🪩 Recording: The sneaky saboteurs keeping you stuck in patterns you hate
Watch the interview with Mental Fitness Coach & DPT Emily Wallace and then do the exercise to uncover the thought patterns keeping you stuck in the burnout cycle on high.
Big thanks to everyone who joined last week — I loved hearing from each of you about the saboteurs that resonated the most. Thanks for showing up and being so courageous!
Watch now
A live community conversation exploring the ways our neurology can keep us trapped recycling negative beliefs and mindsets and how to begin digging your way out.
In my conversation with Emily, we explore the neurology of our thoughts and how the negative ones tend to repeat until we forget they are thoughts in the first place.
If you weren’t able to join us live, you can listen to the interview with Emily on her career path and then go through the saboteurs exercise that we did together on the call. Emily uses this practice with her clients to help identify the types of negative thought patterns that play on repeat in the backs of our minds — naming them helps us begin to notice when they’re present so it’s easier to develop a new thought pattern to replace it.
In this conversation, you’ll learn:
How saboteur thought patterns develop over time and why they’re so sticky
10 common forms they take (“the avoider,” “the pleaser,” “the hyper-rational, etc)
An exercise that teaches you how move away from negative patterns and towards healthier, more balanced ways of seeing yourself and the world
As always, share your insights in the comments 🫶🏻
I think sometimes we feel like we are alone dealing with this stuff — like it’s just us that can’t get out of our own heads and if we could only fix ourselves we wouldn’t have to suffer. One of the great comforts of my research is the confident knowledge that this is a universal human experience. There is nothing wrong with you!! We are all dealing with these beliefs and mindsets — you’re not broken and you don’t need to be fixed. This is just a new part of your journey, where you get to experiment with a different way of thinking and seeing the world. Be gentle with yourself, and if you can — share what you’re noticing with the community here in the comments. Shame can’t survive the light.
More about Emily:
Emily Wallace is a National Board Certified Health & Wellness Coach with training through Kresser Institute’s ADAPT Functional Health Coach Training Program.
She began her journey to coaching after being diagnosed with several auto-immune conditions in 2012 and found herself completely overwhelmed when she tried to fit a healthier lifestyle into her already demanding roles as a physical therapist and a mother. It wasn’t long before she realized that she couldn’t just will her way through it — she’d need to understand the neuroscience of behavior change and start working WITH her brain instead of against it.
She has a Doctor of Physical Therapy degree from Columbia University and previously specialized in treating patients with neurologic and chronic health conditions. You can learn more about her services here!
Thank you 🙏🏼 Terrific framework for exposing our thoughts/patterns/beliefs (the saboteurs I call my Monkeys), how they operate in the shadows to steal our joy and wellbeing. So helpful and affirming as I re-route my Restless Monkey back to my Sage (what I call Soul) so I can edit my graphic novel on this exact subject! Grateful.
Finally had a chance to listen to this. Restless was definitely the primary one for me, hyper-achiever, and pleaser are other predominant ones. The way it came up for me this week was in the length of my to do list even though I was sick (and my husband was home and totally willing to take care of things). My first impression is that this relates to the idea that I can’t trust my body’s signals, but I want to reflect on that more because I think there's more to it. Like a lot of it feels like my natural curiosity taken too far. I can even make my baths productive :) I also found myself wondering if there is a relationship between these nine saboteurs and Enneagram. I see some parallels with at least a few of the types.