Stefanie (00:00.11)
ever noticed how one small thought can influence the whole rest of your day? Maybe you wake up and you stub your toe and then your shower is just too cold and you get in the car and the kids are fighting and you're stuck in traffic and you're late to work. All the things and all of a sudden you think, everything just keeps going wrong. And literally it does the rest of the day to the point that you just want to get home. You just want to throw off your shoes, take off the bra.
Lay in bed and relax and just wait for tomorrow. On the other hand, you can have a simple thought and instead you can think, wow, everything seems to be working out amazing today. I just closed that deal and this went right. I'm going to pick up food and take out and go enjoy my evening with my family. And you're just so excited about the positive results that you've been getting for the day. What's the difference? The difference comes back to what you were thinking.
Your thoughts influence how you're feeling and from how you're feeling is how you're going to observe what's happening around you. It's going to influence how you're reacting to the things that you experience and it's going to create the actions that you take, which gives you the results that you have in your life. The things that you get, the things that you experience all come back to what you are thinking.
That's why we're doing this mini series because I just want to make sure that we always have a point of reference throughout all the things that we talk about on this podcast, but we can come back and we can say, we learned how our thoughts influence the results that we're having in our life. We understand the core foundations for how our thoughts are created, what they can do in our lives and how they are directly impacting the results that we're getting because everything that we are setting up for ourselves, everything that we are striving to create, we've got to bring it back.
it has to start within us and it starts so simply at the very basic level which is your thinking. Proverbs 23, 7 says it best, for as he thinks in his heart so he is. Everything you believe about yourself, your abilities, what is possible for you, it all stems from your thoughts. So the question we need to assess is are your thoughts serving you? Are they creating the
Stefanie (02:22.092)
best version of your life that you want to live. You can intentionally start creating thoughts and they can be different than anything you've created in the past. Friend, this is your opportunity. This is what we're doing in this mini series. These four episodes are all about taking control of how you think, crafting thoughts on purpose to create the life you want to live. There are so many things that you have learned throughout your life.
things that you have been taught and trained on and experienced and just absorbed. There's so much that we just absorb from infancy through our childhood and then into adulthood and things that we watch on television, things that we read in books and podcasts, et cetera. We're taking in stuff all over the place. But sadly, so many of us are not intentionally learning anything about how we think. We are taught to think that thinking is learning as it's taught in the school system, that you
study a subject, you memorize this content, and you can regurgitate this content. Even make meaningful applications from this content. That is not thinking. Thinking is deep exploration, creating thoughts on purpose to guide your actions and your life. Where are we being taught that? It's in scripture. That's amazing. And so if we want to start to unpack what the Bible says, and so we can learn how to use that insight, that wisdom,
to apply in our own lives to live better lives. Because here's the thing, so many people are saying horrible things like, at my age, it's never gonna change. Don't expect me to change, not at my age. Have you heard people saying stuff like this? It's not just like elderly folks, it's people of all kinds of ages. Just, I'm just stuck in my ways. It's just the way it is. You better get used to me. This is how I am. Or here's what I heard recently. It was good enough for me.
Why isn't it good enough for you? As in talking about how they were brought up, how they were trained, what they went through. If it's good enough for them, why should we expect anything different? That's essentially what they're saying. And yet, can we not acknowledge that things have advanced? And things have advanced. And I've seen people on social media, people in my general age, in their 40s, saying things like, I know how to use checks. I can write in cursive. I can do math without a computer. And I'm like,
Stefanie (04:47.47)
Why does that matter? It is 2025. Let's examine what is relevant and their Mac and younger generations. Not too long ago, I applied for a job and went on two interviews and on the second interview, was like, no, this is definitely not a good fit for me because what they wanted, they said they were hiring for a manager and I was highly qualified to be able to run this department. I had the skill sets. I spoke to the skills. I spoke to my experience and how it would benefit them.
I even shared some ideas I had. I'm like, that's good. But do you realize that this job is about managing these people and these people tend to be on the younger side? And they were saying roughly people 20 years, 30 years younger than us. And they were saying, you need to be here. We need to know that you can be here on time every day managing these people, making sure they're showing up, they're doing their thing, they dressed appropriately for work and they need really a lot of help and a lot of guidance. They can't even figure out.
how to change the toilet paper in the bathroom. And I'm like, what? These are the kind of conversations that you think are the most important. And they had a whole limiting mindset about people just out of college, younger generations. And one thing they liked is that I had a lot of experience working with college students as a college professor. And they were like, can you take that and translate now to working with people who have just exited college who are working for us and get them to do their job?
get them to show up on time, get them to follow the dress code. The dress code is so important. I was like, is it really? And anyhow, we just had a discrepancy in how we thought about people in the younger generation. And there's a lot of people who judge all kinds of generations. They're too old, they won't get it. They're too young, they won't get it. You know, we just want to judge people by age and possibly you're judging yourself based on age. And the thing that I want to do is open up your perspective.
and how your age is not a limitation. Your age is part of your qualification. It's part of why you would be good in this role. This is why you can take your lived experience, your knowledge, your acquired skill sets, your wisdom, your maturity, your depth of knowledge, your experience in how you relate to other people, and you can bring that forward. And now you become an amazing asset.
Stefanie (07:10.924)
And it doesn't have to do anything with the fact that you're in your 40s or your 50s, wherever you're at, or that you've been out of the marketplace for so long. But you can look and say, here's what I can offer. And these are the skills that I have to bring because of who I am. This comes from shaping your thoughts. This comes from not focusing on age as a problem, but focusing on age as the benefit. Do you see the difference there?
This is why I say our thoughts are the silent script that's running in the background. It's running all the time. We have our thoughts that we're hearing all the time running through our head, the ones that we pay attention to and the ones that are just going around. There are some that come in and out like my mom always used to say in one ear and out the other, but then there are ones that we attach to and we hold on deeply to. And we tend to be negative minded. There's a lot of research to show how as humans we tend to focus
more on negative thoughts or playing a lot of them on repeat. This is extremely important to understand because if you want to shape your life in whatever positive direction you want to go, you've got to take control of your thoughts and start to notice the ones that are negatively impacting you, holding you back, keeping you stuck, not letting you move forward and do what you want to do because they are creating the doubt, the fear, the hesitation, the limitations. Those negative thoughts are going to play on repeat. They're going to keep you where you're at.
but you can intentionally catch them, say no thank you, bye bye, and send them away because they do not serve you. When I say that your thoughts serve you, that means they help to build you up, they help to take you forward. And God even tells us a lot of the things that we should be thinking about. And guess what? He never once tells us to think on doubt and fear and just to live in the misery of it. He tells us what to think on. It's very positive, it's very life affirming.
And it's abundant way of thinking because we are there to rise above and use his power to lift up our thoughts. And that's what we're going to do is we're going to learn how to harness our thoughts and to use them to guide the actions we're taking in the life that we're creating. Now I've said that multiple times because I want to make sure that you get this. This is what this whole series about. This is what ultimately life changing manifestation is about. And it all begins with what you think. That's why it's so important.
Stefanie (09:31.508)
And it begins by understanding the silent script. So that means you have to start to pay attention to your thoughts and be able to identify them and just creating awareness that they even exist. What is it that you are thinking about? And then how much of your day predominantly is spent thinking about which thoughts? That predominant attitude is what is going to shape the reality you're getting. So if most of the time you're walking around thinking of like a limiting thought and there's just not enough of something,
and all day long you're dwelling on how there's not enough, your brain is wired to keep showing you a perspective and filtering out the world so that all you notice is evidence of that thought. And that thought then becomes the reality that you have. This is why you can have people who live in the same household and experience life very differently. You can have people who go to the same school, get the same job opportunity, and you end up with very different results.
We can have the same almost, we can have almost exact same circumstances, the same exact privileges. And yet we can be very different all based on the way that we are thinking. Okay, I think I've laid out the value enough that you should understand the value, the importance of taking control of your thoughts. Now I want to give you some tips on how you can start to craft them and hone them for your benefit. Let's talk for a moment about what I call
backwards manifesting. What does this mean? Let me give you some examples. If you think that people are rude, then you are going to experience rude people. If you think money is hard to come by, you will continually be struggling to get and acquire money. This happens in everything. And one of the examples is when you believe in Murphy's Law. Murphy's Law says anything that can't go wrong will go wrong. Well, I grew up thinking that and I held on to that.
or bad things happen in threes. Have you heard that one? And so I'd be like, my goodness, I just witnessed two things are horrible. There's going to be a third thing happening today. And I just made space for the badness. made space and allowance for the bad things to happen in my life. There's a limitation to be there. And so that's why I call it backwards manifesting because you're manifesting the things that you literally don't want.
Stefanie (11:48.418)
but it's the things that you have allowed, the things that you believe are going to happen, and thus they come, because that's the foundation of manifestation. You get to set the thought, you get to set the intention, whatever it is that you want to create in your life, whatever it is, and then you have to be welcoming, accepting of it, make space for it to happen, and then you have to believe it is possible for it to happen. You have to be ready for it. And so most people can so easily drop in to believing
in the negative things happening. And they can create in abundance negative things because it's so easy to stay low value cycle, low energy that comes so naturally to us. And that's sad, but that is the reality of our human state. What you have to do is you have to elevate your thoughts so you can rise above, can raise your energy and you can become available for something up here, something in greater abundance that is positive.
There's life affirming. And this what we learn how to do with life changing manifestations. We're going to transform your life by focusing on what you do want to create so that we manifest forward positive instead of manifesting backwards. And this friend is why so many people say that they don't believe in manifestation and they can't see evidence of it. And yet we all do it. It's just reality of life. We're all creating based on our thoughts. It's just a matter of if they have awareness that their thoughts
are influencing what they do, what they observe, and the direction they're going to create in their life. So all I'm asking you to do, is to take the time to become aware of what it is that you're thinking. So you can notice, OK, I've been thinking this for the last five years. I see why I haven't been able to create and state the change that you've been thinking. Do you see that? You should be able to look back with some hindsight, with some understanding of why you've gotten to where you're at.
today because of the thoughts that you have allowed yourself to believe. The things that you have welcomed in, even if it was backwards manifesting, so to speak, you have allowed these things to come into your life because that is what you were allowing. That's what you were ready for. If you're like, hey, I'm ready to up level. I'm ready to be the version of myself. I'm ready to step into something better for myself. Then think about what it is that you're willing to allow. What are you ready to handle? What are you even working towards evolving to becoming?
Stefanie (14:13.612)
and you are going to develop into this person by how? I think you should know the answer by now, by changing your thoughts. We're just going to flip the pattern. You've been doing this. You've just been doing it in a negative off putting way. Now you can just flip it and intentionally create the thoughts you want to think and start to focus on that until you believe it, until you develop into that person. There's a level and there's a stage of all kinds of belief that you can get to for anything and everything.
because I've talked with people before. It's like, well, what do want me to stay? Then just a millionaire? I don't believe that. How can I possibly ever be a millionaire and I don't believe it? Well, first of all, you can sense by the way I'm saying that that would be a negative attitude and know that person should not go around saying that. Neither should you because you don't believe it. So say the thing that you can believe. Say the thing that you actually can attach to. If it would be something using that example, it would be
Just thinking good thoughts about people who are millionaires. Just start there. Find evidence that you can be a good person as a millionaire. And one of the limiting beliefs that a lot of people have is that people with money are not good people. So why in the world would you ever allow yourself to become a wealthy person if you thought they were all bad people? So there's so much here to unpack. There's a reason we haven't allowed other thoughts in. It's not that we just stay negative, but it's also because we have attached a negative value to something that could be positive.
There's nothing wrong with having wealth. There's nothing wrong with being a rich person. What we attach to that is our negative meaning and that's what we have allowed ourselves to think about that way of being. So see, you've got to break down your thoughts. You've got to start to get to even the root of where this thought came from because you could be holding onto a thought that you inherited from a parent, from a friend, from a sibling, from just something you heard on television, something you picked up on the radio, you're listening to a podcast, reading a book.
My goodness, we take in so many thousands of thoughts on a daily basis, multiply times the number of days that you've been alive, even when you were not fully aware as a baby state, infancy, toddlerhood, when you were just hearing things and just allowing it in. Up until about seven, you're just a sponge. You were literally just taking in, taking in, taking in until that higher part of your brain started to just turn on. It's not even fully developed, but the higher part of your brain starts to think for itself. And now you start to ask questions like why?
Stefanie (16:38.49)
Why do we think this? Why do we want to do this this way? And by your teen years, you're really starting to question why. And so much as your conflict sometimes with your parents, with your family, with your authority figures, because now you're starting to think at a different level. And by the time you get to college, by the time you start to enter adulthood, but then we almost regress because now we step into adulthood, which is new to us. And we're like, okay, well, I guess I got to do what my boss says. And you think that that's how it has to be.
And that's why sometimes we can even fall in. We've gone from peer pressure in high school to now we have pressure from our boss and from other people that were supposed to show up a certain way, act a certain way at work. And maybe we even have the pressure of thinking how we have to be an adult. You see, so much of your 20s is just figuring things out. I've really come to experience that. And even though I did so many things so early in life, I realized that a lot of the way I did that was just because of how I was programmed. I don't regret it. I'm just saying that's how I was programmed to think that it should be.
And so I was living the program that I had been input that I had held onto that I had believed for myself. And so we've got to look back now, now that we have our own maturity, our own life, our own foundations and use our thoughts to examine our thinking. Yes. And we've got to be able to analyze how we've been thinking, assessing if this is working for us or if we're still holding onto old programs that just aren't benefiting us, if we need to let those go.
We need to rewire. We need an update. You update your phone, your computer, all your technology devices. And here you are so advanced. You have this amazing brain, this amazing subconscious, and you've got to reassess what it is that that program that is running there. This is how we create change in our lives. So what if you could start to believe that things are working in your favor? What if you could believe that you were living out God's purpose for your life and he was going to start blessing and providing your next step?
Whatever it is, what if you could start to cast forward a positive vision and really start to attach, emotionally attach to the direction you're headed. That's a big part of it, is casting the vision and then you emotionally are there. You've anchored in to who you're gonna be in the future and why this matters. People say all the time, you've gotta know your why. And yes, it's true when you're growing a business, it's true when you step into motherhood.
Stefanie (19:00.234)
It's true so many things, but have we attached the why for what we're doing in our lives? And the next chapter that you're going to write in your story of life, do you know why? Do you know what you're aiming for and why it matters? So what if you believed there are abundant blessings for you in the future, coming right around the corner even? What if you believe things were working in your favor? What if you believe that you could stand in God's power to create? How do you think that would shift your whole life perspective?
and start to manifest different types of results. This is really possible for you. All starts with shifting our thinking. So stop running on autopilot. Stop just letting the thoughts that already have been there, the thoughts that have been hanging out for the last 20, 30 years, stop those thoughts. Examine them. See if they serve you. If there's any rewiring updates, new program you need to run, you can do that. But all starts by first creating that awareness of what thoughts are there.
and then you can start to identify which ones you want to change. The other thing I would say is unlike a computer update that can do lots of massive changes all overnight, you want to pace yourself because you don't want to try and just toss out everything you've ever believed, everything you've ever been and believed and thought about. Go gradually. Work on things that are really important. Think about the most important thing you would like to create just in like the next six months. Don't even do a whole year. What do you see yourself going in the next quarter?
and examine what is it going to take for me to get there and break it down and go backwards. If that's what it's going to take, then how do you need to feel and how do you need to feel? What are you thinking to feel that way? Because we know our thoughts influence our feelings and how we feel results in what we're going to do gives us the outcomes that we have. So you can work it all the way backwards and you can start to understand how I can start to create the thoughts and purpose. This is one of things I help you to do. And what we want to also attach to is as Christian women,
We understand what scripture says about our thoughts. And this is why I've created the Fix Your Thoughts Challenge because we want to learn what scripture says about how we are to think. God gives us information and there's so much there that we can unpack and start to use and apply in our lives to transform our lives. As we wrap up this first episode, keep in mind that wherever you're at in your life, good or bad, positive or negative, you know,
Stefanie (21:18.892)
successful, unsuccessful, however you want to label it. I know I'm giving you like extremes, but wherever you're at, what you have is coming from how you are thinking. So we want to start to create that awareness around what we are thinking. And in the next episode, we're going to learn how to take control of our thoughts, because your thoughts, you can literally harness them. Think about a horse and you've put the reins on, you take control of the reins to control the horse in the direction you're going to go. You can do the same thing with your thoughts.
we want to identify how we can stop the negative thoughts before they take over and start to lead us in direction we don't want to go. How we can break free from limiting beliefs that are holding us back and how we can replace false thoughts and accurate thinking so to speak with positive thoughts that are accurate, that are life-affirming, are abundant as the Bible tells us. Okay there's so much there and I'm so excited to be able to share it with you. Thank you for joining me on this journey as you're diving into how you think.
So be sure to like and subscribe so you don't miss out on the second episode in this mini series, and I will talk to you then.
