Ep #83: Taming the Watcher Brain

You are listening to episode 83 of The Confident Coaches Podcast, the one where you train your brain like a power fighter. Alright, right hook, right hook, let’s go.

Welcome to The Confident Coaches Podcast, a place for creating the self-confidence you need to do your best work as a life coach. If you want to bring more boldness, more resilience, and more joy to your work, this is the place for you. I’m your host, Amy Latta. Let’s dive in.

Hello my confident coach, how are you today? I am ecstatic. I am so freaking ecstatic right now because tomorrow we open the doors on the July class of the Confident Coaches Mastermind.

Coach, confidence. Confidence is really so dang simple and yet you are so busy making it so dang complicated, as anyone with a brain might do because that is what humans will do. And the reason I know this is because I do it too. Oh my goodness gracious.

In fact, I’m going to be sharing – today’s entire podcast is inspired by a coaching session that I had with my coach. Because if there’s one thing I know I like to do, that’s make confidence super complicated and we’re just not going to have that around here anymore.

In CCM, in Confident Coaches Mastermind, I have boiled it down to make it as simple as possible. And I just need that weekly coaching to remind myself too. And it’s so simple. What are you believing that you don’t have to? What do you want to believe instead? What courageous next best step decision will you make from that belief?

Now go do that next step and rinse and repeat and rinse and repeat every week for six months and you will learn to be confident in yourself no matter what. No matter how many consults you have, no matter how much engagement you get in your posts, no matter what your clients are doing or what they are saying, you can still be confident in you, in your ability to market, in your ability to sell, in your ability to coach, in your ability to just be the kickass human being that you are.

This is what we do. In Confident Coaches Mastermind, you learn radical self-love. It’s what we do around here because when you create radical self-love, literally everything in your life is better. Feeling so full of confidence no matter what, and then you know what, the rest is gravy. The rest is just the cherry on top.

And that’s the breakthrough that awaits you, and it’s yours because applications open tomorrow and they’ll be open for the next three weeks. We start the next round of CCM in mid-July and you need to be there. Because remember, even my well-trained brain, my confident brain, it still goes off the rails.

I still talk to a coach every single week, and that’s what the coaching is all about. That’s what the mastermind element is all about is that yes, you have these tools, but you actually have somebody in your brain every single week going, hey, this thing right here, I know you think this is the thought that you’re believing that you don’t have to, but it’s actually this one that’s over here, this sneaky little devil over here. That’s what getting coaching every week is all about.

And these next three weeks, I’ve got some fun things planned including we are kicking it off with some free coaching. So I don’t know if you all remember, if you are brand new, I’m just going to assume you’re brand new. If you’re not brand new, you’re going to remember this really easily.

But if you are brand new, back in March I did a live four-hour training called Getting Unstuck where I gave you those three questions right there, the simple confidence, what are you believing that you don’t have to, what do you need to believe instead, what next best step decision are you going to make.

And we deep dived into those three questions. We found out where are you, personally you coach right now listening, where are you stuck, what specific thing are you stuck on, let’s apply those three questions. You got some insight into some of the tools that I actually use inside the mastermind to help you work through those three questions, and then we have workshop time and we had live coaching.

So we recorded the whole dang thing and you want to go get yourself a copy of that replay because it’s only $97. And not everyone was able to attend the live. It’s a recorded version of a live event. And so for those of you that were not able to attend live, or even for those of you who were able to attend live and you want to come back for some more, this is the chance to get the coaching you need when it comes to using those simple confidence steps to get unstuck.

Where are you stuck? Let’s get you unstuck. And the second reason you want to jump in on this is because it’s your last chance to get it for only $97. The price is going up after the July class starts so you’re going to want to get that now.

It’s four brilliant hours of confidence coaching. As simple as I could possibly make it. And it’s worth at least $2000. So even at the new price that we’re raising it to, it’s still going to be a steal. But $97? That’s highway robbery and it’s highway robbery in your favor.

So you 100% want to get in on that. You can still get that live coaching that you want. So you can buy Getting Unstuck for $97, download the workbook, watch the four hours, and then still get the live coaching that you need to implement the work.

Here’s the fun thing; even if you’ve never purchased Getting Unstuck and you will never purchase Getting Unstuck, I still invite you to come for the free live coaching and get all your questions answered. Of course it’s totally worth the $97 to watch the replay and then actually have some of those tools that we use inside of Confident Coaches Mastermind.

Because here’s the thing; once you get a taste of Getting Unstuck, you will be ready for the full dish, which is CCM. So if you haven’t gotten your hands on a copy of Getting Unstuck, get your hands on it this week. Get it for only $97 before the price goes up. Be there for the free live coaching and actually apply the work that we do inside Getting Unstuck to your own situation.

And if you don’t know how to get your hands on a copy of that, connect with me on Instagram @iamamylatta and hit me up in the DMs. I’m going to have stories about it all this next week. Or take me up on the free offer at the end of this podcast because when you take me up on that free offer, you do get tuned into all of the things that I’m offering, including Getting Unstuck, when the applications open, all the good things.

But this is not the only reason I’m super excited about the July class that actually leads me to what we’re talking about today. What we’re talking about today I am now looking at Confident Coaches Mastermind through a next level lens. I have reached a higher level of thinking, I’m going to tell you exactly how I did it and how you can do it too and how that is informing how I’m going to teach this next round of Confident Coaches Mastermind.

I’m rewriting the whole damn workbook, my friends, because I saw this so clearly in my head when it finally clicked. I was like, hello, this is big, this is a huge breakthrough for me, and I’m going to pass that on to my clients as I always do. It starts with this podcast right here, but it’s going to inform the entire next session of Confident Coaches Mastermind.

So you’re going to want to be in that July class. And everything that I’m sharing today I want to offer you, this is why I love coaching so much. This is why every single one of you would benefit so greatly from having somebody in your brain every single week. Because today’s podcast stems from my own coaching.

If you haven’t figured out by now, this entire freaking podcast and everything that I do starts with what’s going on in Amy’s brain, what has she already been through, how did I work through it, and then I’m just going to turn around and I’m going to share it with you.

I mean, if there’s anything about Confident Coaches Podcast that I want every single person to take away, you right now, listener, listening to me right now, this is my work. This is the work that I have done, and I know that the tools that I teach you work because they’re literally the tools that I use myself.

So the concepts that I’m sharing today came from a session that I had with my own coach, so here’s what I want to share with you. So if you’ve heard me say it once, you’ve heard me say it a million times. That we really need to make friends with the Helga part of our brain.

So if you’re new around here, I talk about your Helga brain and your Gigi brain. Your Helga brain is just the amygdala. It’s that part tucked up behind your brain stem. It’s your lizard brain, it’s your primitive brain, it’s your cavewoman brain.

I just named my cavewoman Helga. That’s all I did. So this is the part of your brain that was designed to keep you safe. It’s the one that yells the horrible things at you, it’s the one that tells you this is never going to work, all of that fun stuff. It’s the part of your brain that keeps you safe. She ain’t going anywhere.

Whereas Gigi is the front part of your brain. That’s your prefrontal cortex, that’s your forward thinking brain, that’s your evolved woman brain and I just named her Gigi. She’s the one that believes in what’s possible, she’s the one that dreams.

That’s the part of your brain that tells you I really want to have a life coaching business, I can’t not do this, I may be terrified, I may be feeling very not confident but theres’s something deep inside of me that just compels me to keep showing up, even if I’ve quit 20 times in the past, right?

So Helga and Gigi are with you all of the time. There will never be a part of your life where you’re not going to have them tagging along. And it’s so important to understand that confidence is not the absence of your Helga brain. Confidence is allowing your Helga brain to say the things that she’s going to say and she just doesn’t stop you anymore.

And then from there, you can make that next best step decision and you can keep moving forward. All the while, she’s still there with you, she’s still hanging out with you. Confidence is as simple as what are you believing that you don’t have to, i.e. what is Helga yelling at you that you don’t have to keep believing and you don’t have to keep listening to, what do you want to believe instead, i.e. what does the other part of your brain, that Gigi part of your brain, what does she know is possible, what does she see, what does she believe in, and then number three, what is that next best step decision that you’re going to make from that new place, what is that courageous next best step.

Even though you’re scared shitless, you know you’re going to do it anyway, and they’re coming along for the ride with you. So confidence may be super simple, it all comes down to which part of the brain you’re listening to. I frequently use the analogy where it’s like sisters sitting on a couch and we’re all engaged in conversation and Helga just tends to be the really loud one.

Now, if you’ve been around the block with me, you’ve heard all that before. So where am I going with this? Where I struggle to understand – here’s the thing; I didn’t realize this on a conscious level. What I’m getting ready to share with you was 100% on a subconscious level. Until I saw the light, I had no clue this was lingering in the dark corner.

Thank goodness for having a coach in your brain every week, right? Because then she can shine that light into those dark corners. It’s 100% what I do is I shine a flashlight into the dark corners of your brain so we can find those sneaky little Helga thoughts that we didn’t realize were in there.

So subconsciously, my belief was that the mentors in my life, the people that I would consider very high-level thinking people have very well-trained Helga brains. Yes, my mentors have Helga brains because there’s no place in the future, there’s no level of success with which you don’t have that Helga brain tagging along with you. But I just assumed my mentors had theirs very well-trained.

But of course, that’s not true. Not only is that not true, the opposite is true. Now, all of this came out when my coach pointed out to me that I frequently turn to lower-level thinking. I like to downshift into lower-level thinking. It’s really very, very funny because she said it as an aside.

She’s like, “I just want you to see that the difference between you and other people who aren’t getting stuck like you do is they just have higher-level thinking.” And as soon as she said it, she goes, “Well, that’s not really what I mean.” And I was like, I think you might have just given me the secret to the universe.

Yes, she’s right. I frequently downshift into lower level thinking. And coaches who are further along, more confident coaches, people that I would put farther along than me, I would say that they upshift into a higher level of thinking and that just seemed so unavailable to me.

In our coaching session, I remember saying, “But I don’t know how to upshift into higher level thinking,” and that’s when she asked me. My coach asked me, “So what do you think somebody who knows how to do that would do it? How does somebody who thinks on a higher level than you, how do they actually do that? What do you think they do that you aren’t doing?”

And I said, “Well, they would just hear their Helga brain and they would see their Gigi brain and they would just constantly choose to listen to Gigi over Helga over and over again.” I mean, the answer was so obvious, right? It was literally right there in front of me.

By the way, that’s a little Jedi mind trick. It’s a great coaching question. It’s one I will throw at you 576 times while we coach together is you will tell me you don’t know and then I will ask you, what does somebody who does know do? What does your mentor do? What would Gigi do? What would future you do?

And yet, my coach could tell that even though the answer was very obvious, it wasn’t really working for me. She was reading my face and she knew that I didn’t really like the solution to that. And that’s when she called me out.

Now, what I’m getting ready to share with you is my interpretation of what she said. I can’t really remember at this point which part was hers and which part is mine. That’s kind of how we do around here. We take these brilliant concepts from our coaches but then they filter through our own brain, they come out the other side something kind of unique and different.

So I would say a good portion of this is my coach’s concept and a good portion of this is my own. But essentially, what it is is I keep forgetting that there’s a third part of the brain, and that is the watcher brain. That’s the conscious brain. That’s like you right now listening to me.

The part of your brain that’s consuming this episode. The part of your brain that’s the third party to the Helga and the Gigi. I’m always talking about you’re always going to bring your Helga brain and your Gigi brain with you. You are the watcher brain in this story. The watcher brain is the you part.

And she asked me when I think about the difference between me and my mentors that I would say are higher level thinkers than I am, when she said this, I almost fell out of my chair. She goes, “I think you think their Helga brains are better trained, when really, it’s their watcher brains that are better trained.”

What did she just say? Say that again. I almost fell out of my chair. So follow me here. Let’s use this example. You decide that by the end of this week, let’s just say for instance you are doing a webinar and by Friday you want to have set the date, you want to have outlined that webinar, you want to have written an email and some posts advertising it and getting people to come.

And your Helga brain is constantly screaming at you, “No one cares, no one’s going to show up, no one wants to hear what you have to say, it’s all been said before,” or, “No one’s saying this, it’s too unique.” And then there’s that Gigi part of your brain, which you may or may not be tapped into.

You may or may not even be aware of her, much less listening to her. But she is also in there with, “But your people do care, and it doesn’t matter how many people show up because we are going to keep doing this and we’re going to keep evaluating this and every time I do a webinar I just keep getting better at it. No one has said anything like the way I’m going to say it.”

And in my subconscious, again, I didn’t realize that I thought this but as soon as she said it it was so clear. I thought that the people who are better at higher level thinking, that their Helga brain is much quieter than mine, so it’s much easier to listen to Gigi because they’ve tamed Helga.

Their Helga brain is well trained like a lion in a circus. Like a crazy wild animal that we’ve somehow domesticated. Like they’ve done locked her up in a cage and she’s just a whisper. And that is the reason why they’re so good at being thought ninjas, that that’s how it’s so easy for them to not let Helga stop them because they’ve tamed Helga so much and she’s been caged so tightly that she’s not very loud.

So obviously it’s so much easier for them to listen to their Gigi brain and that magical thing that they have that they’ve been able to do that. And she totally called me on it that they haven’t trained Helga. They’ve trained the watcher. They’ve trained the you. They’ve trained the brain that’s deciding if they’re going to listen to Helga or listen to Gigi.

So you get that your Helga brain is always coming with you. That’s the human condition. Congratulations, we are all normal. But what we fail to realize is that the higher level that you think, when you are thinking at a higher and a higher level, the more you follow that Gigi brain, the more you choose your future self, the more you use those simple confidence steps and challenge everything you think, the more you do that, the farther you get, the more you accomplish, the more success you create, the more money and the more clients and the more weight and all of the things.

The louder Helga gets, she never gets tamed. In fact, the more you think at a higher level, the louder she’s screaming at you. This whole time I thought higher-level thinkers had a quiet Helga brain. Yes, they had a Helga brain but I thought it was quiet and it’s the opposite.

The higher level you think, the louder she screams. And what sets lower level thinking and higher level thinking apart isn’t so much fancy thoughts. It’s not fancy words and fancy thoughts. It’s just consistently and persistently directing the watcher part of your brain, that’s you right now, away from the screaming rabid Helga brain and towards the empowered forward-thinking Gigi brain.

And you do that over and over and over again and guess what’s on the other side? It’s you in the future. It’s future you. She’s literally right there. In fact, you can see her. She’s just on the other side of a series of courageous next best steps that you take repeatedly over and over again by not believing Helga and choosing to believe Gigi instead.

She’s not some far off elevated on a pedestal version of you. She’s not this ethereal version of you way high up just out of your reach. Just like thinking at a higher level isn’t some contrived use of fancy words that you just don’t have at this moment, it’s literally just here’s you in the center and to your right is Helga, screaming and tantruming and anything else that she can do and that she can say to get you to keep still and stay exactly where you are.

And then on your left is Gigi with her wisdom and what she is sure of and what she does believe in you, and what she does know that you’re capable of, and what she does know that you know, and what you are sure of. And right there in front of you, just past the two of you, that’s future you. She’s right there. You don’t have to chase her.

You don’t have to reach up on your tippy toes. You just get up every single day and you think about what’s the result I’m creating this week or this month or this year. What am I believing that I don’t have to believe? What is my Helga brain yelling at me that I don’t have to believe anymore? What do you want to believe instead? What does Gigi know? What is she sure of? How does Gigi respond to your Helga brain and her screaming?

And then tap into that vision you have of future you. What is your future self? What has she created? How does she think differently? How does she feel differently? Lean into that different feeling right now in this moment and then what courageous next best step decision do you make from this place of belief?

And Helga will shout and you will acknowledge it and you will consciously choose to listen to Gigi and your future self instead. Some days you’re going to be great at this. Some days you won’t. And that doesn’t matter at all as long as you keep going day in and day out.

You can create amazing, brilliant results while still sometimes listening to Helga. One of my favorite quotes is you can be a hot mess express and still leave a huge impact on the world. You can make a fuck ton of money with a half managed mind. My coach and mentor Brooke Castillo has said that over and over again.

This is the work that you are doing. This is what training your watcher brain, which is you, this is what it’s all about. Helga’s over here, Gigi’s over here, just on the other side of consistently making choices to listen to Gigi over Helga over and over and over again, that’s you, future you. The person you’re going to become. The person you are becoming.

This is the breakthrough that is waiting for you. The more you train your watcher brain, do what I just outlined right there, the more confident you become. Because you don’t have to know how it all works out. Because you know that no matter what happens, you always have your own back. It doesn’t matter that Helga’s voice actually gets louder the more you accomplish.

You’re training the watcher part of your brain every single day and Helga can be screaming from the rafters and you can still know that you’ve got this because you are choosing Gigi more and more every single day. This is what you learn inside Confident Coaches. This is the week in and the week out.

I know some of you are out there listening right now waiting for the magical mystical thought, the fancy higher-level thinking thought with all the fancy words and the contoured this, that, and the other. And it’s not that complicated at all and being able to do this work week in and week out, this is what you will learn how to do in CCM.

I have an entire member site of different tools that you can use that will help you shine those lights in those dark corners and that’s what the hour-long coaching sessions we do as a group is for every week and what our Facebook group is for every single week.

To be able to help you find what you’re believing that you don’t have to and to help you find what you want to believe instead and how to tap into becoming more courageous, how to make next best step decisions. That’s what the five steps I teach inside the mastermind are all about and all of the tools and everything.

But it is not a complicated process. It’s a persistent and a consistent process. It is radical self-love like you’ve never ever known. Because there is nothing as confident as a coach who knows that she’s loved and brilliant in here no matter what she’s creating out there.

And we have another class opening up tomorrow. July opens up tomorrow. So make sure you’re connected with me on my Instagram @iamamylatta, you’ve signed up for that free offer at the end of this podcast. Because either way, you’re going to know how to apply and what your next steps are.

I can’t wait to see how you show up in the world when you love yourself so damn deeply that there’s nothing Helga can shout out at you that can keep you down for long. Alright my confident coach, I cannot wait to see what you create in this world and remember, until next week, let’s keep doing epic stuff.

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Thanks so much for listening to The Confident Coaches Podcast. I invite you to learn more. Come visit me at amylatta.com and until next week, let’s go do epic stuff.