You are listening to My Freedom Grove podcast with Gretchen Hernandez, episode 6.

 

Welcome to My Freedom Grove podcast. This is where strong people, just like you come to have honest, open discussions about anxiety, depression, and frustration, but we don't stop there. We go deeper by learning and applying mindset management tools to once and for all break free from the pain. So we can actually enjoy our lives. I'm your host, Gretchen Hernandez. I'm so glad you joined us.

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Hello, My strong friends. Since the last podcast, have you been out looking for your opportunities to make your life amazing?

 

I'm so excited. I went and I found a stranger to talk to. And I was able to find out from him that there was a space that had just opened up, a business actually, that was creating space where people could host their workshops and their classes. And I'm happy to report that I now have space all set up in Point Arena at the Wovenlight Studio to host classes on Wednesday nights from 7:00 to 8:00 PM. So stay tuned, keep looking at my website for classes. You're going to see those in person classes. If you happen to be in the area.

 

What I'm finding is that there are so many opportunities that you can create for yourself. You just have to be willing to start asking around. And sometimes it's just to strangers.

 

Getting into this week's episode, this is one that I've been wanting to do for a long time. I can't tell you how many people have told me about the toxic people in their lives and the effects that it's having on them. The amount of pain that they're going through because they have a toxic person or they're in a toxic environment.

 

And when I go into various Facebook groups that specialize in anxiety and depression, toxic people come up all the time. That always seems to be one of the topics to discuss.

 

I have a different take on it. I like to think about things in a different way so that I don't have to have that emotional pain, right? That's what mindset management is all about is finding those things that are causing us pain and trying to think about it in a different way so that we don't feel pain.

 

This episode is going to show you that there are things that you can do with your mindset so that you can build up your toxic immunity. That way you can have the emotional freedom to be completely unshakable around anybody.

 

Defining What Is Toxic?

 

Now let's take a look at that word Toxic. Toxic means something harmful to a person either immediately or with repeated exposure. Toxic immunity is not being affected by that toxin. So the toxin is a noun. In this case, we can apply it to a person or an environment.

 

So when you have immunity from something, it means that you can be around them and that you don't end up getting sick or feeling bad. If we think about the flu virus, we have two ways that we can keep ourselves healthy. We can either make sure that we don't get anywhere close to that flu virus. We can keep ourselves all shut in our house. Not let anybody in that might have it, or we can get a flu vaccine so that if that virus does come into our space, that we can't get sick.

 

Now mindset, isn't about having a vaccine. Like, wouldn't that be great? If you could just take a pill or have a shot and all of a sudden, there's not going to be any problems in the world. But this is something that is completely in your control. And you can create that immunity yourself.

 

I talk a bit about emotional freedom. You'll hear me bringing this one up quite a bit. And just so that you know, what it means, what I'm getting at is the ability to choose and create your feelings in any circumstance.

 

You have freedom to feel however you want to feel, that it's not just a reaction. Your feelings don't just happen. You get to choose them on purpose and choose the ones that you actually do want to feel. That will lead you to becoming unshakable.

 

I think I had mentioned to you in my previous podcasts, I absolutely love Redwood trees. Now think about Redwood trees. They've been around for hundreds to thousands of years for any one single tree and all of the adversities that they have ever experienced. And they're still standing. A storm can come and you don't even see these suckers move.

 

That's what I'm talking about by being unshakeable with enough mindset work, you can create a brand new core mindset that allows the whole world to happen no matter what happens, right? The storms in life and that your going to be unshakeable. That you will not have undesired emotional responses. That you can just be completely calm in the middle of a storm.

 

Now, if we're trying to think about people that are unshakeable, there's two that come to mind for me. And I'm sure that there's more out there, but Mother Theresa. I'm not saying, Hey, let's all be saints, right? But this woman could be around anybody. And she always had the same composure, just love and kindness and acceptance. She never had to worry about going out in the world. She was always completely okay and safe.

 

The other one is Gandhi. I mean, he's similar type right is that he's around all sorts of different people. He's had things happen to him, or he had things happen to him, and he was still able to maintain his composure. And I don't think that it was all just willpower.

 

These two people, they had their mind set and a certain way that all of these things that happened to the world meant something different to them. That was not a threat. And they ended up being okay, just fine. That's where I want to try to get us to because we deserve to have a life that we actually enjoy. And could you imagine if you could just walk around in the world no matter what was happening and you're just peaceful and exuding love, how great would that be? Getting toxic immunity is going to be one of those very first steps.

 

In this podcast, I'm going to go over how to know if you're feeling like you're in a toxic environment or around a toxic person, if you should go, or if you should stay. I know a lot of people are there at like a crossroads in their lives, trying to decide what they should do. I'm going to show you two mindset management techniques that is going to build up your toxic immunity. And then we're going to do a little break check. It's always important to look at ourselves in the mirror to make sure that we're showing up as our best selves. So we're going to a little look just to see, could we be all so acting in a toxic way towards other people.

 

How to Know if You’re in a Toxic Environment

 

Let's go over how can we tell if we feel like we've been in a toxic interaction? So with a person or in an environment, these are probably going to sound pretty familiar. 

• Your feeling emotionally drained after being in that situation; maybe you get angry during or after. 
• You dread being there. 
• You feel bad, sad, or ashamed about yourself. 
• You feel compelled to rescue that person or fix or care for them in some way. 
• You feel like you're walking on eggshells. 
• You feel like you were disrespected.
• You feel like you're being controlled by the other person or that you're feeling you are being overly controlling of them.

 

What I want you to notice is that all of these things I just listed are feelings. And if you've been following me, you know that our feelings come from our thoughts, right? A circumstance happens. We have a thought about it that comes from our mindset. And that, from that thought, we have a feeling.

 

So when we look at that long list of effects of being in a toxic interaction, all of those are feelings. So we know that they're coming from a thought and that's fantastic because we have full control over our thoughts, our mindset, our bag of thoughts. We have the ability to take a look in there and try to figure out what's in there that's not working for us. It's making us feel this crappy. And how can we get rid of it? This is why toxic immunity is a perfect candidate for mindset management.

 

Is that there's something that's happening with these people that we're thinking. And it's causing us to have these feelings of being in a toxic environment or in a toxic interaction.

 

Your first thing to consider is that effect that's on you. How intense is that effect right now because that's going to help you decide if you should stay and do your work. Or if you should go and do your work. Now, when I talk about work, I'm talking about your mindset management work. You might also have some boundaries setting that you need to do. And we're going to get into boundary setting in our next episode next week in episode seven. So stay tuned. There's a lot more to come.

 

Your mental wellness is the most important. If you're at a critical stage in your mental wellness because of what's going on in the world and how you're thinking about it and feeling about it. This could have some serious impacts on you and decisions that you make on what to do with yourself, right? We know that we could go on and start trying to numb our pain away. We might try to escape our life.

 

We don't want any of that for you. I want to help you figure out what is going to be the right thing for you right now to protect your mental wellness and keep you safe.

 

Should You Go or Should You Stay?

 

Let's talk about how critical your mental wellness is right now. Let's go back to the Redwood tree. Imagine yourself as that Redwood tree you'll know that you are okay enough to stay around that person or that environment. If, as a tree, if you're able to stay upright, or if maybe you're swaying, maybe her swaying quite a bit at that storm, that's brewing around you. That's when it's safe enough for you to stay.

 

But if you find that you're just like your tree is melting into a puddle on the ground, or maybe you feel like you've blown over so much, that you've snapped or that you've even shattered into a million pieces. That's when it's time to step away. You need to go and distance yourself from this because this is having too much of an impact on you. You need to get safe.

 

Now, when you go, you get to decide ahead of time. Is this a permanent departure? And if it is that's okay; this is your choice. Your mental wellness is the most important thing. And sometimes, having a final break from being around that person or that environment is exactly the right thing for you. You might also decide that this is a temporary or maybe an extended temporary break from that person or environment because you know that you have a lot of work to do to build up your toxic immunity, build up your strength so that you can eventually re-enter that relationship or that environment.

 

The decision is completely up to you, and you don't have to rush into it. Do what's right to keep yourself safe right now.

 

Now, if you have decided that you were safe enough to stay, you have to do the work. Why would you subject yourself to always feeling so awful? You're a strong person. We know that, and you keep pushing through all of the hard stuff you've made it through, but that doesn't mean that you're not having all of that pain on the inside that can grow and get bigger and unbearable.

 

Important Disclaimer About Toxic Immunity

 

That's what we're trying to keep you from getting to. We want to get you stronger from the core from the inside out. So that you'll always be around. Before we get into the two techniques on mindset management to build your toxic immunity.

 

Let's talk about what this is not for. Now, if you're around someone that is being physically abusive, there is no amount of mindset work that I want you to do to make you think that this is a safe environment to be in.

 

If someone is physically hurting you, that is not safe. That is not just a toxic person. That is someone that is physically hurting you. And you need to be away from that person. If the person is threatening you with physical violence, that is also something that is not safe. And you can build up some mindset immunity over that. I know I've had to do this in the past, but that's not where you want to spend your effort.

 

If someone is threatening you, or if they're actually physically hurting you, don't spend your time around them. You are worth so much more than to try to figure out a way to live like that.

 

So what does this topic apply to? What type of people, what type of circumstances are we talking about? This can include people that tend to be overly critical. They might belittle your choices.

 

They might feel like they're emotionally manipulative, or they never apologize for anything that they do wrong. They blame you for things. They don't celebrate your successes. They try to make things personal by doing personal jabs at you all the time. Or maybe they're holding a grudge against you from something that you did a long, long time ago.

 

These are some examples of what may come off as toxic. I'm sure that you have some other examples that you can add to this list.

 

Technique #1 Your Thoughts Create Your Reality

 

Let's get into the two techniques. The first technique that I want to teach you is to recognize that your thoughts are what are making the person toxic. Human beings are not a toxin. A toxin is like poison. A human being is just a human being. They are not a bottle of poison.

 

Now we can view the words they say or the actions that they take as a bottle of poison. If our thoughts believe that it is.

 

Things that we're going to focus on are what are the words that the people have said? The body language, or maybe the actions that they've taken.

 

Your brain processes any of these through your brain's processing pathway.

Circumstance (noun + verb) → Thought → Feeling → Actions

So again, that's the circumstance happens. So that's either they've said some words, they have some body language, or they've done some actions. We think something about that. We might pull something out of our mindset, apply that thought, or maybe a couple of thoughts, and then we have a feeling about it. And then our feelings create our actions.

A lot of times, what you're going to find when you're feeling toxicity from someone, is that the action that you have generated from your feelings is creating a thought. So the creation of a thought about that person being toxic is your action.

Circumstance (noun + verb) → Thought → Feeling→ More Thoughts

And that, that new thought also goes through that brain pathway of having the thought that creates a feeling. And now you're at an action, which is, do you want to be around this person or not?

 

Circumstance (my thought) → next thought → Feeling

 

Let's start with the words. So I had mentioned in the previous podcast about Don Miguel Ruiz. So he has this book that I read, gosh, I think back in my twenties called The Four Agreements. If you haven't read it, I strongly suggest it. It talks about the Toltec wisdom of living in the dream. And the agreements, part of it is agreeing basically to the thought transfer from one person to another.

Agreement → agreeing to the thought transfer from one person to another

 

So one person says something, that's just their thought, right? They're pulling a thought out of their mindset, and they're saying something. And that we have the power to choose to agree to have that thought in our mindset.

Now we don't have to. But that's usually not a conscious choice because no one's ever really talked to us about it in that way. That when someone says something, it's just them presenting a thought for us to consider, to include in our mindset.

What we get to do is practice recognizing when someone is saying something that you might think is critical or, or controlling in some way, look at it as just an object that they have presented you with a thought. And you might even want to consider that thought as being a little bottle of poison. Because you know that if you agree to that thought and you put it in your mindset, it's going to generate feelings that are pretty awful. It's going to feel like you have ingested some poison.

So you can choose when someone is talking that way to agree to accept that thought. Or you can say Nope, and just allow it to fall to the ground and not affect you at all.

To agree → to accept that thought.

Here's what happens is someone has said something to us. We immediately adopt that into our mindset because we haven't trained ourselves otherwise. And then we have a feeling about it. And then, we have a thought that is created about that person based on the feeling. And then with that thought is combined that other thought of that person's toxic. And then we start having feelings about that person for them being toxic. And we start assigning our brain to start looking for more evidence that that person is toxic.

 

Let me give an example of how this works. I had a client that was doing a great job, saving the company a lot of money. And she had a boss that wanted her to work on something else that he when he observed her, he saw her at her computer. He didn't know what she was working on, but he knew that she wasn't working on this other thing that he had in mind. And he said a comment to her of you have your priorities messed up.

 

My client automatically adopted that into her mindset of I have my priorities messed up, even though she knew that she didn't, but it was because her boss said it. So it just immediately went into her mindset. Her feelings started to be a little confused and insecure of, well, wait a minute. Maybe I do have my priorities messed up. Here was this really strong, confident person who now was starting to crumble on the inside because of this thought that she has her priorities messed up.

 

So once she was having these awful feelings, her mind created thoughts about this person because he was the one that made her feel that way because she didn't see the distinction of the person saying something. And that her feelings were actually coming from the thought that she had adopted.

 

So when she's feeling this way, she creates the new thought that he's always trying to make me doubt myself, that he's toxic. And then she starts having all of these painful thoughts because her boss is toxic. That she gets angry, that she has to work for a boss like this. That she's depressed. That she feels stuck being in a job like this, having to work for a toxic boss. And that other thoughts, like I, can't win. I can't do anything about it and feeling trapped.

 

So as you can imagine, this starts to fester like a poison from the inside, just making things worse and worse and worse. Where it all started with a thought that he had presented that if she had practiced on catching things ahead of time, that these are just thoughts that are being offered and that she can choose to agree with them or not agree with them.

 

She could have prevented going down this whole feeling of toxicity. Another example is one that I experienced personally, which was…

 

I had a coworker who, off the cuff, said, you don't know what you're talking about when in fact, the topic that I was talking about was something that I knew a lot about and that I was just trying to share a piece of knowledge. When he threw that comment out there of you, don't know what you're talking about. Although I was skilled at trying to catch these thoughts ahead of time. This happened to come during a time where I was kind of bending a lot in a storm. And that I allowed this thought to just come right into my mindset without putting on the brakes on that one.

 

And it changed my thought into; I don't know what I'm talking about. And that led to me feeling embarrassed and a little insecure. I was losing my confidence. Other people started to share their thoughts about this person with me, too, of always saying that he thinks he's better than the rest of us. Or that he's trying to take people down.

 

And now I never really think of people that way that they're out to get you. But when you're already feeling kind of down in the dumps about yourself and you know that the thought came from that person, even though the thought now is your own thought and your feeling that way, you tend to start to listen to what other people are saying about someone. And especially if they're saying that person is toxic in some way, it can start to make you believe those thoughts.

 

And again, they're just presenting a thought you can choose to believe or not. But again, if you have started to already form that thought in your head, your brain is looking for evidence that your thought is true.

 

So if other people are saying it too, then you kind of grab on to it.

 

Now, once I started to have that thought, it was generating more feelings in me towards this person that I didn't want to have. And I started having like that mental tug of war with myself because I usually don't view people as toxic. And when I did start to view this person that way, wow, it felt awful being around them. And I dreaded going anywhere close to this person.

 

Thankfully, I was able to coach myself out of that and back to a good place by ejecting this thought out of my brain. And I think I even had a good vulnerable conversation with that person that said, Hey, yes, you did say this. This is how it made me feel, but I take ownership over my own feelings. I've changed that thought. And just wanted to let you know that I apologize for having some, you know, bad feelings around you. Maybe I acted out a little bit, but that we're good now.

 

And it's amazing when you have those types of conversations, when you're taking ownership of your own feelings towards things that people don't feel like they're being blamed for it at all. But they also get a little bit of knowledge on a little bit of a wake up call. That something they said could have been taken that way, that could damage their relationship. And they didn't want to damage the relationship either, but by coming at it through a self-responsibility angle, it gets you a whole lot further.

 

Anyway, that wasn't the point. I wanted to just give you the examples of how you can take a thought that someone else has presented and how that can lead to all of the toxicity thoughts and the feeling and that you have the ability to stop it in its tracks.

 

Body Language

 

Let's also take a look at body language. There's many times that we interpret somebody else's body language as being toxic. Or it leads us down the pathway that's creating thoughts that they're toxic because of something. And that it was typically started with body language.

 

In my class, how to free yourself from anxiety with mindset management. I give the example of my husband and his bouncing leg. It's a pretty funny story. And it's all written out in visuals in that class so that it gets really clear as to the point of the whole thing.

 

But basically I would allow a bouncing leg of his, as we're sitting there on the couch at night, to mean all sorts of awful things about me. And then I would start to resent my husband as a result of it. One of those thoughts that would come up was that I was a bad mom. I felt like he was judging me for how I was assigning chores to my kids. And that I was a bad mom because these different activities weren't done.

 

When reality was, it was just a man sitting on a couch with a leg, bouncing, everything else was thoughts that I had created. And then I started feeling resentment towards him based on the thoughts that I had created in my own head.

 

Back in one of companies that I worked at, there was this one leader that tended to walk around, and he'd observed something happening. And then he just shake his head.

 

I had so many people coming up to me talking about how this boss was toxic. And I asked them to tell me more about it because I had observed him shaking his head, too. But I wanted to see how they got from a shaking head to this being a toxic boss. They would think what that shaking head meant that he was disappointed in them, that they thought that he thought that they were incompetent or that they were not good enough at their jobs.

 

And because they were guessing at these different thoughts in their mind. And when they're talking amongst themselves, they made these thoughts of what his thoughts were to be completely true. And then they got mad at him for having these thoughts.

 

And then that made him a toxic boss.

 

Now I had the fortunate opportunity that I was the coach for both the group and the boss. And I asked the boss about his shaking head. Oftentimes that shaking head was more on. He was trying to think of an answer to a problem, a business problem, and that he was like weighing different options in his head. And that the shaking head was him like saying in his head, which options would work and which options wouldn't because he really wanted to help his people.

 

That was a complete thought mismatch between what his group of employees was thinking he was thinking. And what he was actually thinking. And yet, here they had created that he was a toxic boss. When in reality, he was coming up with thoughts, with ideas on how to try to help them because he actually cared about them.

 

That can be a pretty dangerous thing when we're trying to guess what's in someone else's mindset.

 

Seeing the Dynamic

 

One of the main tools that I use when I coach people is called the framework. And it shows a circle like a process map, circle on how our circumstances creates our thoughts that come out of our mindset and that our feelings come from our thoughts and it generates our actions. Our actions then becomes a circumstance for somebody else. They have thoughts about it that come from their mindset that create their feelings that create their actions and how their actions are now our circumstance and that in the middle is our result.

 

Now, what I like to try to caution people about is that when they're looking at this circle, the right-hand side is their thoughts and their mindset. And those are the only ones that they have control over. And the only ones that they can actually see and go explore.

 

What we tend to do, as humans is, try to guess what's in the other person's mindset or assign what they must be thinking. And then we create a whole bunch of meaning around those thoughts.

 

Now that's never possible. We can never guess accurately what that person is thinking. We can try every once in a while, maybe 5% of the time, we're going to get it right. But the majority of time, we're going to get it wrong. And when we start assuming that someone is toxic because of the thoughts that we think that they're thinking, we've done a huge injustice to that person. And we've created a whole lot of unnecessary pain for ourselves and our relationship with the other person.

 

You get to decide if you want that person to be toxic, because you will make them toxic by thinking the thoughts and believing that that person is toxic, and your brain is going to go and find all of the evidence that makes that person toxic.

 

Technique #2 Switch from Toxic to Hurt

 

Let's go on to technique two, which is to consider that the other person is hurt, not toxic.

 

Now, a visual for this one. Consider a bear, right? A bear can be pretty scary. They can definitely inflict some harm to you, but a hurt bear that's in a cage, right? So you can consider when you're approaching this bear, are they going to hurt you? They're in a cage. They can swipe out at you, but are they in a cage because they're dangerous? Or are they in a cage because they're hurt, and they need to have some care?

 

I find that I'm usually approaching people thinking that they are a hurt Bear. No matter how that person is acting out, I'm always looking to see what is the hurt that's coming behind it. Now, this might not be the best approach for everybody because it is possible that a bear is just a bear.

 

But in my 47 years of living, there's only been one time that I actually got hurt. And honestly, in looking back, it wasn't that the bear was a bear. It was that the bear was so hurt that it was something that I was not equipped to deal with and that they would lash out in such a way that I got hurt while I was there trying to help or comfort them.

 

This is where those boundaries come in. That we'll talk about next week's episode of trying to make that distinction of when is someone too hurt to be around that they can end up causing some harm to you? For this episode, we're talking about just considering that the other person is not a bear, that they're not toxic, that they're not a monster that they might be lashing out because they're hurt themselves.

 

And that when you can recognize the activity that they're doing is coming from a place of hurt, that you can view them more with compassion and understanding, instead of in that reactive state of creating thoughts that they're toxic.

 

Back in my early thirties, I had just started working for a company, and going in; I assume that everybody is kind and helpful. And there was one woman that had befriended me, and I shared all sorts of stuff with her, the good, the bad, the ugly. And now, this was before I was doing my mindset management work. So my thoughts were real jacked up. And I was blaming a lot of people for other things.

 

What I didn't expect was that this person was going to go and share my stories with other people. And I definitely felt a little burned from it. There were consequences of other people finding out about the things that I said. There were consequences to me. There were consequences to the people that I had talked about, and overall, just not a great experience.

 

Now, I ended up working with this person for well over a decade. And I had other coworkers that also had experienced the same thing with her. Now we learned pretty quick, just not to share with her. Right? And I think that there were several people that had described her as being a toxic person.

 

Now, again, I'm always trying to find what is the hurt behind people's actions. Now, one of the things that I hadn't considered with this person was her background. And it wasn't until I started doing this mindset work that she was one of those people that I wanted to try to examine my thoughts around because I didn't want to feel this way towards her. I didn't want to feel all of the negativity towards her.

 

So when I learned more about her background, she came from a very physically abusive relationship. And it was abusive towards her and her children in a very, very dangerous way. And I think that the other person actually ended up in prison because of it.

 

What I started to recognize was that some of the stories that I had told her had actually triggered in her some thoughts about the relationship that she had gone through. And that by her going out and sharing the stories that I was telling that this was her way of trying to get me help. Is that she didn't want me to have the same kind of path that she had. That she'd hear the things, I was saying and think that's not right. And that she's in danger. She'd go out and share it with other people, because although she might not be able to intervene and get the help for me if she shared it with enough other people that someone might step in and try to help me.

 

Now, this is a completely different way of looking at what happened, and that when I started seeing it as that was a possibility, all of the evidence was there, that that absolutely could be the truth. And that felt so much better.

 

Now I had to take responsibility in it too of, you know, obviously, the things that I was sharing were all of my stories. And that there wasn't really a call to action that I was making of someone. I wasn't asking for help, but that's definitely the way that it came off back then. Is that I was complaining and whining and doing a whole lot of woe is me. So, of course, she wanted to help because she did have a really good heart.

 

And when other people were telling me about their experiences with her and I was putting it through the lens of, is she actually trying to help people? It was absolutely possible that every time that she was going around and sharing other people's stories, that it was because she was coming from a kind-hearted place and trying to help people that she wasn't actually a toxic person.

 

It's all in how you look at it.

 

Now you can choose. If you want to hold on to the story that this person going around and gossiping or sharing or looking for help, you can choose if you want to believe that they're toxic. But you're also going to have to stew in the feelings that that generates. Or you can choose to think about it and look for evidence on could it be something else that feels better for you?

 

So consider that when you're having these interactions with people that to you are feeling overly critical or blaming or something is, is there a reason other than them being toxic? Could they be hurt? Could they have different circumstances or different experiences in their life that have formed their mindset and that they're sharing these things with you from a different place that it's not out of trying to be toxic or trying to hurt you in any way. That they might actually be either trying to help themselves to feel better or that they're trying to help you. And you just don't realize it.

 

Brake Check - Look in the Mirror

 

We're now going to go into the last part, which is our little brake check. Is as we're going along in life or driving our car down that road, we want to make sure that our system is working fine, that our own hous is in order. We're going to apply the brakes real quick, just to make sure that everything's working.

 

Now with this, I want you to consider, are you the one that is coming off as being toxic? Now it's so easy to point the finger of blame at everybody else and try to change them. We may not realize that we're having actions that might be triggering other people to interpret us as being toxic. So let's take a look at that short list that we went over at the beginning of this podcast and turn it towards yourself and ask, am I showing up in this way at all?

 

• Do you ever belittle other people's choices? I know I've done this on more than one occasion. 
• Are you criticizing them for what you see as their faults? 
• Are you being emotionally controlling or manipulative to get your way? 
• How many people have ever tried to use guilt or shame to try to get someone to do something for them or to try to get them to show them some attention or some affection? That is part of this. 
• How about when you make a mistake? Have you ever said something really harsh at one point, and you never went back and apologized for it later on? Or that you did some other big mistake in life or even a small mistake, and that you just never chose to go and let the other person know that. Yeah, I own that I made that mistake. I'm sorry. I made that mistake. I'm going to try not to do that again next time. 
• How many times do you find yourself blaming other people for everything? Now, just the fact that you're pointing to other people and saying that they're toxic, that's you blaming someone for something, okay.
  
  This is your opportunity to claim your power back. That if you keep blaming other people for everything, you're always going to be stuck. And especially if you're feeling a lot of pain about whatever it was, whatever thoughts that you're having because of a circumstance, you're always going to be stuck in that misery. And blaming someone gives them all of the responsibility and all of the power. But when you take all of that back and know that it was just how you were thinking about something that made you feel that bad, you can change your thoughts. And you don't have to blame anybody else because you want to take your power back.
  
  You have the ability to create your own reality and your own feelings and to feel fantastic. But if you're stuck blaming others, then they're going to start feeling that you're a toxic person. And you're always going to be stuck in misery.
• Do you celebrate other people's successes? Yeah. This is something that if you don't celebrate their successes, someone might think that you're kind of toxic.
• And then the last one on this short list was holding a grudge. Now holding a grudge is that you're reminding the other person that they're a bad person or that they've done something bad or that they're inferior to you. It's something that you're holding on to, right? It could just be one activity that that person did at some point in their life. You created some thoughts that there was something wrong with that activity. And now you're going to hold that one activity over them for a very, very long time so that you can feel a little bit better by making them feel worse.

 

Anybody that has ever been hurt may use any of these actions so that they can try to feel a little bit better. They aren't necessarily trying to be toxic, but sometimes they come off that way as a result. Most people are not monsters. They're not toxic. It's just how we're thinking about their actions that's making the person be toxic or be a monster.

 

You may not be aware of the thoughts that you have in your mindset that are creating the reality about this person for you. But now that we've gone through this podcast, you have the opportunity to go back and examine. What do you have? What are you holding onto into your mindset that is creating that reality of that person for you?

 

And you get to decide, do you want to always view that person as being toxic? Because if you believe that they are, they will be to you. They will be a poison. You will allow that in your life. And you're going to feel awful. The whole point is to build up your toxic immunity. If there was nothing toxic, to begin with, you don't need immunity, but sometimes there's something in our environment that definitely feels toxic. Let's build up your immunity to it. Let's get you that emotional freedom, and let's help you to be unshakable no matter who you're around.

 

All right, my friend, until next week, take care of yourself. Remember, your mental wellness is number one. Keep yourself safe. Do what you need to do. I'm always here for you. Alright, I'll talk to you next week. Bye-bye.

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Thank you for listening to My Freedom Grove podcast. I hope this podcast provided you some relief and some inspiration. If you know somebody else that can benefit from this podcast, please share the link with them. Together, I know we can make a difference. To access more podcasts and offerings, please visit www.myfreedomgrove.com. Until next time, take care of yourself. This world needs you.