816 Plant Good Seeds

Harvest seeds of growth. Ending relationships is never easy. But it’s a part of life. Not all relationships last, but it’s how we end them that makes all the difference. You can use the opportunity to plant seeds that better your future, or you can plant bitter seeds that will bloom into hatred and rage. You make the decision. It is possible to consciously uncouple. For this Five Minute Friday, I revisited a conversation I had with Katherine Woodward where she explained the best way to end a relationship. Katherine Woodward Thomas, M. A., MFT is the author of the New York Times Bestseller Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After, which was nominated for a Books for a Better Life Award, and the national bestseller, Calling in “The One:” 7 Weeks to Attract the Love of Your Life. She is also a licensed marriage and family therapist and teacher to thousands from all corners of the world in her virtual and in-person learning communities. Katherine teaches us to understand our feelings and gives us techniques to release them. In This Episode You Will Learn: About “affect labeling” or naming your feelings (2:00) The practice of Tonglen (3:55) How to harvest the seeds of growth that are underneath our emotions (4:30) About the concept of Karma (5:20) Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is Five Minute Friday.

• 0:11Lewis Howes?

  Welcome everyone to this episode, a very special episode with a new friend of mine. Her name is Katherine Woodward-Thomas. And for those that don't know who she is, she's a life coach and licensed psychotherapist, one of three founding faculty of Evolving Wisdom, which was recently named by Inc. Magazine as the fastest growing online transformation educational company in America. Catherine has had the privilege of co-leading virtual learning communities that includes hundreds of thousands of students from all over the globe. She also wrote a bestselling book called Calling in the One: Seven Weeks to Attract the Love of Your Life, which became a bestseller within four months of publication and has since gone on to sell over 200,000 copies.

• 0:53Lewis Howes?

  She also has a new book coming out right now that's called Conscious Uncoupling.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  So one of the things that I offer people is a simple technique called affect labeling in the psychological world, which is basically the ability to put a name on each of your feelings.

• 1:11Lewis Howes?

  Okay, so give me an example.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  So, an example is, first of all, there was a scientific study done where subjects were looking at a computer screen and they were seeing, you know, faces of horror, faces of rage, faces of hatred, and they were being monitored in all of their vitals. And they're kind of going off the charts, their blood pressure's rising and their heart rate is going. And then they did another technique with this, they say the same pictures to a new group, but put a name, hatred, rage, despair, and the vitals did not go up in the same way.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  So what that shows is that when we have a name for the experience that we're having, we don't get as overwhelmed. So language serves kind of as a container.

• 2:04Lewis Howes?

  So how would we use that in a breakup?

• 2:07Speaker 01

  So I have a practice where I just, it's very simply advise people to ask yourself, you know, Catherine, honey, what are you feeling right now? I'm feeling...

• 2:19Speaker 01

  Terrified.

• 2:20Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  I can see that you're feeling terrified, honey. What else are you feeling? I'm feeling so humiliated.

• 2:26Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Oh, I can see that. You're so humiliated. What else are you feeling? I'm feeling really pissed.

• 2:34Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Okay. Okay, I can see that you're feeling that. What else are you feeling? I feel exhilarated. You know? Because we have all these feelings going on at once. They don't have to get on with each other, you know?

• 2:45Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  So it's so that that process. And then sometimes if the feelings are overwhelming, I also give that people an opportunity to do this process of tonglen, which is a Buddhist process. I'm not Buddhist myself, but it's a beautiful practice that Pema Chodron actually made very popular. If you breathe a certain feeling into your heart. So I feel despair. I'm going to breathe despair in. I'm not going to turn away from it. And on the out breath, I'm going to breathe out a blessing to everyone in the world who in this very moment is suffering with this very feeling.

• 3:16Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Including myself.

• 3:18Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  And it starts to be like you can start to hold the feeling more because you've made a bigger playing field and you see it as an impersonal experience.

• 3:26Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  And then you become, you know, a force of good. Ideally, what happens is we want to harvest the seeds of growth that are inside of each of our feelings. So for instance, the feeling of rage, there's something underneath it, like a violation has occurred and there's a part of us that's saying, I I should be treated better.

• 3:47Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  I deserve

• 3:48Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  respect. I deserve that my that my feelings should matter to the people that love me and that I've opened my life up to and I deserve to have better. So that can actually become a stand then that you take.

• 4:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  You know, because we're going to move into self-responsibility. How is I giving my power away? How is it okay? How is I, you know, treating people to disrespect me? All of that kind of thing.

• 4:10Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Right? So you want to harvest the seeds of growth better.

• 4:14Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Because this is the thing. There's also a teacher, Ken MacLea, talks about karma.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  And he breaks karma down, basically to its original Sanskrit meaning, which means the ability to plant seeds for the future. It's action, seed, results.

• 4:38Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  So every action we take, every choice that we make in that moment where we're in a breakup, is planting a seed for the future.

• 4:46Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  And a lot of people who end up in that negative spiral where you're, you know, years later fighting and back in court and stuff is because at the very beginning, people planted bad seeds of hatred and rage.