Pick up the pieces of your life, pull them back together with the word to write all the beauty and peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when you write your story.

Pick up the pieces of your life, pull them back together with the word to write all the beauty and peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when you write your story.

You got the.

You got the.

Words and said, don't you think it's time to let them out and write them down and cover what it's all about and write your story. Write you, Write your Story.

Words and said, don't you think it's time to let them out and write them down and cover what it's all about and write your story. Write you, Write your Story.

Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm your host, and I am so grateful to be here. I'm so excited for today's episode. I have something really cool that I want to talk to you about a handful of experiences I've had in the last few days that have given me new insight and have shown me even more clearly how I use the concept of write your Story and the Write your Story framework and the principles that I teach in the Write your Story book and here on the podcast on an everyday basis in a really practical way. And I'm so excited to share this with you because it's been an absolutely mind blowing epiphany for me. It's simple. It's not, you know, I say mind blowing, but it is mind blowing. And it's also like really simple and practical and so I'm so excited to share that story with you here today. I think it's going to be really helpful for you, and I think you're going to resonate with a lot of the concepts that I want to talk about. So let's get started. Let's dive right in. One of the things that I say in the book that I've been asked about a handful of times on podcast interviews that I've been doing leading up to the book release is I say that the stories we tell ourselves become the blueprint from which we build our life. And I've had several people who have interviewed me ask me to share more about that or just to explain more of what I mean about that. And what I mean about that is two things. Number One. One way to look at it is that the stories we tell ourselves are the filter through which we process our life. So the way that you narrate your story becomes like you've heard the term rose colored glasses. That's a great way to think about it. If the glasses that you're wearing are rose colored, everything that you see out in the physical world is also going to be rose colored. If the glasses that you're wearing are a deep blue. Everything you see out in the physical world is going to be a deep blue. And the stories we tell ourselves, the way we narrate our life works in the same kind of way. It's a filter, and whatever that filter looks like, that's what your life is going to look like. So everything that you see, everything you experience, all the data that's coming in is filtered through that story, that narrative, and it comes out on the other side looking the same way the narrative looks. And so if the narrative that we tell ourselves is really negative, if it's really coming from a place of victimhood, if it is dark, if it is helpless, whatever it is, that's how we're going to see and experience the story. And same if that filter is really joyful, if it's really excited, if it's really you know, if it has like a positive expectation attached to it, then everything that takes place in your life is also going to be seen through that filter. So that's one way to think about the analogy, and to look at it in another way, is literally like a blueprint to a house. The narrative that you tell yourself, the story that you've created, the meaning that you've made of the experiences that you have already had. Works like a blueprint. So you think of like a blueprint drawn on a piece of paper. You hand that over to the builder of the house, and the builder is going to literally build the house exactly the way that the blueprint looks. They're not going to deviate from the blueprint. They know better than to do that because the blueprint is the guide. The blueprint is the map, and our lives work a very similar way. We can affect change in the physical world by telling a different story. So if we're telling a story that again has a positive spin on it, that has a positive expectation, that has a sense of agency to it, then that blueprint becomes a very sturdy blueprint from which we can build the house of our lives, and that house becomes a sturdy place for us to live. If the narrative that we're telling ourselves, the story that's playing on repeat, is disempowered, if it's helpless, if it's coming from a victim place, if we're not the hero of our own stories, if we have a controlling idea to the story that isn't favorable for us, then that's the blueprint from which we build our lives, and so the things that begin to take place in our lives reflect back to us the blueprint that we've created from our thoughts. So obviously this is something that I've known for a long time. I'm very passionate about. I've talked in a previous episode about Esther Hicks and how that has come back around in my life and how I have been really affected and impacted by hearing her work again. And yet I wanted to share this story with you because I want you to see that even though this is something that I've written about that I'm excited about, that I talk about in this podcast, it comes up for me again and again and again. There are always opportunities for me to see how I've crafted the narrative in such a way where the house of my life that I'm building is not actually the house that I wanted to build, Where the filter that I've put on my life is not the filter I want to look through. There are a thousand different filters that we could choose to look through on any given day, and there's nothing morally right or wrong about any of those filters. But whatever filter we put on the story is going to impact the way that we see our experiences. And I think that this story that I want to share with you, or set of stories, is going to demonstrate to you how that works and how we can instantly really upgrade the narrative that we have attached to our experiences. So this past weekend, I went on a quick trip to Dallas to see a friend of mine get married. It was a very quick trip because I've got two little kids at home. Mat agreed to stay with the kids and run point at the home front and said that it was fine for me to go just make a quick run to Dallas so that I could see this friend and get married. So I left my house at six fifteen I think on Saturday morning, drove to the Nashville Airport, got on a flight at like eight fifteen, Flew to Atlanta, flew to Dallas, rented a car, drove the car all the way to the wedding, which was like an hour outside of Dallas. Hung out at the wedding, partied, left at like eight thirty, drove back to my hotel, stayed for you know, less than twelve hours at the hotel, and then hopped back on a flight and was home by noon on Sunday, so barely more than twenty four hours that I was gone. You know, it's been a long time since I've been on an airplane. I've been for the last couple of years mostly at home with my kids. If I've been on an airplane, it's been usually with them, with the entire family. So this was the first time in a while that I've been out on my own traveling. And one of the things that I noticed about being out of my element was I started to pay really close attention to my thoughts. And like I talked about on the Esther Hicks episode, if you haven't listened to that episode, you should go back and listen to it because it's really really powerful stuff. One of the things that I talked about is how I don't typically think of myself as a person who has very negative thoughts. I maybe would have said that ten years ago in my life, but now where I am now, I feel like I've upgraded the story so many times that I mostly think about myself as having pretty positive thoughts. But what I shared on the Ester Hicks episode is that she says to pay close attention to your emotions, that your emotions are actually your guidance system, and when your emotions are off, that's when you can tell that your thoughts are off. When your emotions are out of alignment, that's when you can tell that your thoughts are out of alignment. For me, the emotion that almost always tells me that I'm out of alignment is anxiety, and anxiety has been a constant companion with me for most of my life. I mean, I can hardly remember a time in my life when I didn't feel anxious, and so I think at a point in my healing journey, I just kind of went like, Okay, anxieties along for the ride. It's not going anywhere. It's gonna come with me. I'm going to have to find ways to cope and to coexist with this anxiety, because I can't imagine a scenario where it wasn't this constant, you know, passenger in my car. And I think that definitely is a coping mechanism, and a really important coping mechanism and an important part in the path of healing. Before my kids were born, I felt like my anxiety was mostly under control, and then after having babies, I had really bad postpartum anxiety. My anxiety was worse than the depression that a lot of women talk about. And my anxiety was so bad actually that I would have these like really vivid flashes of terrible, terrible things happening to my children and my brain. It was almost like my brain was on this track like a movie, and I couldn't turn the movie off. I would like, picture, you know, I'm driving the car. I've got two babies in the back of the car in their car seats, and I would picture my the left wheel of my car like sort of catching the road and veering off the road and the car flipping over. And then my brain would like play out the entire scenario, like the paramedics coming and I would picture just horrific things like my kids not breathing or bleeding or whatever. I would picture being at the hospital and the nurses talking to me and being like, wait, what you did?

Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm your host, and I am so grateful to be here. I'm so excited for today's episode. I have something really cool that I want to talk to you about a handful of experiences I've had in the last few days that have given me new insight and have shown me even more clearly how I use the concept of write your Story and the Write your Story framework and the principles that I teach in the Write your Story book and here on the podcast on an everyday basis in a really practical way. And I'm so excited to share this with you because it's been an absolutely mind blowing epiphany for me. It's simple. It's not, you know, I say mind blowing, but it is mind blowing. And it's also like really simple and practical and so I'm so excited to share that story with you here today. I think it's going to be really helpful for you, and I think you're going to resonate with a lot of the concepts that I want to talk about. So let's get started. Let's dive right in. One of the things that I say in the book that I've been asked about a handful of times on podcast interviews that I've been doing leading up to the book release is I say that the stories we tell ourselves become the blueprint from which we build our life. And I've had several people who have interviewed me ask me to share more about that or just to explain more of what I mean about that. And what I mean about that is two things. Number One. One way to look at it is that the stories we tell ourselves are the filter through which we process our life. So the way that you narrate your story becomes like you've heard the term rose colored glasses. That's a great way to think about it. If the glasses that you're wearing are rose colored, everything that you see out in the physical world is also going to be rose colored. If the glasses that you're wearing are a deep blue. Everything you see out in the physical world is going to be a deep blue. And the stories we tell ourselves, the way we narrate our life works in the same kind of way. It's a filter, and whatever that filter looks like, that's what your life is going to look like. So everything that you see, everything you experience, all the data that's coming in is filtered through that story, that narrative, and it comes out on the other side looking the same way the narrative looks. And so if the narrative that we tell ourselves is really negative, if it's really coming from a place of victimhood, if it is dark, if it is helpless, whatever it is, that's how we're going to see and experience the story. And same if that filter is really joyful, if it's really excited, if it's really you know, if it has like a positive expectation attached to it, then everything that takes place in your life is also going to be seen through that filter. So that's one way to think about the analogy, and to look at it in another way, is literally like a blueprint to a house. The narrative that you tell yourself, the story that you've created, the meaning that you've made of the experiences that you have already had. Works like a blueprint. So you think of like a blueprint drawn on a piece of paper. You hand that over to the builder of the house, and the builder is going to literally build the house exactly the way that the blueprint looks. They're not going to deviate from the blueprint. They know better than to do that because the blueprint is the guide. The blueprint is the map, and our lives work a very similar way. We can affect change in the physical world by telling a different story. So if we're telling a story that again has a positive spin on it, that has a positive expectation, that has a sense of agency to it, then that blueprint becomes a very sturdy blueprint from which we can build the house of our lives, and that house becomes a sturdy place for us to live. If the narrative that we're telling ourselves, the story that's playing on repeat, is disempowered, if it's helpless, if it's coming from a victim place, if we're not the hero of our own stories, if we have a controlling idea to the story that isn't favorable for us, then that's the blueprint from which we build our lives, and so the things that begin to take place in our lives reflect back to us the blueprint that we've created from our thoughts. So obviously this is something that I've known for a long time. I'm very passionate about. I've talked in a previous episode about Esther Hicks and how that has come back around in my life and how I have been really affected and impacted by hearing her work again. And yet I wanted to share this story with you because I want you to see that even though this is something that I've written about that I'm excited about, that I talk about in this podcast, it comes up for me again and again and again. There are always opportunities for me to see how I've crafted the narrative in such a way where the house of my life that I'm building is not actually the house that I wanted to build, Where the filter that I've put on my life is not the filter I want to look through. There are a thousand different filters that we could choose to look through on any given day, and there's nothing morally right or wrong about any of those filters. But whatever filter we put on the story is going to impact the way that we see our experiences. And I think that this story that I want to share with you, or set of stories, is going to demonstrate to you how that works and how we can instantly really upgrade the narrative that we have attached to our experiences. So this past weekend, I went on a quick trip to Dallas to see a friend of mine get married. It was a very quick trip because I've got two little kids at home. Mat agreed to stay with the kids and run point at the home front and said that it was fine for me to go just make a quick run to Dallas so that I could see this friend and get married. So I left my house at six fifteen I think on Saturday morning, drove to the Nashville Airport, got on a flight at like eight fifteen, Flew to Atlanta, flew to Dallas, rented a car, drove the car all the way to the wedding, which was like an hour outside of Dallas. Hung out at the wedding, partied, left at like eight thirty, drove back to my hotel, stayed for you know, less than twelve hours at the hotel, and then hopped back on a flight and was home by noon on Sunday, so barely more than twenty four hours that I was gone. You know, it's been a long time since I've been on an airplane. I've been for the last couple of years mostly at home with my kids. If I've been on an airplane, it's been usually with them, with the entire family. So this was the first time in a while that I've been out on my own traveling. And one of the things that I noticed about being out of my element was I started to pay really close attention to my thoughts. And like I talked about on the Esther Hicks episode, if you haven't listened to that episode, you should go back and listen to it because it's really really powerful stuff. One of the things that I talked about is how I don't typically think of myself as a person who has very negative thoughts. I maybe would have said that ten years ago in my life, but now where I am now, I feel like I've upgraded the story so many times that I mostly think about myself as having pretty positive thoughts. But what I shared on the Ester Hicks episode is that she says to pay close attention to your emotions, that your emotions are actually your guidance system, and when your emotions are off, that's when you can tell that your thoughts are off. When your emotions are out of alignment, that's when you can tell that your thoughts are out of alignment. For me, the emotion that almost always tells me that I'm out of alignment is anxiety, and anxiety has been a constant companion with me for most of my life. I mean, I can hardly remember a time in my life when I didn't feel anxious, and so I think at a point in my healing journey, I just kind of went like, Okay, anxieties along for the ride. It's not going anywhere. It's gonna come with me. I'm going to have to find ways to cope and to coexist with this anxiety, because I can't imagine a scenario where it wasn't this constant, you know, passenger in my car. And I think that definitely is a coping mechanism, and a really important coping mechanism and an important part in the path of healing. Before my kids were born, I felt like my anxiety was mostly under control, and then after having babies, I had really bad postpartum anxiety. My anxiety was worse than the depression that a lot of women talk about. And my anxiety was so bad actually that I would have these like really vivid flashes of terrible, terrible things happening to my children and my brain. It was almost like my brain was on this track like a movie, and I couldn't turn the movie off. I would like, picture, you know, I'm driving the car. I've got two babies in the back of the car in their car seats, and I would picture my the left wheel of my car like sort of catching the road and veering off the road and the car flipping over. And then my brain would like play out the entire scenario, like the paramedics coming and I would picture just horrific things like my kids not breathing or bleeding or whatever. I would picture being at the hospital and the nurses talking to me and being like, wait, what you did?

What?

What?

You let them do?

You let them do?

What?

What?

And it was almost like I couldn't turn that off. And so even though anxiety has ebbed and flowed throughout my life, I think before having kids, I felt like I was in a really sturdy place. It felt like my thoughts were pretty much in alignment with my broader being, and it didn't really feel like my anxiety needed that much attention or my thought life needed that much attention. Well then my kids entered the picture, and this crazy anxiety explodes again out of nowhere. And so it's been top of mind. It's been very present. I've been thinking a lot about it and doing a lot of work around shifting and reshaping my narrative. Again, a lot of it has been around, you know, deciding that I'm a good mother, telling myself that I'm a good mother. That's kind of a detour from the story. But well, while we're on that detour, I will say this one thing because this has been super helpful for me. An incredible guide in my story is a woman named doctor Kim Deramo. If you don't know of her, and you may not, because she's kind of in a different kind of circle than the circle that I run in. But if you don't know of her, you should go find her on Instagram. She's such a fabulous healer. She's a really incredible woman. She comes out of allopathic medicine, so she was a doctor, an er doctor for over ten years, and she's moved into this space of what she calls mind body medicine. She started the Mind Body Institute, and she teaches people how incredibly miraculously healing our own bodies are, and how things like anxiety and PTSD and all these different you know, autoimmune diseases and chronic pain issues, how much progress we can make when we acknowledge that mind body connection and when we allow the experiences that are causing that physical pain to move through our bodies completely. And she teaches like EFT tapping and all kinds of other really amazing healing modalities that have been such a game changer for me. Doctor Kim has been a teacher for me for the last year and a half ish, and she came into my life shortly after my kids were born, and one of the things that she taught me is that postpartum anxiety. What's happening actually is your nervous system is hitting a set point of joy. It's like this thing has come into your life that you love so intensely and so much, and so much joy is trying to happen for you, Like your world has just been exploded open to a new threshold of joy, and yet you're nervous. You're hitting this sort of ceiling on your nervous system. Your nervous system's like, no, no, no, that much joy is not safe. We've never been to that kind of joy before. We're not going there. And so your nervous system's way of blocking you from going to the joy is by telling you this could all be taken from you in a second. And when she told me that, it like resonated so deep in my bones. I can't tell you how helpful that tiny paradigm shift was for me. It was like exponentially massive for me to start to see that the anxiety around my children was really about my body being blown up into joy, or really my soul being blown up into joy. If we use Esther Hicks language, it's like your broader being has been blown open to joy, and your body, your physical being is going like no, no, no, no, no, we can't go there. That's too much joy. It's too much you know, happiness. It's that you can't let that in. It's not safe. And so my body's trying to keep me safe by keeping me at what the amount of joy that I've experienced in the past, and the collision of those two things it's what's causing the anxiety. So there's a bunch of different things that she taught me how to do to help my physical body open up to the joy that my broader being was already experiencing. And that has dramatically shifted my experience of motherhood. And part of that, like I said a minute ago, has been about really letting in, like I am a good mother. I was built to be a mother, I was made to be a mother. I'm really really good at mothering myself. I'm good at mothering my children and allowing myself to fully let in the joy that is here for me to experience. So that's a slight detour, but it does serve the point of what I'm wanting to share with you today, which is that I go on this quick trip to Dallas, I'm leaving my kids behind. So probably some of that anxiety is getting ignited there that old narrative that I have. You know, I'm not cut out for this, I am not a good mother, I'm leaving my kids behind. Whatever kind of like bs narratives that I have personally about being a mother, and that the broader society kind of dishes to us as mothers that if we ever leave our kids behind for any reason at all that we're a terrible mother. So I go on this trip and I'm having this, you know, I almost want to call it low grade anxiety, but it's really not because I'm realizing as I'm traveling that the anxiety is actually not very low grade. It's like either my awareness of it has been earned up, or the anxiety is worse than I remember it being, because I do remember having an ability to kind of move through my experience and have that anxiety be there and just kind of be like it's fine, it's fine, everything's fine. But as I was traveling this time, I was just like, Wow, this anxiety is ever present. It's talking to me. And because I've been listening to Esther Hickson, because I have this concept of the gap between my physical self and my broader being, I was like, this anxiety is talking to me. It is showing me where there's a gap between what I know to be true and my deepest self, my highest self, my truest self, and what I'm telling myself to be true in this present moment. So I just started paying really close attention. I was like, I want to know what the thought patterns are that are generating this kind of vibration in my body. So just to give you a couple of really simple examples, I'm on the first leg of my journey. I flew from Nashville to Atlanta, Atlanta to Dallas, and I just immediately start worrying about having too tiede of a connection in Atlanta. I'm like double checking the time, what time do we land? What terminal do I land in? What terminal do I have to get to? Is that going to be enough time? I'm already picturing myself, you know, rushing and running from one thing to the next. And I started imagining myself, you know, like having a hard time getting my luggage. And then at one point on the flight, I go to look up my rental car information and realize that I've forgotten to book a rental car. What happened was a few weeks prior, when I was booking the trip, I went to go book a rental car, and I logged into my app for my rental car company and realized that my name hadn't yet been updated to my married last name. Since it's been so long since I've traveled on my own and booked a rental car, I haven't booked a rental car through my app, so it was still my maiden name. Even though I've been married and my name has been changed for a couple of years. I saw that it was still my maiden name, and I thought, you know what, I'm probably going to run into issues if I show up at the rental car company and my license has my married name on it and my account is under my maiden name. So instead of booking a car, I'm gonna call them tomorrow morning and update, you know, my last name, and then I'll book a car. Well, I just forgot to do that after I had been in the app. In my brain, it was like the task was sort of checked off, and so I just totally forgot to call. So as I'm on this first leg of my journey, I'm panicking. I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm going to get to Dallas. I'm going to get to the rental car company. They're not gonna have any cars, and I know they're really strict about this kind of stuff, and I'm screwed. And the story I start telling myself is like, oh, Ali, you always do this. You're such a space cad at You're sodisorganized you know, this always happens to you. You're always doing this, You're always making these kinds of mistakes. It's such a simple mistake. You should have just booked it when it was. And I'm noticing this narrative playing out in my head, and I'm already picking out like where did this narrative come from? Who told me that I'm a space? Who told me that I'm disorganized? And I'm picking all of that up. But I'm just really noticing, I'm like trying to put some distance between that narrative and my real self. Like what I mean by distance is just going like, that's not me talking to myself. That's a program I've taken on. That's someone else's voice that I've taken on as my own. That's playing out right now. But that's not me. That's not what I really think about myself. That's not how I really feel about the world. That's not how I feel about my life experiences. That's not the moral I want to make of this story. That's not the controlling idea of this story. So I'm just paying close attention. And then I decide, at one point on this journey, I'm gonna flip the narrative, and I'm like, I'm just going to practice this with something really simple, like the rental car, thing like getting from one leg of my journey to the next, making this tight transition in Atlanta. I'm just going to practice flipping the narrative and I'm going to see what happens. So I decided that the narrative I was going to make for the rest of my journey was, you know what's crazy? Things always work out for me, even when I make a mistake, even when I forget something, even when the turnaround is really tight. It's almost like weird. It's like the Red Seas part for me, and things just work out in my favor. I always get what I need, I oftentimes get what I want, and things just always work out great for me. I don't know what it is. It's the weirdest thing. Things always work out great for me. So notice how this is the new controlling idea of my story. The controlling idea before was I'm disorganized. I'm such a space cadet. This always happens to me. I needed to be more organized or efficient or something like that or whatever. I had to like have this figured out. So I start wondering to myself, what happens if I flip the script, what happens if I tell myself things always work out for me? And I'll tell you the first objection that my brain gave me to telling this story is I was just like, Oh, my god, how entitled of you to think that things always work out for you? You know, I was having this imaginary conversation in my head with an imaginary person who's not real. It doesn't exist with someone going like, oh, it must be nice for you, things always work out for you. And it's almost like that imaginary person I was having a conversation with was like another part of myself. Like if you've heard of parts, work and therapy, we have all these many different parts of ourselves. It's kind of like the peanut gallery in your brain that's always talking to you. The parts are often representative of different people in our lives who have had an impact on us or different influences. Is sort of like incoming data from the media or whatever that have become these parts of us. So that's a part of me that's talking to me, that's going like, good, must be nice for you. And I'm thinking about how sometimes I look at people who seem to like skip through life footloots and fancy free, not worrying about a thing, and things always seem to work out for them, And I can sometimes have a bit of that cynical attitude towards those people. It's like, Oh, it must be nice for you, things always work out for you. Doesn't happen that way for me? It was just like what would happen if I took on this story for myself? So I started telling myself over and over again, things always work out for me. It's the weirdest thing, Like, no matter what I do, I can't mess it up. Things always just come together for me perfectly in the end. Even if they don't work out the way I thought they were going to, they just do work out well. I like, you know, rush to my quick connection in Atlanta. I'm about to get on the second flight and I'm one of the last people to get on the plane, and so I scan my boarding pass and the attendant at the door says to me, where are you sitting? And I said, I'm sitting in Comfort Plus and he goes, okay, Well, because I've been told that I'm supposed to make everyone check their bags. But since you're in comfort plus, I'll let you take your bag on. And I was like, oh, look at that. Things always work out for me. And I just noticed how flipping the script like that forced me to look for evidence that that new script was true. It's something so simple. It's like, even if I'd had to check my bag, not the end of the world, they would checked it, you know, Gate checked the bag, and I would have picked it up in Dallas, no problem. But I knew that when I got to Dallas, I had another tight turnaround. I was gonna have to really quickly run and get a rental car and hop in the car and drive right away out to this wedding so that I could make it to the wedding in time. And so every minute mattered. So I got on the next flight and I'm in a hurry trying to book my rental car. I'm like, I'll just book the rental car on the app as it is with my maiden name, and I'll worry about the married name thing when I get to my destination, because I want to just make sure that I can at least secure a car. So I'm in a rush trying to book my rental car before we take off, and I have to put my phone into airplane mode, and I'm like hurrying, hurrying, hurrying, and I'm like, oh, the flight's gonna take off. I'm not gonna have enough time. And all of a sudden, the pilot comes over the monitor and says, you know, there's some storms in the area. It's going to take us a minute. We're going to be delayed by about ten minutes, and we should get you up in the air, no problem. I was like, Oh, look at that. Things always work out for me. It's the weirdest thing. No matter what I do, I can't mess it up. Things always are just sort of working out in my favor. Even if they don't work out the way that I plan, they always work out for me. So I book my rental car and I can still feel this kind of low level anxiety going, like, they're never gonna let you take a car if the name on your driver's license is different than the name on your account. So I'm still having this low level anxiety about that. And again, you can't really call it low level, Like I was like so aware of this sort of like weighty feeling in my chest that was just like that's never gonna work out. They're never gonna let you do that. You're gonna be stranded in the Dallas airport. You know, Like that part of me is like exaggerating things, like overly worrying, overthinking these things. And so I just keep telling myself the new story. I just keep going. You know what, things always work out for me. Whatever I do, I can't mess it up. They always just kind of work out for me in the end. I don't know what to tell you. That's just the way that my life goes. So I get to Dallas, I go to the rental car place. I'm a National gal, And if you've never rented from National, then you need to know that when you run from National, you don't have to check in with an agent at all. You literally get to go straight to where the cars are. They leave the keys inside of the car, like you know, either in the glove box or the cup holder or whatever. So you just go straight to the aisle, get the car that you want, and then you drive the car to check out. So you're when you're checking out the first time that you hand them your paperwork and your license, you're already in the car and you're about to exit the rental car company. So I go get in this really long line of cars, and there's this woman in front of me who pulls up to the attendant and she hands over her license and her paperwork. And I noticed that she's like getting into a long conversation with the agent and I can't hear what they're talking about because I'm in my own car, but they're talking back and forth, talking back and forth, and finally they're kind of raising their voices. She's getting really frustrated and upset. And there's a line of I don't know, ten or fifteen cars, and the agent is telling her she can't check out. She's going to have to back all the way up down this very very narrow pathway through a line of fifteen cars. It's really stressful. The woman is in tears, she's crying. She's telling this woman like, I don't I can't possibly back up through all these cars. I don't know how to do this. She's raising her voice, and the agent is telling her like, I don't know how to tell you. You know, if you don't know how to back up a car, I guess that's your problem. She's just like use the backup camera, do what you gotta do, like it's not my issue, it's yours. And that was kind of that. And the whole time I'm watching this go down, my heart is like thumping in my chest because I'm going, Oh my god, that's gonna be me. That's gonna be me. It's gonna be I'm gonna go up there, and she's gonna tell me the same thing, Like this woman has the same issue I have, and she's gonna tell me the same thing. And I'm gonna have to back up through all these cars too, And I'm like really feeling for this woman and really panicking, and I just keep going. It's so weird. Things always work out for me. And I pull up to the window and I hand over my driver's license and she goes to look up my reservation and she's like, I don't see your reservation in here. Can you give me a reservation number? And I'm my heart's something so hard inside of my chest. I don't know, like I felt like I was like almost having like a trauma response or something like I felt like I was about to get in huge trouble. You know that feeling you have when you're a kid, and you didn't do something quite the right way, and you're just like, I'm about to get in huge troubles. I'm just like bracing for impact. And I read her my reservation number and she's like, oh, I have you in here, but I have you under this name. And I was like, yeah, that's my married name on my license. It must not be updated in your system. And I just hold my breath and she goes, okay, and she hands me my licen's back and she goes, have a nice day. And I drive out of that rental car garage. Every bone in my body just like deep sigh, like I can't believe I got away with that. And I'm like, it's the weirdest thing. Everything just ends up working out for me. It's so strange. I don't know how this happens, but things always work out in my favor. Even if they don't work out the way that I think they're going to, they always work out for me. So I run to the hotel as fast as I can, check into my room, change my clothes super fast. I've got like a fifteen minute turnaround to get in my formal dress for the wedding. Throw on some makeup, brush, my hair, earrings good enough, check it out in the mirror, rush out in my heels and my dress and get in my car and start driving to the wedding. I've got my directions on my GPS on my phone, per the usual, and as I'm driving i go, I notice that my cell phone battery is low, so I go to plug in my cell phone and I realize that I've brought a cord to plug into the car, but the adapter isn't the same adapter. It doesn't fit into the car, so I can't plug my phone into the car. So I start to panic again. I'm like, oh my gosh, my phone's going to die. My phone's going to die. And I'm in the middle of nowhere of Texas. I have no idea where I'm going. There's nothing around here. I'm going to get stranded. I'm going to not be able to make it to the wedding. I'm going to have come all this way. I'm gonna miss the whole thing. I'm going to miss it, and I'm not even gonna get to see my friend get married. So this is the story that's playing out in my head, and I just start to tell myself. I'm like, you know what, this is experimental. I'm just gonna stick with my story. I'm just gonna tell myself everything always works out for me. It's the weirdest thing. So I'm driving through the middle of nowhere, Texas. I get the ten percent warning on my phone there's ten percent battery left. I see a sign for like a quick stop gas station, and I'm like, Okay, I'm going to stop here because I don't think I'm going to make it to the wedding before my phone dies. And I don't understand the directions. There's like fifteen turns that I'm supposed to take before I get to the wedding, and it's another, you know, thirty five minute drive. So I'm just gonna stop at this gas station and see if some kind soul might let me plug my phone in. So I stop at this gas station. I'm in the middle of nowhere, Texas, in a normal dress and heels. It's pouring down rain, like pouring down rain. So I cover my head with a scarf, run into the gas station and I ask the attendant. I'm like, do you have a spot where I could plug in my phone? And he's like sure, come right over here. So he like ushers me around, plugs in my phone. He's looking at me kind of funny because you know, I'm in a formal dress in the middle of nowhere, Texas. He's like, where are you headed? And I was like, I'm headed to a wedding. My phone's about to die. I don't know where I'm going. You know, I'm still thirty five minutes away from the wedding. There's just a lot of turns. I don't think I'm gonna be able to make it without my phone. And I'm looking at my watch going like I'm going to be late, Like I'm not going to I'm going to miss the ceremony. So he goes, well, plug your phone in there, sit down right here. He pulls up a chair for me, and then he goes, why don't you write down the directions so that way in case your phone dies, you've got a backup. So he goes to get me a piece of paper and a pen. He brings it over to me. I write down all the directions. He's like, yeah, leave it in, leave it plugged in for as long as you can, and then when you have to atlast minute that you have to get in the car, just take the phone, hope it makes it, and then you'll have the paper directions as a backup. So I wait about five more minutes. At the last minute that I'm watching the GPS kind of tick up, the wedding starts at five. It's for twenty five, twenty seven, twenty nine, and I'm like, I gotta go. I'm going to be five minutes late to the wedding, but I got to get in the car right now. So I unplug the phone, get in the car, drive the rest of the way to the wedding. My phone literally makes it until the minute I pull into the driveway is when the phone dies. And I've got these paper directions as my backup, so I'm like, you know, reviewing the paper directions next to the directions that are on the phone to make sure that I know exactly where I am. And I get to the wedding, I'm the last one there. I park my car, I run in the pouring down rain to where the ceremony is happening, and I walk up to the outside of the ceremony and realize that the ceremony has already begun. There's a woman standing outside the door. Who's like, hey, the ceremony has already started. We're going to have you wait out here until after the bri walks down the aisle. I'm like, totally makes sense, definitely, don't want to interrupt the ceremony. I will wait out here gladly, no problem. And yet it's also freezing cold and raining outside, and I'm in a formal dress and in heels, and like I have a scarf, you know, kind of like over my head to shield my head from the rain. And the bride's coming around the corner and she looks out the window and sees me standing out there, and she tells the wedding planner inside, like let her in. So the wedding planner stops the procession, opens the door, lets me in, has me like scoot very like indiscreetly around a corner so that I have a spot to stand in the back of the room so that I can watch my friend come down the aisle with her dad. I was just like, oh, my gosh, things always work out for me. It's so weird, Like no matter what I do, things always work out for me. And I was just witnessing in real time how myself telling that story became both the filter through which I saw my experiences and also the blueprint that was building the life in front of me. And what's most this about all of it, I think, is how my anxiety dissipated. How by the time I was leaving the wedding and driving back to the hotel, I had found a spot at the reception to plug in my cell phone, so I had good cell phone battery. But I just was in a different headspace. I was in a different emotional space. I was more aligned with myself. I was like, Wow, what a great day. I'm going to get every single thing that I need and probably a lot of things that I want because things always work out in my favor. And shifting this story was like an instantaneous way to shift my experience of the day. And who knows how my experience would have been different if I had stuck with this story. Oh my gosh, there's such a space good at I can't believe you did this. You know you're always doing stuff like this. You're not organized enough, Like, how could you expect to travel on your own? You can't even You're so forgetful. You should have booked this back when you know, back when you tried a few weeks ago, you can't be trusted like those types of things that I was telling myself. Who knows how my experience would have shifted if I was bringing that energy into all of my interactions. You know, would the man at the gas station have been so kind and friendly to me? Would the woman at National Car Rentals? Would she have been so kind and friendly to me? Actually, the woman who got yelled at and had to back up through all of those cars, I feel so much compassion for her. I was really feeling for her because I just felt like she really was not treated fairly in that interaction. But you have to wonder what kind of energy she was bringing to the agent that pulled that anger and vitriol out of the agent. Like why did the agent respond so differently to my request than she did to her request? This is not me like putting myself on a pedestal or making myself better. Then it's actually genuinely me asking the question what happens when we shift our mindset? What happens when we assume that something really great is going to happen, When we assume that something positive is going to come out of this instead of something negative. You know, maybe in an alternate universe or alternate timeline, I would have to back my way through fifteen cars. But even that experience would have felt really different. If I was telling myself things always work out for me, then it would have felt if I was telling myself, Oh, I'm such a screw up. I do this all the time. This is my fault. You know, I should have thought about this. If I only I would have done this differently, this never would have been happening to me. That energy is a really different energy than like I got this. Yeah, things always just work out for me. I don't know what to tell you, but things always just sort of work out in my favor. And this really made an impact on me, this experience this weekend. It felt like just an important moment in my life, another moment of realizing that I have the agency to shift my own experience. I have the agency to write my own story. The controlling idea of my story is things always work out for me. I mean, would you like to hear a story from someone who says, I want to tell you a story about how things always work out in my favorite no matter how chaotic and weird things get things always work out for me. It's the craziest thing. And I want to tell you a story about how that's true. Isn't that a fascinating story that you want to listen to? Versus a story where someone says, like, you know, things never work out for me, like my life always goes to shit no matter what I do. You can almost feel, like, feel that resonance in your body. Stop and just pay attention for a second. I want you to pay attention to what happens in your body when I say these words. Things always work out for me. It's the weirdest thing. Events and circumstances just fall together in my favor everywhere I go. Just feel the way that feels when I say that to you, or if you were to say it yourself, feel the way that that feels in your body. Now, feel the way this feels. Life never works out for me. It's always just such a shitchin no matter what I do, it just never comes together the way that I want it to. Yeah, I mean like I'm always just screwing things up. I don't know, like maybe if I could figure out a better way and maybe things would work out. But yeah, It's just never worked out like that for me. Can you feel like I feel this like almost like not in my stomach. I feel that having this in my chest I was talking about the vibration of anxiety comes back into my body when I tell myself that story. And you know, I know this is sort of silly things. It's like other things happen too along the way, where like I was worried that the overhead compartments were going to be full, and there was like this perfectly perfect, like the size of my suitcase space in the comment apartment right above my seat on the final flight of the day, so that I didn't have to check my bag. And stuff like that is just silly. It's like, well, whatever, so you have to check your bag. It's not that big of a deal. But I use this as an example because there are plenty of things that are happening in my life right now that are not petty or small. They're not as small as a space in an overhead compartment. There's some things I'm going through in my life that I've talked about some and maybe some day I'll be able to talk about them more. But certain things that I have not been allowed to talk about fully because they're still in a really delicate position and there's a lot of people involved, and it's just not the right stuff to talk about them publicly yet. But my husband and I have been what feels like an incredibly long all is Lost moment around one particular topic in our life that affects many other parts of our life, namely the financial piece, and it has been such a saga. And it's like some days the external circumstances say to me like things are going to work out perfectly in your favor, and sometimes the external circumstances say to me like, you're screwed. You are so screwed, and you've made huge mistakes and you're never going to get out of this alive and this is going to ruin your life. You know, I know that sounds over dramatic, but I'm dead serious that there are certain days where I feel the one way and certain days when I feel the other way. And notice the difference in the resonance in your body. And the point I want to make with this, and the point I want to have wanted to make with Write your Story, is that you do get to decide which story you choose to tell yourself. And there are all kinds of objections that come up for me when I try to shift the more positive story, the one that I already talked about, which is like, oh, it must be nice for you. You know, you sort of feel guilty accepting the privilege or accepting the I don't know of another word other than like status that comes with being someone who things always work out for you. I feel a sense of like, there's an objection that comes up that's like, you don't deserve that, You're not worthy of that whatever. But the fact of the matter is like, the only thing that makes you worthy of that story is choosing it, just deciding to say, yeah, things always work out for me. I don't know what to tell you. That story is a choice. And when you take on that story, when that becomes the controlling idea of your story, it changes the way that you interpret your experiences. It changes the way that the data comes at you, It changes the way you see things, it changes the way you experience things, and it changes the outcome. So with this particular outcome in our lives, and again I can't share all the details right now, but there is a circumstance that feels like it's teetering on a yes or a no, Like it's it's unclear whether it's going to go the way that we want it to go. And when I think about it not going the way that I want it to go, I feel that sense of panic, dread, that havingness in my chest that like, oh, this is going to be so bad, We're never going to climb out of this pit kind of a thing. But I'm choosing to say to myself, things always work out for me. It's the weirdest thing. They always work out in my favor. No matter what I do, I cannot mess it up. No matter what happens to me, this cannot be shaken. I oftentimes get what I want, and even when I don't get what I want, I get something better than what I thought I wanted. And when I really allow myself to lean into that story to believe it with all my heart, I'm telling you it changes the way that I feel in my body. It brings me into alignment with my broader being. It makes me feel so free and safe and happy and joyful, and like Esther Hicks says, it's like, why would you want to feel anything other than those things, And I know we have all kinds of objections that come up. One of my objections that comes up even as I'm talking about this is just like, well what about the truth?