And so we always want to ask the question is this Catholic? So first what we teach in, master’s what we teach in private one-on-one coaching is this tool called the model and the model is very similar to cognitive behavioral therapy. So if you Google cognitive behavioral therapy and click on images, you’ll see a bunch of triangles that say your thoughts, drive your feelings, which drive your actions, which create more evidence for your thoughts. Okay? And the model that we teach is just adds two more components on that, where you reflect on where you were, what was your circumstance when you had that thought? So we add circumstance at the front end, and then we add result at the end, which is you did all these behaviors, then what was your result? Okay. But really it’s just cognitive behavioral therapy, which is growing in popularity. It is becoming more trendy.

Now there are a lot more books on this. There’s a lot more chatter on the internet about mindset, work, mindset, coaching, and it all comes down to this, which is your thoughts, create your results. And I remember the first time I heard that, I was like, Hmm, that sounds new age-y. And not like it’s from Jesus. I don’t want it. But I had heard it from this very beautiful Catholic person. So my mind was a little confused about that because I really did trust this person. And listen, it is so important that we question things to see if they’re Catholic or not. So I was taking this class last week from the lady who runs a rosary and, and she was teaching this class on how to take essential oils and like diffuse essential oils at different times of the year to kind of prime your kids for liturgical living.

Right? So they’d be like, Hmm, lint kind of smells like this, right? And that you could use sense to really like anchor them into the rhythm of the calendar and that you would also do that for the different mysteries of the rosary. It was amazing. But anyway, one of the things she said in this class, which just like my jaw dropped, I’d never heard this before. She said when the church drops something, the culture picks it up. And she said, when the church dropped saying the rosary, the hippies started putting them around their necks. And when the church dropped mysticism drugs and psychedelics took its place. And when the church dropped prayer and meditation, the mindfulness movement picked up. And when the church dropped fasting, it’s now growing as a secular trend.

And that made so much sense to me. And it also made me even more wary of really testing the truth of something and knowing that just because it sounds good. And even if it helps you a little doesn’t mean that it’s something from the Lord. Now that’s not to say that fasting bad or that things that are popular are bad. It just means we have to pay attention. And we have to ask ourselves, is this practice leading me towards the Lord? Or is it leading me away from the Lord? So this is why I was so adamant about learning more and researching more about life coaching. So I went out and did more research on this and I looked up more life coaches and I read more about the model and cognitive behavioral therapy. And what I found was none of this is new, right? This has been a concept that many church fathers and ancient philosophers have talked about, right? Marcus, or Raylea said, you have power over your mind. Not your events realize this, and you will find strength, right? So what Marcus Aurelius was saying is, Hey mama, when standing in your living room and you’re looking at your messy house, it is not the state of your house that is causing you problems. It is what you think about the state of your house that is creating pain in your heart.

And if you can learn that one skill, we just teach you one thing you guys, if you can learn this one thing will change your life.

The Maura was digging in. The more I would read, I just found so much evidence to back this up, right in Isaiah 26 three, it says those of stead fast mind, you keep in peace in peace because they trust in you. So what that is saying, right, this person is talking kind of to the Lord. And he’s saying, Lord, those who manage their minds, you will give them peace. And they will have that peace because they trust in you by managing their minds. And this is exactly what the saints did. They would be presented with difficult situations. And instead of being like, Oh, my life is so terrible because of this situation, this circumstance, they would manage their minds and just think something that led them to God. I trust in him. This is exactly where he wants me to be. I love the Lord. I’m willing to do this for him. And they had peace because they were able to change their thinking, right? We’re not born like that. Right? We’re born wanting to avoid pain, wanting things to be easy, wanting more pleasure. This is a learned skill. And we did not learn it in school. And I didn’t learn it until I was 36. I might’ve been 35.

Okay. You can learn it at any age and it will unlock your mind. And the purpose of unlocking your mind is to walk with the Lord St. Anton. Also one of the doctors of the church said for, I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand for, I believe this, unless I believe I will not understand. And that was kind of mouthy and maybe sounds a little bit cryptic, but what it means is your thoughts create your results. So it’s like I tell moms in the raising Saint program,

We

Need to believe that our children will have a wonderful love affair with God. We have to believe it. Even before we see it, we need to believe that the Lord will walk with them and they will walk with the Lord. Even if we have no evidence of that. And if we believe that we are going to show up in our own life and in the lives of our children in such a way that does draw them closer to us.

Okay. Saint Augustan. Okay.

It says faith is to believe what you do not yet see the reward for this faith is to see what you believe. Right? And so what he’s saying is if you’ve got a grumpy husband and a stale marriage, and you’re like, I just don’t believe that it’s okay, or it’s going to get any better.

If

You begin to change your thinking, if you begin to look at that man and say, wow, that is the, that is the perfect man for me. He serves our family in so many ways. I am so in love with him, find things that are true.

But if you begin to think those things, you will believe something different and then it will create what you believe. And it is not new agey. And I’m telling you, I’ve done this now with dozens of women, like hundreds of women, if you include masters, but doesn’t privately, one-on-one intensely for three months where I watched them be in a prison in their minds. And we just open the gate. We just let them out of the cell. We say, listen, that story. Isn’t true. I’m going to tell you an example of that a little bit later in this episode. Okay?

Okay. The other reason I know that life coaching and the model and cognitive behavioral therapy is not new agey is because it leads you to God.

It leads you to God. When you clean up your mind, you hear him. This is not ungodly. Self-Reliance we are not building ourselves up to be saviors. We just bring this to the Lord. And we say, Lord, I want to be who you want me to be, show me. And then we trust in him and his plan, even if it seems scary. And then we find courage, courage never feels good. You guys, the courage to do something.

It’s an uncomfortable feeling.

You don’t ever need courage to eat ice cream, right? We need courage in the face of something scary or challenging.

But on the other side of courage is confidence. And that’s what I hear you say. I wish I was more confident. I wish I didn’t second. Guess myself. I wish I didn’t have so much anxiety. I wish I didn’t have so much. Depression. Confidence comes on the other side of courage and we create courage with our thinking.

And the first step is just awareness of this, right? I am on a mission to get 10,000 Catholic moms to manage their minds. And I can teach you that in one month, most people who join us stay because it blows, open their whole world. And they love the women and they love the group coaching and all of it. But even if I could get 10,000 women to give me one month and they just learned this one tool, which you can learn by the way in less than an hour, right? You don’t come in and we’re not like, here’s your five-hour course. Right? I think the model video itself is like 20 or 30 minutes. It’s pretty short. And then we give you some more examples. You can practice. That is all you need to do to bring awareness to this idea that your thoughts are creating your results.

It is not your circumstances. And I just want that to flood you with hope right now hope that your life could be better than it is. I wish I had that hope five years ago, four years ago, there were so many years where I just thought this is so awful and hard and it’s just my cross and I have to bear it. And it wasn’t true. There were some real crosses in there, but my thinking made them so much heavier than they needed to be. So let me tell you why Catholic life coaching is growing which it is if you Google Catholic life coach, either for men or for women, or just that general name, you will find so many. Now I know so many and I’m seeing them all over Instagram. And that wasn’t true. A few years ago. There are so many Catholic life coaches now. And the reason why is because when you experienced this, you tell everyone, okay, so I know some of you were like, Oh, it still feels new agey to me. And I don’t really understand it. And then a small voice goes and it probably won’t work for me.

Right. But it does work

And it is not new agey. And so I just want to give you confidence that Larissa and I, and the other coaches we work with, we really spent a lot of time and continue to research more evidence that life coaching and managing our thoughts is an extremely Catholic thing.

Okay.

And so I just want you to feel so comfortable about that. And when you read the testimonials, if you go to our website made for greatness.co/masters, all of the testimonials are about women becoming more who God made them to be. And that’s how I feel. I feel like I knew I had all this potential and that God had given me gifts and I was just wasting them. I was squandering them and I didn’t know how to use them, or I would use them poorly and fail and it would be confusing,

But I learned how to manage my mind. And when I learned how to just get quiet enough to trust myself and to trust the Lord, I feel like I began to hear what he wanted me to do. And now that I’m doing it and I’m living it out, I feel so expanded. I feel like my love has expanded. My mind has expanded this mission that I have has just blown up in an incredible way. Just getting to do this podcast for you guys is amazing, right? Thousands of Catholic women are listening to this and learning how to manage their minds. So listen, if you don’t join us in masters, that’s totally fine. But give yourself the gift of typing in cognitive behavioral therapy in YouTube, go watch somebody teach you that your thoughts create your results. Go listen to people, share example after example of how this is playing out in their lives, because then you will see how it is playing out in your life. And also on their website. There’s a button that says free, and you can watch me do some group coaching and you can see me walk women through that process as well.

The first lesson I want you to have is hope that there is hope that whatever you’re going through can be made better just by your thinking. I promise you I have not yet encountered anything that that wasn’t true for. And when I help women break through this prison and unlock the gate and they see their own story,

It leads them closer to God. It, it leads them to being the woman that God wanted them to.

And so life coaching is growing because it was something we didn’t know. We didn’t understand it. It sounded weird and hanky. And now when people experience it and it changes their life and they realize it is Catholic and it does lead them to the Lord, they cannot stop talking about it. Right. I decided to build an entire business around it. I knew that I would do this for the whole rest of my life. Right. I like to joke and say that like, I’m going to be in hospice and I’m going to like reach out to the nurse’s arm and be like, did you know that your thoughts create your results? Let me tell you about that because I’m so confident that this one tiny lesson can change people’s lives.

Cool.

And so life coaching is also growing because people are beginning to understand what it is. I didn’t know what it was. I thought it sounded weird and silly and maybe a bit stupid if I’m being honest. But imagine like the very first time that people started doing fitness classes together, right? Let’s just say it’s in the fifties. I saw, you know, a picture once of women dressed like in the fifties, doing weird, funny fitness things in like an aerobics class. So imagine you’re this woman you’re like Janice, right? You’re Janice in the fifties. And you’re like, Oh, I’m not. As soon as I used to be, there was this flyer for this fitness class, I’m going to go work out with my friends. And Janice tells her mom about this class. And Janice mom is like, what? That is ridiculous. Why would you need to pay money to learn how to move your body? Because Janice, his mom grew up 20, 30 years before where you were like making your own food, farming it, doing all of your own laundry by hand everything. And that was your workout. So it’s unfathomable to her. It seems ridiculous to her that you would pay to go to an aerobics class to exercise because with Janice, his mom doesn’t realize is that the world has changed and we need different tools.

And the way that our world has changed is that moms are isolated. We don’t have the voice of aunts and grandmas and you know, sisters and all of the women who would have listened to you previously, you would’ve been like, Oh, my three-year-old’s driving me bananas. He keeps doing XYZ. And then your aunt or your mom or your grandma would have been like, Oh, I know that’s just what three-year-olds do, though. It’s totally normal. And then you would have just believed them. You’d have been like, Oh, it’s totally normal. It’s a non-issue right. So they would have helped you manage your thoughts just with their wisdom and their experience, but we don’t have that anymore. And so where does living in a prison of our minds, where everything makes us feel anxious, we all think we’re totally screwing it up. We’re screwing up our health, the kids, our marriage, our vocation, some of us have dreams and we’re just sitting on them, all of it.

And we don’t know how to get out of this prison, even when we recognize it. Even when you wake up and you think this is not how I should be living, this is not how it should be. You know that, but you don’t know how to get out. And now it’s totally normal to go to the gym. Makes a lot of sense to us. Even if you don’t choose to do that, you’re like, yeah, I get it. You know, we live sedentary lives. We don’t want the whole gym equipment in our house. So yeah, I get that. Some people pay $50 a month to go to the gym and work out there and take their classes And I get why something changed. And we needed that venue. It’s totally normal. And that’s how life coaching is going to become right. 10 years from now having a life coach or being part of a group coaching environment is going to be very normal and accepted like, Oh yeah. Are you struggling with that? You should join this program. Learn how to manage your mind because we’re going to take the wisdom of the people running the program, mixed with this tool of learning, how to manage our thoughts.

And you’re going to find freedom. You’re going to manage your mind. You’re gonna have

Different mindset. These are all the different popular ways that we’re hearing about this these days. Okay. But it comes back to what the Bible says, take every thought, captive to Christ, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. And that’s not a one-time thing. So if you are reading the Bible and feeling like I don’t, they keep talking about peace and not being afraid, but I don’t know how to do it. This is how you do it by managing your mind. So I want to tell you about stories. We have these stories about ourselves, but we don’t see that their stories.

And one of the stories that I discovered about myself recently was that I believed that the successes that I’d had in my life didn’t count and this came up in my business first and I was thinking, I’m just not, I’ve never really been successful as an entrepreneur. And my husband kind of laughed at that. And he was like, yeah, you have. And I was like, no, not really. So then I began listing the businesses that I had, right. When I was 17, I learned how to hand code sites. And I built a few websites, one for $600, one for $1,200, a few more around that range. Right. And I’m like, well, that doesn’t really count though, because it wasn’t a full-time job and I didn’t keep doing it. All right. That’s all my, that was the story. My brain is telling me myself about the first company and why it didn’t count.

And then my second company was the dog training company. And I did that for two years and I made pretty good money doing it. But I didn’t manage my money really well. And it was kind of a tumultuous time for me, just like with friends and all the things that you’re doing in your early twenties. Plus I was training and boarding dogs every day. And so I never got a day off because I didn’t love that job. And I decided to close it. So my brain says, well, yeah, that doesn’t count you. Weren’t very successful. Cause you closed it or you didn’t make a lot of money or you kind of wasted the money that you made. And I’ve done that about my books. I’ve written four books and my brain goes, well, that doesn’t count because you sell Felish them. Even though I have amazing Amazon reviews of those books, my brain is like, that doesn’t count.

You’re not a real author. That was the other thing. It was like, you’re not a real business person. You’re not a real author. And as I heard this story and I saw it repeat over and over again, I also noticed it came up with my kids. Now I don’t have the, the right words around this, but somehow I feel like I’m not a real mom of a big Catholic family because I didn’t choose to have a big Catholic family. Right? Like I never really wanted a bunch of kids. The kid thing is not my favorite thing. And so I have this kind of fraud, like I’m just playing someone else’s life, which is utterly ridiculous. And I want to say this to you guys because you’re listening to this being like, that’s ridiculous Sterling, you’ve raised six humans. You’ve cleaned them. You fed them. You’ve kept them safe and alive. You 100% are a real mom of a large Catholic family. There’s no fraud there. That’s literally who you are. Is that what you would say to me? But you are believing a story just like this.

And so when I identified this story, the first thing I did was just begin to see that it was separate for me because I believed that it was who I was. Hi, I’m Sterling. I have red hair and blue eyes and all of my successes in life, they don’t count. Like I’ve never won anything. I just kind of believed that this was like who I am or a curse that was upon me. And that all future efforts would end up the same way. And guess what? When you believe that your success isn’t real and you feel like you’re a failure, how do you show up in your life? You overeat, you watch TV, you don’t make plans. You scroll on social media, you put your head in the sand. These were all things that I used to do. And what’s interesting is I don’t do those things anymore because I discovered a different story previously. But this story I just discovered this weekend, right? Months and months and months into life coaching. And I found this new story.

My success doesn’t count. It was deep, you guys, it felt like a deeply rooted belief. And so I gave it some space. I gave it some time. And the first step was just seeing that it was a thought that is very difficult when you really believe it’s true. Like, Oh, this is just a truth about, for me, it takes some time just to begin to see it as a thought, Oh, there’s that thought again? And now I call it a story. There’s that story again? That I tell myself that my success doesn’t count. I did this with made for greatness, Larissa, and I had a really good month. You guys just keep talking about masters and people keep signing up and we keep coaching. Lots of people and doing private one-on-one coaching too. And it’s been so fun. And I remember telling someone about the business and saying like, well, yeah, but it doesn’t count because I do it with someone else.

What about doing business with someone else takes away from the success of having a business. This is going to laugh when she hears this, by the way, because she’ll just hear this with the rest of you. Nothing. It is completely legit intimate. It is a real, when we have built something beautiful and strong, we have done that out of nothing. We built it with our minds and it’s incredible. And now I just, I still have that thought. My brain still wants to tell me that things I’ve done don’t count. And I will just now say, Oh, there’s that story again? That story, my brain likes to tell, because a belief is just a thought that you think many, many times, and you can choose to think something else and you will practice it. And it will feel weird and awkward, right? So it still feels kind of weird and awkward to me to be like, I am a successful entrepreneur period. No explanations, no qualifications, no like, well, but my husband helped me or no, but it doesn’t count because of this. I am a successful entrepreneur period. I am the, a mom of a large Catholic family. I choose them every day.

And I just, I want you to ask yourself, what is your story? What is the mind prison that you are in? What do you believe is actually true about yourself? Where you would come to me and you would say Sterling, but you can’t change this because it’s just who I am. I’ve always been like this. I don’t see any way to be any different. I’m like this in many areas of my life. I don’t think I could change. Right? Some of you will say that you are anxious. Like that is true. I red hair, I blue eyes and I’m an anxious person, but that is just a belief that you have because you’ve thought it so many times, some of you will have this around money. You are a poor kid growing up and you just feel like a poor kid wearing nicer clothes, play, acting in your own life. And if we really saw, you we’d know, you don’t know how to manage money. You don’t know what to invest in. Some of you will have this around your body and being beautiful or not beautiful. No one will ever want me was always everyone’s second choice. I’m a backup kind of person, right? I want you to ask yourself what your story is, and I want you to be brave enough. I want you to garner the feeling of courage by asking yourself what if it was possible to change this?

And you can change it by Googling cognitive behavioral therapy. You can change it by continuing to listen to this podcast, listen to every episode, three times until your brain soaks it up. Go listen to the life. Coach school podcast, Larson our life, coach school, life coaches, right? Like that’s a school we went to and it has a podcast and it’s a secular podcast. But if you listen to it, you will understand how to manage your mind. And you’ll be able to leave the rest of it. That isn’t Catholic. And isn’t for you. Trust herself in that way or come join us in masters. Spend one month with us, learn how to use the model, learn how to clean up your thinking and to break free of the prison. That is your story. Let’s write a new story. Let’s write the story. The Cod wants for you. What if something amazing is right around the corner and you just can’t see it. And this is the only thing standing between you and this exciting life that God has planned for you because I’m here to tell you most of my circumstances, didn’t change just my thinking. And I feel like a whole new woman

The world will offer you comfort, but you were not made for comfort you or made for greatness.