47a. Are You Triggered?
So you’ve been triggered, and what that means is often you start closing off because something there is annoying and you’re closing to it. Now I wonder, if you dig in to the thing that’s triggering you, it’s likely going to be taking you down to something that you’ve protected yourself from, or that you don’t agree with and you’ve created protection around it. So what I want to challenge you today to do, because we can find out a lot about ourselves from our triggers, and our triggers can really limit the amount of information that we’re allowed to take in.
So if somebody’s speaking to you and you’re sensitive and triggered and feel like people are constantly criticizing you, then you’re likely not going to be hearing what they’re saying. And they may not be criticizing you, they may be giving you a little bit of feedback and you may be taking it in a way based on your past experience that’s closing you down. So the ideal would be that nothing on the outside would ever trigger you. So as a fun game today, take note of yourself. Watch the way you respond, listen to where you’re listening, listen to the way you’re hearing and responding. And if you’re finding yourself getting offended, agitated, annoyed, hurt, triggered, then take note of that and make a list of it. And then I’m going to coach you in the next coaching excerpt on the go about what to do next. So let’s make a list today, and if you come up with something that’s really curious to you, send me a note. I love to hear from you.
47b. My Triggers Have a Theme?
Hello, this is Anne with your Coaching on the Go. Last time we talked about being triggered, and your assignment was to note when you feel triggered and make a list of those triggers, and now that you’ve done that, because often we have a certain trigger that is more dominant than any other, but there are… We’ll have basically a trigger for anything that we have something deeper about, and the trigger is really about us. It’s not about the person who said it. What you might find is if you clear what’s underneath a trigger, then somebody could say the very same thing to you when you’ve cleared it, and it won’t trigger you because you’re not going to be taking it personally. It’s not going to be connected to something that goes all the way back into your two-year-old or your four-year-old.
I had a discussion with one of our speakers for our next event, it’s said that in utero we begin to create our system of operation, what we believe and what we think is true. And I have a friend that revealed to me recently that when she was 17 months old, something traumatic happened and she began to respond in a certain way, and it has affected her life. She didn’t realize until now in her 50s that she made that choice and that she shifted the way that she operates to protect herself at that moment. So our triggers have a vast amount of information in them.
For years, I walked around being annoyed with things and people, things on the outside of myself, and really it was information for me about what’s going on inside of myself. So it’s an interesting perspective to know that the people or things triggering you really aren’t triggering you. It’s something within you that you’ve set up, usually for your own protection, usually to adapt to something traumatic that you experienced and to make sense of it for you, to put it in a category and keep you safe. But often when you go back and look at these things, they actually are doing more harm for you now than they are at protecting you.
So today your assignment is to go into this list of triggers that you created yesterday, and you can continue noticing for weeks. You can do this for the rest of your life. You can notice a trigger and then go into it. But for today, we’re simply starting to put these triggers in categories. So if you can notice when you’re annoyed or triggered or hurt, anything that bubbles up, emotions that don’t feel good, keep track of those and then see if you’re finding a pattern. I would highly suggest to not just find one trigger and think that’s it for you. Allow yourself to continue to investigate on this. It can be a lifelong process that’s really enlightening. So today you’re starting to put those triggers into categories and notice if you have some themes on how you’re triggered, and then we’ll continue.
Have a beautiful day. And I really enjoyed hearing from some of you about your triggers yesterday, so feel free to return an email and tell me what your trigger is. And better yet, what I would really appreciate today is if you go into our Facebook page, go into our SpiritRiver community and be bold enough to put your trigger or put a trigger in there, or at least say hi. I would love to see this community become a service to one another. So if you start engaging and meeting one another, that will be beneficial to you. Sending you big, big love and joy for a beautiful day.
47c. What’s it all about?
We’ve been talking about triggers for the last day. This is Anne with your Coaching on the Go. The last couple of sessions we’ve talked about triggers. So what happens is when something is… Tony Robbins talked about this, it’s the first time I heard about it, but it makes so much sense. If you’re in a situation, just in your daily life, and you get triggered, meaning something has an emotional kick to it, something that’s bigger than the moment that’s happening, and you find yourself caught up in something that’s way bigger. If you look at the actual moment, and your response to it is magnified above and beyond what it should be or what you think would be normal for that situation, then that trigger is connecting other events that have gone on before this.
I’ll give an example. Years ago I hurt my back, and there was a certain intense pain that I had when I hurt my back, and then it stopped me from rowing on the women’s rowing team. I had worked all year, I secured a seat in the racing eight of the crew team, it was a lot of work, out of 140 people. I got that position and then I hurt my lower back, I never was able to race. And so not only did I have the pain, but I had the feeling of not accomplishing, and the disappointment, the feeling of disappointment. I took away my own power in that situation, feeling disempowered.
So when I would reinjure my back over the years, it would go to a feeling of worthlessness. It would go above and beyond having a back pain. So, that’s what I’m talking about. I’m talking about when it’s bigger than the event itself. So now you get to track that. You get to track where it’s going down the rabbit hole. So you have a list of triggers that you’ve created in the last two audios, if you’re paying attention and doing the work, and if you didn’t, you can go back and still do the work. It’s never too late to do the work. This is ongoing work, by the way.
So today’s challenge for you is exercise for you. If you’re growing and you’re wanting to really move forward, you owe it to yourself to look curiously. Be curious. Where did I feel this before? What’s this really about? We say in the business, (I don’t say in the business) what’s underneath it? We kind of live in the surface sometimes. So what’s underneath this behavior that you’re exhibiting, this trigger? This emotionally heightened situation, what’s it really about? Get curious with yourself today and let’s continue digging in on triggers. If you start finding something, make notes on it.
As always, I try to give you, what is called, a scavenger hunt. Today’s scavenger hunt, go to Instagram, SpiritRiver Coaching, connect over there. I’m going to be starting to throw more and more content in two areas. I’m throwing it into Instagram, SpiritRiver Coaching, and I’m throwing it into Facebook, the SpiritRiver community. So get yourself over there, become part of this active community. We have a lot of listeners. Start to become engaged in a way that you take some risks and you let your voice be heard and seen in these community pages and become a contributor. When we vulnerably share, we serve. I love you guys. Have a beautiful day.
47d. Down The Rabbit Hole
So you have been investigating these triggers a little bit, what are you finding? You’re finding that they are from something prior. You’re seeing a series of events where this particular thing has been hurting. So you can find yourself in a conversation with someone, say, a loved one, say your partner, your husband, your wife, your child, and all of a sudden you’re six years old and you’re fighting for yourself, you’re fighting for your dignity. You don’t want to feel silly, so you’re fighting for your feelings, you’re fighting for your safety.
So this is a vulnerable spot, and this is where you’re going to be touching into parts of yourself that sometimes you have packaged up and you haven’t touched since they hurt so bad. And if you’re not able to get down there, down into these places… This is what I do. This is one of the things that I help people with. I support people in traveling into places within themselves where they have blocked themselves. If you can’t release these blocks, then that’s why you are stuck. Whenever we expand… and nothing to feel bad about. Whenever we expand, part of us, the part of us that wants to stay safe, starts closing off opportunities, and the part of us that wants to expand is so excited and can’t expand because you’re having a conflict.
So when you have this beautiful idea and you’re ready to go on it, and you hesitate, it could be… It could look like many things. It can look like procrastination, for one, but really there’s something down deep. There’s something under the procrastination. If you don’t go under there to look, or you don’t get help to look, because it’s really a complicated process. Sometimes you’re going to be a procrastinator and can just label yourself that way. You can stay in the safe zone, but it doesn’t feel good because you’re not satisfied with your life.
So a good way to tell if you are operating on the highest level is you feel satisfaction if there aren’t any blocks or resistance. So if you’re steeped in resistance, if you feel conflicted, if you have been stuck for years in a spot, or you find that you derail opportunities, or you’re in the same relationship over and over again with different people, it’s you. You’ve got something to look into and shift, and all of those things can be shifted. It’s complicated sometimes because we’ve been living with that operating system for such a long time, and we’re familiar with it so it doesn’t seem unusual to us. So that’s why even the highest level human beings, they have people help them shift away things that aren’t working anymore. It’s never ending.
The thing is, though, that you get better and better at it, you get better and better at seeing it, going beneath it, tracing it, releasing it and figuring out how to continue. So you become kind of a… We call it a self-cleaning oven. You become able to just understand the process of shifting away from resistance so that you can continue to move freely. And you also become a person that understands that whenever you expand to the next level, you’re going to face some level of resistance from the part of yourself that wants to keep you safe. Because you’re expanding, you’re expanding into new territory, and new ways of resisting are going to be bubbled up from down deep by your internal guidance system of protection.
So it’s all good, it’s a big process, and that’s why I have different coaches that help me so I can go through this process quickly and I can keep moving in life. We’re not born to be average, we’re not born to be always following. We’re leaders. Down deep, we’re leaders and master creators. If you are not in a position where your leader and master creator is operating freely, then connect with me and I’ll get you the support that you need to discover things about yourself and expand into that new territory.
With deep, great love for you and excitement for what you’re about to create, have a beautiful day and do the work. I’m going to post a link later this week for a coaching call, and you can sign up for a coaching call this weekend and see what your next steps are. Free yourself.