great.

Clint – I’ll ask if we can possibly make that available on the transcription of this podcast as well. So that would be publicly available.

Elissa – Just getting back to the relationships, Clint, there’s another exercise that I do that people could try. That is you get an A4 sheet of paper and you put a circle in the middle and you say, Me, that’s where you are in the middle. And then what I want people to do is to draw a circle outside of that and then a circle outside of that and do about five or six of them. Then think about just intuitively right down the list of the people that are really close to you in your life, like your partner, your parents, close friends. And I want you to intuitively put them in the circles where they currently are. So if they’re right up close to you in your circle, then you put them in there. Then on another piece of paper, repeat the same thing with the self in the middle, and then several circles going out, getting bigger from that, and then place those people where you think they should be for your self-care. So this is a boundary exercise and it’s about, well, okay, that circle is my innermost circle that’s closest to me, that belongs to me, that sacred. That’s where I do my meditation, that’s where I have my worthy beliefs. That’s where I exercise. That’s where I have my self-care time, that’s me. But what you’ll find to be really interesting is that and I know I slip into this, particularly being a parent, anyone who’s a caregiver will know this. Is that the circles are very blurred. And what it does when I first is it just helps me to set boundaries, to look at it and think, well, maybe that person needs to be a bit further out sometimes.

Clint – Maybe off the circle altogether.

Elissa – Maybe.

Clint – Well, we’ve got the circle exercise to add to our list. I’ve got a list here of things that we’ve learnt so far, including some ideas that I’ve had over the years to add-in. And we can maybe do a summary shortly and go through here all, all things. Is there anything that we’ve missed? Are there some things that you want to add?

Elissa – There’s one thing I was thinking about. There’s. John Prendergast has written a beautiful book called The Deep Heart. And in that book, he talks about he’s got a few really beautiful exercises that you can do with your limiting beliefs. And they’re very simple meditations.

Clint – What’s his name?

Elissa – John Prendergast.

Clint – Okay.

Elissa – Yeah, I think Gabe Golden did an interview with him. I think I actually did in one of my very first webinars, I did an exercise that he has a meditation exercise that’s called Tending Your Heart. That will be in one of the recordings that we have up for me. But he’s really good at just getting you to sit in a meditative station like you did with the group that time, that very similar exercise. But you can go, of course, deeper, and that’s where I use neural processes to shift for some people like me, I really needed to shift them at a really deep level. For some reason mine were just ingrained like concrete.

Clint – Well, your challenges with your health began at a very young age. And so at that age, you’re very, very susceptible to external influences and negative thought patterns and so on.

Elissa – Yeah.

Clint – Okay. Well, thank you, Alissa. Before I go and go through what I consider a sort of a summary of what you’ve presented here. How do people get hold of you? So if they want to do a one-on-one session like this with you and get help.

Elissa – So that’s my website which is www.elissalowenstern.com and that sort of gives you or I’m on social media I’m on Instagram and Facebook. Look I run workshops too and as well as one on one sessions. The one on one sessions, I tend to go deeper into the limiting beliefs and shifting them at a subconscious level. As you said before, it’s very important to identify what you want instead, because often when I work with people, they know what they don’t want, they don’t know what they want instead. So if you feel you don’t deserve something, or if you’re ashamed of the way your rheumatoid affects your body, then how do you want that to be different? And when it is different, the question to then ask is, and how will your life be different when you have that? That’s where, again, I use a lot of visualizations because then you create that new life in the meditation, and you can actually again go to that visualization into the future of when I’m at my gym when I was 16 years old or when I’m my knees doing what it.

Elissa – I think the thing that I really want to finish with is that we just don’t appreciate the power of our unconscious mind. It is so potent and it can, little by little, small steps, change enormously. The other thing, too, is, and I’m sure you feel the same, Clint, is that you do have to keep working on it. It’s not a magic pill that you take the same as anything and it’s right that you don’t finish. You need to be what I call aware every day. So I watch myself, I say when I wake up in the morning, I check in with myself. How am I? How am I feeling? Am I going to get out of bed feeling like I’m going to beat myself up today? It’s a bit like, you know, where they get in the car and you’re grumpy and all of a sudden you see somebody else who’s grumpy in their car, so you attract it. I know I’ve had this happen, I’m sure you have. If I get up and I’m in that beat myself up mindset, my whole day follows that.

Clint – So what do you do?

Elissa – Well, then I’ll pull in and I’ll do some exercises. First of all, I might do meditation, like a I’ll think to myself, okay, where’s that belief coming from Elissa? Okay, you don’t need that anymore, you know what you can have instead. Or I might do the visualization that I talked about borrowing somebody else who I know who seems to be always positive and doing it for me. What I find is you need to do things now that a quick like a chicken, we all don’t have half an hour or an hour. So it’s almost like another good thing that people can do is, when a kid is going to get a piece of China out of the cabinet and you quickly say, stop it, that’s what you need to do, red light, stop it. I’m not letting you into that, I do that all the time, you are not going there. I’m not going to let you go down that one-way street of let’s beat Elissa up today. She’s got a sore joint or she’s not exercising properly or she had enough when she didn’t want to or you know what I mean? The choice that we are making on this rheumatoid journey is to facilitate healing so that we can be happy, confident, and be in charge, much more in charge of our rheumatoid. There are going to be times where it takes over us, this particularly for people who are new into the program. And I found particularly in the beginning with diet, that this mindset was really important in thinking the days when it was tough. I’m here for a purpose because I want to be the one who chooses how my body goes. I think those little things, that document that I’ve got has got a lot of things in it where people can draw on quick things to get them back on track again. But the first thing to do is to tell the child, Stop.

Clint – Yeah, love that, to stop it.

Elissa – Like a red light, pulling up the red light. Just quit it, I’m not doing this.

Clint – Love it. Okay, well, thank you, Elissa, this has been really interesting. We’ve got some notes here, at least that I’ve made as we’ve gone along to try and bring this into some kind of summary. And I’ll add to this, the checklist that I’m going to put on the show notes for this. Let’s say we wake up, we don’t feel like we’re in the mindset to move our body. We feel worse than yesterday, which for me is always the that’s always the red flag to the bull is if I was on a progress doing really well and then wake up and my body’s just lost the momentum, it’s a day off I’d had said ten days in a row, and then now this one’s worse and it makes me furious. What was it that triggered that? And then I go into that kind of mentality and then nothing else matters unless that gets resolved. In those sort of days, we can draw upon past experiences in our own lives or draw upon those of others to say, I have overcome these sort of challenges in the past. I can do it again. We’ve basically indulge in the emotions associated with that evidence, and that brings us back into that state again. You mentioned touching the void in passing that movie since you mentioned it. I went and watched, which I haven’t before. I think it’s a 2003 movie, so it’s been around for some time, but I watched it in my infrared sauna, it’s over two months, and loved it. In fact, during the second sauna session I did for nearly an hour just because I wanted to see the end of the film. And it really is a testament that film into drawing upon levels of human determination that go beyond anything that you can even wildly imagine. So go watch Touching the void, everyone, if you haven’t seen it, that’s great homework. We got to say BS to these limiting beliefs and say, what is the truth? What’s the actual truth? These things that we repeat in our minds are undercutting our progress. And if we take just a few moments to think about them and say they’re BS, what is the truth? And then make the truth the affirmation. If the truth is that you’re actually seeing slow improvements, then say to yourself, every day I’m making slow improvements, I’m making slow improvements, I’m making slow improvements. I used to say I’m pain free, drug free, back to maximum energy pain free, drug free, back to massive energy pain free, drug free back. It doesn’t even really make sense, and I was just to say that over and over again on that sort of rhythm that you can’t really end up in anywhere else because it’s almost like that becomes you. Then someone in the chat, as they said earlier, like, what do you do if you’re in a funk? I like to get a small win, any small win that can be so small just to feel that dopamine that comes with getting a small win.

Elissa – What I do is I make a dumb list of the positives of each day. I don’t make a list of what I didn’t achieve, I only have a list and I do it every day. It’s a special book that I have and it’s only my done list, the achievements. At the end of the day, I read it and I think, yeah, that was a small as it was that’s what I did. I think I spoke to you about in one of the other podcasts, 4000 weeks. It’s a, I’ll put it in the coaching thread, but it’s about our relationship with time. And this guy was talking about you have to have your positive list and write it out, particularly if you’re starting out on the journey because the tight like in that movie it’s the tiny steps, isn’t it?

Clint – Well, that’s right, and I knew this small win concept well before watching that movie, but he would focus on just getting ten meters, another ten meters, another ten meters, and breaking down his agony just into ten-meter milestones. Like Dr. Klapper says, he said, you know, when you’re on this journey, your goal each day is just to walk to the next tree. You’re not trying to, run, you’re just trying to the next day get to the next tree and then the next tree and then the next tree. And so. That actually leads nicely into my next sort of little bullet point here, is that when you’re in this mental funk, get into nature. Just go for a walk in nature, even if it’s just a park near your house, that’s all you have access to. Get into that because that’s where you’re going to feel better get out of the environment in which you’re feeling the most intense negative feelings. And then this next one is the biggest one for me is move the body, the best way for us to snap out of a funk and get my mindset positive, or at least not as sharply negative, is just do something where the body requires so much of my mental attention that I can’t be thinking about that other thing.

Elissa – Because you’re doing two things with that. Actually if you think about it as a picture frame, the mindset is a picture frame, you need to change it, put another frame on it. So that can be nature. But the thing with movement is it creates that the all of the hormones that are released and the, breathing if you’re doing some deep, deep breathing is just brilliant because it switches on the parasympathetic. So that movement is really important. Just anything, just 10 paces or so.

Clint – Yeah. Or something ridiculous, some stupid dance.

Elissa – Yeah, I agree.

Clint – Then you mentioned the circle exercise, which is really, really cool. We’ve got to put ourselves in the middle and then put those loved ones or even not even just people around us who influence us, and then another picture of where they should be. John Prendergast, people can look up him about changing these limiting beliefs if they are struggling with this. And then your check in in the morning and feeling how you are before you actually get out of bed. If you need to apply the red light, stop it, I think is great now and you’ve got the checklist that you’re going to make available to everyone as well that people can download for free on this podcast blog page. So head over to www.RheumatoidSolutions.com, and then click on the podcast episode and you will see Elissa. To wrap this up, the last thing I have here is a question from the chat. Elissa, what is your Instagram? Do you have an Instagram?

Elissa – It’s my name, Elissa Loewenstern.

Clint – Great. And I’ll put that in the same location. Thank you, Alyssa. Much gratitude for what you do for our community and these podcasts that you’re doing and for your time today.

Elissa – You’re most welcome. Clint It’s I’m really loving being part of the group and getting to talk to people, it’s an honor really. We’re all here to help and support each other. And I want to just finish by saying, too, that when it’s a tough day, don’t forget to give yourself a hug and be kind.

Clint – Beautiful, thank you. And thanks to everyone who attended live. So those of you who are with us on this call, our wonderful, beautiful members of our community, thank you for attending with us. I hope you’ve gained a lot out of it today. And for those of you listening, wherever you are or watching on YouTube. Thanks so much. And life is better when you’re healing and when we get our mindset right, it certainly helps to guide us in that direction. Thanks, everyone.