Jan. 14, 2026

Stop Being Your Own Worst Enemy, Part 4: Rewire Your Mindset

Part 4: In this final episode of our Confidence Deep Dive mini-series, I’m sharing the hard but liberating truth: mindset is "always the work." You don't just take the class, get an A, and move on; you build a practice of constant adjustment.

If you’re ready to take the intentional thoughts we created in the last episode and actually cement them into your brain — avoiding the trap of "robotic" affirmations — this episode is for you.

**Let me know your questions and comments! Your private email access is at bonus@cherylpfischer.com.

Take Action Today:

Write it Down: Put your new intentional thought on a sticky note on your bathroom mirror and in your phone notes.
Add Emotion: Don't just read it; feel the emotion (e.g., empowered) while you say it.
Tap It In: Tap on the "Karate Chop point" (the outside edge of your hand) while repeating your affirmation to help move the emotion through your body.
Shift the Chat: Catch yourself "complaining as conversation" and swap it for a better question like, "Tell me something good that happened."
Grab the Story Cycle resource here.
Set up a free call about coaching here.

Why This Episode Matters

Midlife is a powerful turning point. It’s when we realize that our brains are wired to keep us safe, often by being hard on us. By moving from unintentional complaining to intentional affirming, you stop being your own worst enemy and start becoming your own best advocate.

Take just a little bit better care of yourself in midlife.

Support the show

🌸 Liked this episode? Share it with fellow Gen X women navigating hormone balance, an empty nest, and/or self-confidence!

🫶 Love this show? Leave a review to help more women over 50 find us.

💡Want menopause advice, mindset shifts, or support with midlife transformation?

Book a free Mindset Coaching / Intro Call: cherylpfischer.com/coaching

Let’s talk health after 50, self-talk, and redefining aging for women — without the “midlife crisis” narrative. Every week I'm adding new success strategies for midlife women.

Connect with Cheryl, Midlife Coach: Instagram | LinkedIn | Website

00:00 - Why This Work Never Ends

02:55 - Building Intentional Thoughts

05:50 - Affirmations That Actually Work

09:10 - The “But” Affirmation Hack

11:20 - Adding Tapping For Emotion

13:20 - Stop Using Complaints As Conversation

WEBVTT

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Hello, my friend.

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We are here in part four of How to Stop Being Your Own Worst Enemy.

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And thank you for listening along with me.

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I love this topic because there'll be some mini-series in this confidence deep dive subscription that you resonate with more or that apply to your life more, and some that will maybe apply less.

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This one applies to everyone.

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And even though I am a certified coach and have taken multiple coach training and accreditations, it still applies to me.

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So one of the most helpful things that my success coach a few years ago said was this is always the work.

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So what I wanted when I first was learning mindset, and I first was learning how to go for success and how to work on my thoughts and work on my goals and all of the things that we're talking about here.

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What I wanted was to learn how to do it and then be good at it.

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Get an A in the class, move on.

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And unfortunately or fortunately, you could look at it either way, that is not how success and mindset and life works.

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We will always want to be making these little adjustments in our mindset, in how we're thinking.

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We will always have situations where we need to go through that story cycle and then go backwards through it and create an intentional one, like we talked about last time.

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So if you haven't heard part three yet, you may want to pause and go listen to that one and then come back.

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It's always the work because we are humans and we are so often hard on ourselves.

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And it doesn't come always from an inability to see the good in ourselves, it comes from our brains wanting to keep us safe.

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It comes from our past experiences in life, and those things are still gonna be there.

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So what we want is to be able to make the adjustment even more quickly, even more smoothly, even more easily.

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So please don't think that you have gone through this mini-series, and now anytime you catch yourself being hard on yourself again, oh my gosh, I'm such an idiot.

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Why didn't I absorb anything?

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It takes practice.

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And quite frankly, it probably takes coaching.

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You know what I'm gonna say.

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Go to CherylPFisher.com/slash coaching and set up a free call with me.

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Let's talk about whether that would fit for you because it took a lot of coaching for me, and I still use coaches regularly.

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So let's wrap this up though, shall we?

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So in last time's episode, I guess that's fair to say episode, we were talking about the intentional and unintentional story cycle.

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And we realized that if we go backwards through it, we can create the intentional thought.

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What do I want to think that will help me feel empowered or excited or positive or whatever about this situation that will help me take the action that I really do want to take?

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Those thoughts that we create, those intentional thoughts, are life-changing.

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They are creating what happens in our lives.

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So, for example, I used a similar example last time, but let's say you have gone through this intentional cycle and you figured out that you the thought you want to have that's gonna help you feel more empowered is that I provide value and clients love to work with me.

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Keep it fairly general, but something positive.

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We've gone through the story cycle, we've gone through where we're sitting now, we've gone the other way to figure out an intentional thought, and we've come up with something.

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Make sure it's in the present tense, which is what I just said.

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I provide value, and clients really want to work with me or love to work with me.

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Now, that thought needs to go everywhere.

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That thought, and maybe you do this for a few different things, but I would say focus on one or two areas, one or two of these new thoughts you want to you want to really cement into your mind at a time.

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That thought is an affirmation for you now.

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And remember what we did when we created that thought, we knew how we wanted to feel.

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You maybe wanted to feel empowered or excited or whatever.

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Let's say empowered.

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So the way that we retrain our brain is repetition with emotion.

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So affirmations sometimes get a bad rap because if I am just going, I provide value and clients want to work with me.

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I provide value, clients want to work with me.

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I provide you can't see me, but that's very low energy.

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I certainly do not have the emotion of feeling empowered.

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I want to say, write, listen, whatever, read, whatever your affirmation style is, repeatedly this affirmation, feeling that emotion.

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I provide value, and clients love to work with me.

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I'm feeling it.

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I'm I'm I'm remembering that I wanted to feel so empowered by that, and I'm I'm getting into that and I'm feeling it in my body.

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I provide value, and clients want to work with me.

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That emotion needs to go along with it.

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If you're doing like a rote repetition, that's not what we mean.

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Okay.

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So once you've created this new intentional thought, it becomes an affirmation.

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I want you to write it in your phone notes app.

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I want you to write it on a sticky and put it on the bathroom mirror.

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I want you to put it next to your computer at your desk, wherever, multiple places, and then maybe right at the bottom, what the emotion is that you're trying to have.

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Maybe I would write empowered, and then I'm reminding myself, oh, there I'm looking at that affirmation.

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Okay, let me get in the space of feeling empowered.

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I provide value, and clients love to work with me.

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And it might take a few repeats to really get into that feeling.

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That's the key.

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Repetition with emotion.

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So we're making sure it's present tense, it's positive, and you're feeling the emotion.

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If you struggle with this, if my my affirmation is fairly vague here, I provide value and clients love to work with me, but maybe you recently had a client that was a little bit difficult to work with that that could be happening, and maybe now your brain's going, well, do you?

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Are they?

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Do they?

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You can do what I call a but affirmation.

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This is the only time that it makes sense to have uh something a little bit more negative or or the older way of thinking in an affirmation.

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You can say, I wasn't sure about clients wanting to hire me, but now I know I provide value and they love to work with me.

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It's something old or a little bit more negative, but now I your brain will hold on to whatever came after the but.

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That is how your brain works because you just negated everything that came beforehand.

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That's a powerful one.

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And it's just tricking the brain a little bit.

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Your brain isn't gonna argue with you as much because you started by saying, Well, I wasn't sure if clients really wanted to hire me.

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And your brain's like, Yeah, but now I know that they love to work with me and I provide value.

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It's a little harder for your brain to argue with, it's a little trick.

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So try that if the thought you came up with when you went through this intentional cycle wasn't working for you.

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Now, besides affirmations, I want to add two more things.

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Number one, because emotion is so powerful with these affirmations, I want you to consider tapping.

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And I haven't done a tapping mini-series in the confidence deep dive subscription.

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So I believe that's what's coming next.

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Next is going to be tapping.

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What the heck is it?

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And I'm going to give you some general tapping uh practices, exercises that you can do.

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It's so powerful.

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And guess what?

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You can just tap when you're doing affirmations.

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So this goes along with what I was saying before.

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And let's keep it very simple since you might not know all the tapping points.

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If you look at your hand, the outside edge of your hand, we call it the karate chop point.

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So from your little finger down to the side of your hand, if you tap with a few fingers from your other hand on that karate chop point of your hand, that is a great place to start.

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And it helps your body to move energy through, to move emotion through.

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If you are readings/saying your affirmations, feeling that emotion and tapping.

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And we'll come back to this in next time, or not necessarily next time, but in the next mini-series, because I'm going to focus on tapping in that one.

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But for now, try that, tapping on the karate chuck point while you're repeating your affirmations, while you're feeling the feeling you want to feel.

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That was the first one to add.

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Second thing to add, I want you to listen to your words, not just like we've been talking about, when you're talking to yourself with the thoughts in your head, but also when you're talking to other people.

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And this probably deserves a bigger mini-series at some point, too.

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Conversations that we have.

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A lot of us fall into the trap of complaining as conversation.

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And what I mean by that is when you're having a conversation, a lot of times with an acquaintance or colleague or something like that, maybe not as much with family or close friends, but someone maybe you don't know quite as well.

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You're, oh, isn't it hot today?

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Oh my gosh, this weather, I can't stand it.

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And the traffic was horrible.

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I barely had time to get here.

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And now the copier's broken, and I can't get the Wi-Fi to work.

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This is how we talk.

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And it doesn't seem like it doesn't seem bad.

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It doesn't seem like a problem.

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We're just commiserating with each other.

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And I'm here to say that habit is not a great habit.

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And I actually sort of embarked on a project to change the way I talked to people years ago when I realized I was doing this.

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I was complaining, complaining, complaining, complaining.

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It was hard to change.

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It was really a challenge.

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I sometimes didn't even know what to say because I couldn't think of anything except to complain about the traffic or the weather or the Wi-Fi or the, you know, whatever.

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It took me a little bit of time to adjust to that.

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And I still do it, of course.

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We're all human, as I said.

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I want you to have some other ideas in mind.

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Could you ask, what are you doing this weekend?

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Or what's your favorite show that you're watching now?

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My friends and I talk about this all the time.

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It's fun.

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You could even say, tell me something good that happened.

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It's okay to vent and in fact healthy to vent.

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And venting is a period of time in which you are venting about something and you've said to the other person, can I just vent to you about this thing?

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Great, healthy.

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But venting all the time has become a habit that is damaging to your mindset and does bring you down.

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And we've been talking about how important it is, the thoughts in your head and how they make you feel.

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And this does affect that.

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So I want you to just pay attention and notice if this is something that you're doing and see if you can start redirecting.

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Have another question in mind, change the subject.

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Just try it.

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Because that kind of habit is really powerful to adjust as well.

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All right, so there's a lot that you are taking away from this mini-series.

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You are taking away how to do the story cycle.

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Unintentional and then going back through and creating an intentional one.

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Listen to part two and part three again for that.

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You are taking away how to use the intentional thought that you create.

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That was this part.

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You are taking away how did all this happen?

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That was part one.

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So go back and listen as often as many times as you need.

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That's what this is here for.

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You will none of the episodes are going away as long as you are subscribing, you have access to all of them.

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And I hope this makes a difference for you.

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I'll see you on the next one.