You may have heard of The Addition Principle, even if you didn't hear it by that name. It is a powerful tool for letting go of unwanted thoughts and behaviors. Learn what it is, how you might use it, and how it is helping me to move forward in some long overdue ways.
Find more info about Jay Benke at https://www.cleverhuman.org/about
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If you're a woman who appreciates connecting with other women in community with vulnerability and compassion, please join us in the Solidarity Sister! Facebook group at:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/716800349946338/
The Solidarity Sister! Book Club has begun and runs through the end of May. We're reading Brené Brown's Gifts of Imperfection over a period of 15 weeks, and connecting via Zoom and Marco Polo. Find more info in the FB group. Sign up at https://forms.gle/ZHpfhd8hwCpw6NL2A
FB: The Solidarity Sister Podcast IG: @solidaritysister.kristinwilson
You may have heard of The Addition Principle, even if you didn't hear it by that name. It is a powerful tool for letting go of unwanted thoughts and behaviors. Learn what it is, how you might use it, and how it is helping me to move forward in some long overdue ways.
Find more info about Jay Benke at https://www.cleverhuman.org/about
*************************************
If you're a woman who appreciates connecting with other women in community with vulnerability and compassion, please join us in the Solidarity Sister! Facebook group at:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/716800349946338/
The Solidarity Sister! Book Club has begun and runs through the end of May. We're reading Brené Brown's Gifts of Imperfection over a period of 15 weeks, and connecting via Zoom and Marco Polo. Find more info in the FB group. Sign up at https://forms.gle/ZHpfhd8hwCpw6NL2A
FB: The Solidarity Sister Podcast IG: @solidaritysister.kristinwilson
Kristin:
Hello and welcome to another minisode of Solidarity Sister with Kristin Wilson. In today's episode, I'm going to share with you a strategy that just might be the key you need to letting go of bad habits and thought patterns that aren't serving you. I'm going to be honest, I've definitely heard other people talk about this concept, though they may have a different spin on it. I am the total of all the information I've taken in, the experiences I've had, and the choices I make. So these mini sodes are born from that combination. I do like to give attribution to great ideas when I can. The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy was a recent read for me. If you haven't read it, Please do. It's so good. And something along these lines was talked about there, though my take definitely expands on what he shared and includes some new ideas. So, what is The Addition Principle? In a nutshell, it is a powerful tool for letting go of bad habits and thought patterns by crowding them out. It is most effective when we can come to a place of being present and conscious in our lives, i. e. not numbed out. I have been really working hard on myself the last few months to open my heart up to life again. I know I spent a lot of time in survival mode over the last couple of years, or decades maybe, though I can give myself grace for being that way. We cannot selectively numb. By numbing the difficult feelings, I also numbed my potential to feel joy and hampered my ability to connect with the people who matter most to me. I feel everything now. In the moment, this means that I've cried a lot lately, as there is some tough stuff going on here, and I've been deeply sad about that. It also means that I have felt some exhilarating moments of joy and hope and profound gratitude, and I have truly felt them all. As any regular listeners know, I've been listening to crazy amounts of audiobooks over the last two and a half years. I suspect in that time that I listened to close to a thousand books. I added these books into my life to crowd out the voices in my head that were full of worry over things like Dave's COVID recovery. He was in the ICU with COVID and almost lost that battle. I'm so grateful he didn't. And then there were some heavy things with some of our older kids. Parenting teens and young adults offers a lot of challenges. As does watching your parents face the difficulties of aging and declining health. I also became stressed about the clutter in my house and I think I was trying to drown that out too. Adding something to your life to numb out from the hard things is something that lots of us do. However, this is a counterfeit of The Addition Principle. While those things may serve to crowd out our thoughts and feelings around whatever needs healing in us, they aren't working towards our highest good and all of that numbing will eventually compound our struggles. I know. Because I have experienced this. The Addition Principle asks us to be intentional about what we add. Let me give you some examples. In the book, The Compound Effect, Hardy talks about someone he worked with that spent a lot of time keeping up on the latest news, like upwards of three hours a day. He came to realize that this wasn't serving him and was in fact increasing feelings of anxiety. Rather than strong arming himself into giving up this time in the news, and then being concerned about what he was missing because FOMO is real, Hardy encouraged him to intentionally choose something to add to his life. If I remember correctly, the man wanted to spend more quality time with his kids and get into photography. By focusing on the things he was adding, he grew to really enjoy that time, acquire new skills, and deepen relationships. He didn't even miss the news anymore. Let's look at The Addition Principle in terms of changing eating habits. Maybe you're eating too many desserts or drinking too much soda or alcohol. The Addition Principle might look like putting all your focus into increasing your intake of fruits and vegetables or into fun flavored seltzer water and fancy cups. You might still have some desserts or soda or alcohol, but as you get intentional around filling up on these better choices, you'll find that you'll naturally consume less of what you were trying to get away from. Where focus goes, energy flows. In my life, I have struggled to let go of some deep resentments that have been a large part of keeping my heart closed. In the last few months, I have finally taken some steps to address these head on. They weren't serving me. The Addition Principle has really helped me with this. What have I added? The three most powerful additions for me have been 1. A focus on strengthening my gratitude practice, 2. An increase in the amount of time I spend listening to good music with an emphasis on worship music, and 3. more frequent and thoughtful prayers. The gratitude practice has been super life changing, though my circumstances haven't changed and in some ways have become more challenging. I feel different. I have so much more hope. One of the things I love about Brene Brown's Gifts of Imperfection is how in each of the 10 guideposts for wholehearted living, Brene talks about what we need more of and how by increasing that thing, we will be letting go of something else. For example, Guidepost 4 is on cultivating gratitude and joy, letting go of scarcity and fear of the dark. As I continue to add in more and more gratitude, I find myself crowding out feelings of scarcity as it relates to finances, but also as it affects how I feel in my relationships and how I feel about myself. I'm still a work in progress, to be sure. But I feel so much better about my current trajectory. The addition of praise music has blessed my life profoundly. It's not that I didn't listen to it before, I just didn't listen to it as often. I find now that I'm listening to actually less audiobooks and spending more time on praise music. By filling my mind and heart with truths about the goodness of God, I find an increasing ability to overcome feelings of anxiety. And do the things I feel God asking me to do. When thoughts of fear or despair come, I often find scripture verses or praise songs come into my mind to speak words of truth. This helps me to center my faith on Jesus Christ and remember that He is aware of me and I can trust Him. I also joined a class focused on becoming spiritually centered. Each week we meet on Zoom to listen to a recorded lecture, and then we work to put those principles into action through daily homework within community. A lot of the homework is prayer centered, and there are even certain assignments where we are praying over something, like really trying to pray over that thing 10 or 20 times in a day. As I have worked on increasing my prayers and focused on seeing myself and others in my life situations as God sees them, I have had unique thoughts and insights, which have made it easy to let go of those old resentments and to avoid creating new ones. So often we look at our lives in terms of what is going wrong or what we are lacking. We might even feel powerless to change. I have been caught in this place before. So if you are there now, solidarity friend, I've come to understand that we have so much more power to influence our lives than we realize. We always have a choice. There are always things we can add to our lives to make them feel more in alignment. Small and simple steps add up to make a huge difference. In gathering my thoughts for this mini sode, my friend Jay Benke came to mind. Jay and I have been in a couple of Marco Polo groups together. Some years ago, a mutual friend of ours was really stuck. She felt hopeless about her life situation, and Jay encouraged her that even if she didn't feel ready to take a step forward, that she could set aside some time each day to simply dream. That's what started Jay on her path forward. The Addition Principle works. Jay is a survivor of human trafficking. She ended up in a highly abusive marriage with a husband wholly unwilling to make changes to keep her and her kids safe. She used The Addition Principle to change her life by adding time each day to dream about what kind of life she wanted to create. As she spent time thinking about what life could be like, it helped her to see small ways she could already be living that life. She has since left that abusive marriage and is an advocate for victims of trafficking. Jay is a consultant for both the public and private sectors and has trained and educated tens of thousands of people. She's a powerful speaker and an agent for change. I'll put a link to her website in the show notes in case anyone could benefit from her work. I recently saw a Facebook post asking people to define what they felt the point of life was. One answer really stood out to me, refine the quality of our intention. I reached out to the person who left the comment for more info, and this is what he shared, quote, that comes from a YouTube podcast interview with Christian Sundberg. He spoke about the challenge of being a highly evolved spiritual being in the limitation of a dense physical body that often experiences pain surrounded by a whole of people being cruel to each other. And even then, all of that serves to refine the quality of our soul's intention. Another way he said it was, Wield love even in dense, painful circumstances. It touched me deeply, unquote. That touched me too. In opening my heart and becoming more and more thoughtful about the quality of my intentions and how I relate to myself and the world around me, I want to be a person who can wield love even in dense, painful circumstances, because pure love casts out fear. As I ponder over things in myself that have been preventing me from being in this space, it is all too easy to see the obstacles, the bad habits, and the unhealthy patterns. I don't want to ignore them because bringing awareness to them does help us see how we can change. But, I also don't want to be overcome by them. The Addition Principle is keeping me focused on adding all the good I can to my life and being intentional about what I need more of in order to live wholeheartedly. I invite you to give it a try. If you found this episode helpful, I would love for you to use those three little dots in the upper right hand corner in Apple Podcasts and choose to follow show. Additionally, if you choose go to show and scroll down. You can leave me a review. I love five star reviews because they let me know that what I am doing is adding value to other people. And also let's the algorithm know that this could be a podcast that might give value to others. Finally, if you know someone that would benefit from this episode or the podcast as a whole, please share this episode. You could even share it on your social media if you have found value here. Thank you for being part of the Solidarity Sister community. We needed you.