Nurture Your Mind: How to Toss the Toxic

 In this episode of the "Imagine Yourself Podcast," Lanée Blaise and Sandy Kovach get real about taking care of your mind and cutting out the toxic stuff. From sneaky negative thoughts that mess with your head to the constant noise of gossip and social media, they break it all down. You’ll get tips on what to keep in your mental space and what to kick out—plus, they touch on the power of self-talk, affirmations, and staying grounded in your faith. If you're feeling drained by screen time, craving more peace in your life, or just looking for ways to stay positive through the craziness, this episode is packed with practical advice and fresh perspectives to help you find a healthier mindset.


🎙️ Episode Highlights:

• Break free from the cycle of negative self-talk.
• Discover the balance between empathy and maintaining positivity.
• Learn why ditching gossip and toxic social media can change your life.
• Embrace hope and realistic positivity.
• Find tranquility through faith and daily mindfulness practices.
• Remember, God is in control!

✨ Bonus: Real-life stories, practical tips, self-help affirmations, and personal anecdotes that you don't want to miss!

Hit play, nurture your mind, and let go of what doesn't serve you. Let's grow together! 🌱😊

RELATED: Love Your Flaws: Malene Kai Bell's Guide to Self-Acceptance

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Imagine Yourself is hosted by Lanée Blaise and Sandy Kovach. Lanée is a TV writer and producer, motivational speaker and podcaster. Sandy is a radio personality, voiceover artist and podcaster. They come to you from the Detroit Metro area and invite guests from all over the world to help encourage you in your health, career, faith journey and more!

Transcript

Sandy Kovach  [00:00:02]:
We're talking nurturing our minds today by tossing the toxic, diving into how negative things can affect us and what we can do about it. From things we watch on TV, scroll on our phones, see on social media, hear from other people, society, our own negative self talk. Welcome to imagine yourself podcast where we help you imagine your next chapter of life with grace, gratitude, courage, and faith.

Lanée Blaise [00:00:29]:
Hello, everyone. This is Lanee here with Sandy. And today, we are building on the whole concept of loving ourselves, accepting ourselves, really embracing our self worth, and we're going to come at it today with a kind of psychological and faith based angle. All of this is because Sandy and I were so enlightened by the last episode when we had our guest, Malene Kai Bell. And that episode was called Love Your Flaws and it was all about a guide to self acceptance. But this time, we wanted to kind of reach a little further and dig into what is it that we are putting inside of our minds. I know you you thought I was going to say what we're putting inside of our bodies, but but it's what we're consuming in our minds, in our surroundings, in our environment. What goes into our brains is something that we really want to take a look at because if you're not careful, you might be feeding yourself some crap and we don't want to do that to ourselves.

Lanée Blaise [00:01:43]:
We want to really take an intentional deep dive and see if we can push some good healthy things into our lives. Sandy has a quote that I had never heard before, but I just think it would be a beautiful way to kick off the episode and then we're just going to jump in on all kinds of things: personal, psychological, faith, all the things.

Sandy Kovach  [00:02:04]:
But Alright.

Lanée Blaise [00:02:05]:
Tell us that quote, Sandy.

Sandy Kovach  [00:02:07]:
Well, first, I have to say I'm relieved that you're not talking about the bad things that we're putting in our bodies because I did not wanna lecture on my, former love of Oreo cookies. I guess it's it's an ongoing affair, but, but I've I've stopped seeing them. So

Lanée Blaise [00:02:23]:
After this episode, I bet that you will because you'll be putting such wonderful things in your mind, you won't even wanna put Oreos in your body.

Sandy Kovach  [00:02:31]:
That's right. That's right. So the quote is, your mind is a garden. What you plant and nurture will grow. Be careful what seeds you allow to take root. What you put in your, in your mind, what you consume, the atmosphere, the things you listen to, the conversations that you have, all kinds of things can take root in there. And a lot of times, we don't have control over the atmosphere. We just have to watch what takes root.

Sandy Kovach  [00:03:01]:
But other times, we do have control.

Lanée Blaise [00:03:04]:
Yeah. Here's the thing. I know that I really listened back to that former episode with Malene Kai Bell because I tend to be a pretty positive person and optimistic person. And I know, Sandy, you and I were talking earlier today, and you were reminding me that she did kinda say, hey. Life doesn't have to be all sunshine and unicorns and and all that stuff. But you are also telling me you wanna make sure you don't find yourself drowning in negativity, whether it's negative self talk, whether it's dealing with toxic people, whether it's doom scrolling on social media. I love being empathetic, but I personally don't want to take in all of the pain of another person because I don't believe we were meant to do that. But when you look at the news and you look at social media or you talk to friends who are dealing with legitimately hard situations, you wanna make sure that you you still are watering your own garden and still planting your own soul and still keeping hope growing within and that you don't just fall down into the pit of, you know, the world or everyone's sadness.

Lanée Blaise [00:04:21]:
I can tell even my tone is starting to get sad. So let's let's let's, you know, pop it back around to how do we make sure that we consume some good things to balance out the bad because don't get me wrong. Everybody has guilty pleasures and sometimes, you know, you like to watch a little crap TV or, you know, here and there, but the more that people are on our cell phones, the more almost dangerous it can become to find yourself consuming negative triggering scandalous types of things.

Sandy Kovach  [00:04:57]:
Yeah. The social media rabbit hole, news can be the same way, And, algorithms these days, especially these days, feed what you already are maybe mad about. So let's say, I'm of a particular stance politically. The algorithm is gonna know that. And it's it but it's not just gonna give me, like, political content. It's just gonna give me, like, a bunch of trash on the opposition. Like, they're not even people. And it's gonna get me so stirred up.

Sandy Kovach  [00:05:29]:
I'm not saying me personally, but this is generally because the the whole thing with all of the social media is just to get you to spend longer on their platform. And it used to be that Facebook was kind of maybe even for older folks, but it wasn't doing the same thing as much because it you know, you still got a healthy dose of your friends and a healthy dose of the news, just general news and whatever. But now it's kinda like TikTok in that it's it feeds your preferences even more. Or if, you know, you like true crime stories and nothing's wrong with that. Like you said, you know, I watch, you know, crap television. And true crime isn't always crap. Sometimes it's compelling, and you can learn some things. But it's gonna feed your your social feed is gonna be true crime stories all the time, and you're gonna get paranoid.

Sandy Kovach  [00:06:16]:
And you're gonna think that everybody is a serial killer or something like Dexter's, like, living next door to you.

Lanée Blaise [00:06:22]:
Okay. This is very interesting you say this. My family and my household, my daughter, my son, my husband, and I, just this past weekend went through kind of like a what's on your I know there's that commercial, what's in your wallet, but like what's on your feed? And it was very telling. And I can sometimes sense that, especially maybe my daughter will go around really sad one day, and I'm like, what's wrong? And she's just like, you know, all the wars going on, all the I'm like, oh boy. I know that she has been consuming some things that are really, really heavy that we weren't really meant to consume that way. And so, my husband's was all these types of food, barbecue and Oh. And like different chicken places, different restaurants, different critiques of food places. And I was like, I don't know if that's good either because what he's consuming is, like, making them hungry all the time.

Lanée Blaise [00:07:22]:
You know? So that's that's not helping us. And then my son, I know this sounds crazy, but all his stuff was like dumb, like, almost like Beavis and Butthead kind of dumb stuff. You know? Like, it wasn't actually Beavis and Butthead, but it was all these, like, people taking a ping pong ball and throwing it a certain way and or or slapping each it's just all ding dong stuff.

Sandy Kovach  [00:07:45]:
He's a guy.

Lanée Blaise [00:07:45]:
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. He's a teenage guy, so it made sense. Right? And then mine tended to be to be fair, a lot of it was because I just have been very slow moving on my social media. So a lot of it was actual friends and family members and then lots of little inspirational quotes and cat videos and baby videos. Oh my goodness, these babies doing these weird things with the mom really just wants her to say mama, mama, mama, and she says daddy, you know, all that stuff. So it really just can affect your mood in ways that you might not be paying attention to, And my husband even did one thing.

Lanée Blaise [00:08:26]:
He, like, completely deactivated his one account and just started fresh because he didn't want that same stuff to just keep coming at him. This is when he had more frustrating stuff coming in in his feet. Now it's food, but, might have to deactivate that too. But, but just consider what if you really need to, like, give yourself a fresh start.

Sandy Kovach  [00:08:48]:
I think everybody should do that. I'm gonna take a look at my account. Yeah. I can tell you it'll be a lot of cat reels and A lot of maybe dogs. Yeah. I'm not that deep when it comes to my social feed. In fact, I I try really hard to not post any political things. I really have a hard time during political season because I have friends on both sides, and sometimes their posts are okay.

Sandy Kovach  [00:09:14]:
You know, it's alright. You know, whoever your guy or girl is, but sometimes it's so toxic. And it's like and I know what you just posted is not true, but I'm not gonna I'm not gonna say anything. You you know what? You can scroll past that. And I guess that's the other part is when you do see people on social media, whether you agree or disagree, scroll past unless you want more. More of the same.

Lanée Blaise [00:09:36]:
Yeah. Another component that is very interesting is our attention spans and being able to slow down. So I challenge some of you who have not picked up a book in like months. I, last night, I just was feeling anxious or just feeling like everything was going so fast in my life. So I read a book, you know,

Sandy Kovach  [00:10:02]:
actually a paper book. Not on a Kindle or audiobook or

Lanée Blaise [00:10:06]:
Exactly. A paper book where you turn the pages with your fingers. And, you know, it was a little fiction book. It was and that's another one, you know, choosing a book that won't make me more anxious. You know, sometimes I do love a good detective book or thriller, but sometimes a good romance novel or just a little nice, easy fiction book to just slow things down because the world is going so fast. My daughter was telling me that a lot of her friends, especially the male friends of hers, these are early twenties, are finding it difficult to sit through a television show without being on their phone because they're used to how fast, you know, little videos come through on reels and TikTok and things like that. That watching a television show that has a whole storyline and characters, it's just too slow for them. Wow.

Lanée Blaise [00:11:02]:
So I challenge everyone to try to slow things down a bit. Get your attention span up. You can have more stamina to read or to watch something all the way through instead of just rush rush rush rush. So this you know, this is another form of how you consume things in life and you know even fictionally. Just slow it down a bit.

Sandy Kovach  [00:11:27]:
Slow it down. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Now that's not about social media or attention spans or anything else, but the pattern of this world is instant gratification. And you can even see that. Have you ever been in a grocery line, and the cashier is maybe just learning, maybe just started and having a hard time, or somebody's got a item they need priced or whatever. It's taking too long. Look at the people behind them. Like, someone is about to murder them or something.

Sandy Kovach  [00:11:59]:
Yeah. I mean So frustrated. Just Like, the worst thing in the world is to wait for 5 minutes. I don't know.

Lanée Blaise [00:12:05]:
And it's not. And it's because of I think a lot of that is because of the way that we've been consuming content, because of the way that we've been consuming products. You know, you can go on Amazon or whatever really quickly, have the thing delivered to you right there. So we really, we can just slow it down. If we can try to balance out some of the things. Also this one, Sandy, I know you're gonna joke on me, but, I have a cassette tape.

Sandy Kovach  [00:12:33]:
You have a cassette tape.

Lanée Blaise [00:12:35]:
From 1998 that has this great concept on it that I have been consuming each night as I go to bed.

Sandy Kovach  [00:12:45]:
Okay. So wait a minute. I don't have a problem with you having a cassette tape. What I have a problem is that you have something to play it on.

Lanée Blaise [00:12:52]:
Okay. Yes. I had to go on Amazon.

Sandy Kovach  [00:12:54]:
Oh, you bought

Lanée Blaise [00:12:55]:
the order? No. I had to order a cassette tape player.

Sandy Kovach  [00:12:59]:
Now did you order, like, a Sony Walkman or, like, a

Lanée Blaise [00:13:02]:
yes, I had the Walkman and then I was able to use like my little apple headphones to still the, I had to get a find one on old pair that had like the little round, plug. Yeah. To click to plug it in the side. And I grabbed this cassette tape that was given to me by a counselor back in 1998 to help me with self forgiveness and with perfectionism and all of these different things that we, you know, self worth, all of that, that stuff that I had been struggling with then and that many people struggle with now and that we talked about on the last episode with, Melanie Kybell, our guest. The so it was something where the lady her name was Linda Cox, and she was the counselor, but she also recorded these. And she recorded everything very slowly in a very soothing voice, which really did it forces you to calm down, right? When you have the anxiety, when you have all the frustrations, when you feel like you're blaming everybody and stressed out. And one of the people who who wrote in, was it Sandy, what's on Facebook, or what are

Sandy Kovach  [00:14:10]:
you doing on Facebook? Her name is Linda Ramos, and, she's one of our great listeners. She comments on our episodes a lot, but she said after that episode where you talked about this cassette tape, which I assumed, you know, was in in some box somewhere. I had no idea you could pull it out and play it, but I was hoping you remembered. She wanted to know what some of these specific affirmations were that helped you.

Lanée Blaise [00:14:32]:
Well, what happened is after you told me that, I did pull that cassette tape out. I did go on Amazon, got the cassette tape player. I listened to it. I kind of would lay down in my bed and listen to it because I remember this is, you know, decades ago, but Linda Cox had told me: use this tape to play as the background in your brain because in you she said in the in your background of your brain sometimes there's a lot of negative talk and things that are going on, maybe even subconsciously. So in this case, you're actively putting it. And I said, well, the first time I listened, even back then, I was like, it's kind of slow, it makes me fall asleep. She's like, that's fine. Let yourself fall asleep to it.

Lanée Blaise [00:15:15]:
It might even go in deeper into your subconscious mind and really get to be an integral part of you so that when you're not listening to it, you'll find yourself saying things in a positive way. It it it'll spin it for you. It just changes the game for you. So you have this running tape in the back of your mind at all times. Some of the things on that tape because I went ahead and listened to it last night just to and jotted a few things down. Yeah. Some of those things were and this was the faith based tape too. It's kind of like it starts off really almost like with, dear God, please lift my mind.

Lanée Blaise [00:15:55]:
Please let me focus on truth. Please help me to realize my worth. Please help me to realize this is this is the one that really got me because of the the last episode. Please help me to realize that I am lovable. That I am worthy of love. And then it starts to, you know, build up even more into because forgiveness is tricky. So this one was more like, dear God, I'm open to forgiveness. Please show me how to forgive myself and others so that I can feel that freedom and peace of forgiveness.

Lanée Blaise [00:16:32]:
It goes deeper and deeper into what I felt like I was really dealing with. Of course, like I said, she was giving me counseling. I told her about my perfection issues, worthlessness issues, forgiveness issues. And so this tape was, you know, she pulled one off her shelf, take this home, and put this into your brain. Let this be what you consume. Mhmm. And it just slowly builds up in such a beautiful way that Sandy, there were some parts I started crying last night.

Sandy Kovach  [00:17:03]:
You mean, oh, last night hearing it.

Lanée Blaise [00:17:05]:
Last night hearing it because it's been many years, but crying because it opened up a lot of things like and I love the gentleness. It doesn't say, forgive yourself. It says, please show me how. Like dear God please show me how I can forgive myself. How I can forgive others. Even the part about like, please help me to release any shortcomings, imperfections, shame, guilt. I forgive myself because it starts to build up more. I forgive myself for not being what I needed myself to be or what others needed me to be.

Lanée Blaise [00:17:47]:
I make the decision to forgive. And also the other one too, like I forgive others for not living up to my expectations of what I wanted or needed them to be. I release. And when she's like, honey, when she said I release, then the tears came. It's like releasing all this gunk, all this junk and yuck and pain and frustration and stuff that can still be inside of us even when I had a fantastic day yesterday. I went on a walk yesterday. I ate healthy. I got to see my family.

Lanée Blaise [00:18:22]:
Everything was great. No bad news. But there's still things that are sometimes that need to be released. And so I'm just kind of saying this really to emphasize that part of what you consume can be such a game changer. And when someone has crafted I I don't know if you call this a meditation or a therapy device of some sort. I don't know what you call it, but I called it release and relief. I don't know. Just relax, relate, release.

Lanée Blaise [00:18:53]:
It just it was just great. And, I told my daughter about it and she's like, mom, you can even do simple things yourself. As simple as like you start with a fact. Like I am Linnea or I am Sandy, you know. I have this wonderful family or I have some kind of great friends. We support each other. We try to pull one another up. We try to be strong for one another.

Lanée Blaise [00:19:18]:
I wake up each day fresh and new. God gives us mercies new every day. I mean, there's just so many ways you can do it yourself or you can find something, but find something to pour into to help balance out all the gunk.

Sandy Kovach  [00:19:34]:
Oh my gosh. Yes. Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, think about such things. That's one of the most impactful scriptures, Philippians 8 4:8. So things like that. I mean, you're talking about putting that into your mind, putting the word of God into your mind, getting a devotional to start your day.

Lanée Blaise [00:19:58]:
Or end your day as well. Or

Sandy Kovach  [00:20:00]:
end your day. Yeah. It doesn't have to be at the beginning of the day. Yeah. Not at all. So, yeah, I mean, that was a beautiful story of, something that was crafted especially for that. But I would also say there are other books, you know, including the bible, to do things like that. And I and I know that, what did, Mileney say? She said she did mirror work.

Sandy Kovach  [00:20:22]:
She there was a book she was talking about, and she actually looked in the mirror and said that kind of stuff.

Lanée Blaise [00:20:27]:
The book that was by Louise Hay, mirror work, and yeah, she was talking about how she's looking herself right in the eyes, and she's pronouncing these things. And I don't want it to be think about physical appearance things either. I want it to be about like looking in that eyes, that window of the soul, and really seeing, seeing seeing who you really, really are and giving appreciation for it.

Sandy Kovach  [00:20:52]:
Yeah. And, and you brought up this just kind of in passing. And I know we were even talking about doing an episode just on the whole blame game, and we, you know, release other people that we're blaming in our mind. We forgive them. We release ourselves. We're not living up. And we were talking earlier about what a spiral blaming like, some things are just not anyone's fault, and we have a tendency to wanna blame someone. Sometimes we're like, oh, I'm stupid and the negative self talk, and we blame ourselves.

Sandy Kovach  [00:21:22]:
Yeah. And other times, we blame someone else. Like, my husband is always not always. Okay. Here I go. I'm already blaming him already.

Lanée Blaise [00:21:32]:
And never. No?

Sandy Kovach  [00:21:33]:
Always and never. He, trust me. I am not a hoarder. I don't hold on to tons of things, but I will say I do hold on to some things, and he likes to just get rid of things that don't have a purpose. He's, you know, he's very orderly, and we even have a joke. I sometimes say to him, oh, you're not gonna use this in the next 5 minutes? Go just throw it away. You can get a new one later. I mean, not that we have money just to replace anything.

Sandy Kovach  [00:21:58]:
It's just that's a joke. So my blame game a lot of the time is as soon as I can't find something, oh, well, my husband threw it away. He threw it away because it wasn't important to him, and it was only important to me. And then I go on in a litany of, like, wow. And what else does he do? Well, he just he doesn't care about what's important to me. It's just not a priority for him. Oh, boy. You know? He only cares about himself.

Sandy Kovach  [00:22:21]:
I mean, it's just bullcrap like that. That's not even true.

Lanée Blaise [00:22:24]:
All spiral all the way from 0 to a 100.

Sandy Kovach  [00:22:28]:
Yep. And you can do that with anyone in your life. You can do that with kids, husband, wife, boss, a coworker. Name your blamer. Name no. Blamey. It would be the blamey.

Lanée Blaise [00:22:39]:
You blame me. Yeah. You yes. And that's the part too again, where slow it down for a minute. Give yourself a little breath. Really? Like, okay, let me think about this in a more smooth way. And just try to try to get that calmness. I know that Melanie also talked about mindful meditation.

Lanée Blaise [00:23:01]:
Where you're slowing down your thoughts. You're getting that anxiety level down so that that blame game doesn't go berserk. It's just, it's really important to do some of the things that I wonder if it's a lost art. You know, taking a walk around the block while not listening to Imagine Yourself podcast. You know, I don't know that's terrible.

Sandy Kovach  [00:23:26]:
Or anything.

Lanée Blaise [00:23:26]:
Yeah. Double plug. Yeah. But not listening to anything. Not listening to any music. Really, really being present where you are listening to the birds, listening to listening for God to tell you something. Watching a regular old TV show or reading a regular old book or just talking to someone on the phone without multitasking.

Sandy Kovach  [00:23:49]:
You know? Right.

Lanée Blaise [00:23:50]:
Right. You know? Yes. You know what I'm saying? It's like things like really listening to what they're saying, not letting it consume you either if it's especially if it's something negative. But also not yelling at your kids and cooking dinner and half of the TV on and everything else while you're talking to this person. It's just slow it all down. Be mindful of what's going in to your body because I know this is bad but I'm gonna like give a little example. If I sit up here and sing bipity boppity boo, bipity boppity boopity boo. Was that from like Cinderella?

Sandy Kovach  [00:24:23]:
Yeah, I think so. It's Disney.

Lanée Blaise [00:24:26]:
Yeah, and it's the fairy godmother, she's got the little one and bipity boppity boo. Yeah. I hope someone is walking, I don't know, to their car later today or picking up groceries and bippity boppity boo pops in their head. And they realize that's actually the power of what you consume. It's probably like, I don't want that song in my head, but it shows how easily something everybody knows the feeling of when a song gets trapped in your head. And,

Sandy Kovach  [00:24:55]:
earworms, I think they call it. Ew. Right? No. It's a serious

Lanée Blaise [00:25:02]:
like Woah, okay, yeah, I don't want that. But I don't want us to miss how easily something can get in our brain if it's not the right thing. And when I say not the right thing, not something that serves you, not something that blesses you, enhances your life. Try to get it out of there.

Sandy Kovach  [00:25:26]:
I love the not something that serves you. People say that a lot. Does this serve me? And I was thinking about that, and the Milene used it as well. It's a very good reference point. But I also thought of when she said that, I thought of doctor Phil. And he says, how's that working out for you? Instead of is that serving you?

Lanée Blaise [00:25:49]:
Yes. That's the more Exactly.

Sandy Kovach  [00:25:52]:
Exactly. Less complicated version.

Lanée Blaise [00:25:55]:
That is true. And you're like, not good. I used to call my grandma Susie. She was like 90 years old. Then I'd call her and say, hey, grandma Susie. How you doing? Not good. I'm like, oh boy, here we go. And that's, that's what I'm like, okay.

Lanée Blaise [00:26:10]:
As I'm talking to her, I'm gonna like listen to her, but I'm also gonna let some of it just go right on out, 1 in one ear, out the other. I don't want to hold on to this because I can tell it's about to be a a bad conversation.

Sandy Kovach  [00:26:24]:
Well yeah. And, I mean, that's the trick, and you talked a little bit about this in the beginning. And when you truly do need to be empathetic, that's a different thing. But there is an art to being empathetic for that person, like you said, and not letting it bring you down so that you are still able to be positive. Or you use the example of your daughter and all of the pictures and graphic things that she was reading about wars. But, you know, it really made her sad, and it's good that that made her sad. I mean, you wouldn't want somebody to not be affected.

Lanée Blaise [00:26:52]:
Yeah. That they don't even care.

Sandy Kovach  [00:26:54]:
They don't care, but there's a balance of that as well. But then there's another kind of talking that's negative that is not empathetic, and we should say something about that, and that is gossiping. When somebody starts talking about other people first of all, you know that if they're talking about other people, they're talking about you to somebody else. I mean, that's just

Lanée Blaise [00:27:15]:
Hi, Jerbeck. Yeah.

Sandy Kovach  [00:27:16]:
So don't throw in with, like, negative gossiping. It creates all kinds of problems. Then somebody tells, did you hear that Lene, when she goes for a walk, I heard sometimes that she just goes in the middle of the road and, stares at people.

Lanée Blaise [00:27:32]:
I mean,

Sandy Kovach  [00:27:32]:
I don't know. It's

Lanée Blaise [00:27:32]:
just Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just made that up, but obviously. Exactly. Yeah. That's the you don't want to participate in that, which sometimes, especially if it's not a family member or whatever, like sometimes it's toxic people, toxic relationships, just to you don't want it, if you can at all avoid it and stay away. There's some people, if that's what they're gonna talk about all the time, they might not be able to be your friend anymore.

Sandy Kovach  [00:28:01]:
I know. Sometimes people are just negative Nellies. I hate to use that term. And, again, we don't wanna be like the opposite where everybody has to be positive as, Melanie talked about the posit what did she call the positivity not positivity paradox.

Lanée Blaise [00:28:16]:
What was it? Movement?

Sandy Kovach  [00:28:18]:
Positivity movement. The positivity paradox sounds better. It sounds like it's

Lanée Blaise [00:28:23]:
Yeah. Positive paradox is that we although we want to be positive, we need to understand that there are times when you are supposed to kind of take it down a notch and be smooth and be gentle and understanding with people when they're not seeing any positive in it. Because that's the part too, like I almost wonder if I prefer the word hope even above positivity because hope makes me think, like, okay. I realize everything sucks right now, but I also have hope that on the other side of this, there's still good to come. There's more to come. And I'm I'm willing to live and wait and watch for it to come. And I'm willing to step forward to move towards that hopeful day, that hopeful time, that hopeful scenario because I understand that it's not happening right now. I think that gives a lot more grace because there are people who are in the thick of it and sometimes they don't even want to really think about the hope either, and we can pray without them even knowing that we're praying for them to be able to get to that other side and get to that hope.

Sandy Kovach  [00:29:36]:
That's true. So this has been, boy, there's we spent a lot of time talking about what we're taking in and how we're perceiving things. And just remember too, I guess, we one more thing that we've definitely talked about before, and we have a lot of episodes about not, landing too far in the negative self talk area or protecting your mind. And that is recognizing and remembering. And we've had several guests talk about this, that just because you think something doesn't mean it's true, and don't let negative thought consume you. See it for what it is. It's a thought and let it go. And she and Lenny said that about social media too, and I thought that was so profound.

Sandy Kovach  [00:30:19]:
Just because you see something on social media doesn't mean you have to take it personally. And I think we were talking more about, like, ads that might make you feel less than because, you know, people are marketing to you. And in order to get you to buy their product, they have to make you feel like you need it, and sometimes that can go in a toxic direction. But I think you could use that for any kind of content that is negative. Don't let it land on you.

Lanée Blaise [00:30:43]:
Even that little part that you said makes me think of one last little component also. It's not necessarily about forgiveness or what you're consuming, but it has to do with the fact that let's be willing to tell ourselves that we cannot control other people, the way they go about doing things, things that they say or the way that they say these things to us or about us or even over there to the side have nothing to do with us. The world may feel like everybody's just gone crazy. Whatever. We are not in control of that. We are not meant to be in control of that. What we are in control of is how we want to take things in, how we want to craft our minds, how we want to capture those thoughts for ourselves, how we want to try to live our lives, and it's not a perfect system because definitely some things are going to come in unexpected and blindside us and knock us right on our butt, but to give ourselves permission to look around and say, I don't have to fix these other people. Even if it's my spouse or my kids.

Lanée Blaise [00:32:07]:
I don't even our kids. We have to discipline them and raise them and teach them, but it is not our responsibility to fully fix them, and it's not possible, and we give all that to God.

Sandy Kovach  [00:32:20]:
That's right. God is in control. Whatever you're worried about. I know it's easy to say, and sometimes it's not easy to believe, especially if you're anxious about something or you are focused on somebody else that you wish would change or, yourself that you wish would change. But even just say it to yourself. God is in control. And like we were saying before, not a lot of things aren't anybody's fault. Things are I don't can't remember how you put it in the beginning.

Sandy Kovach  [00:32:50]:
Just let it go. Right? Basically. Yeah. You don't have to engage with everything. You don't have to take it in internally. And if you can remember that God is in control, and it's gonna be okay. And today, we're recording this episode on August 28th, 8 28 day. My favorite scripture, all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose.

Sandy Kovach  [00:33:12]:
So that I mean, it's a lot of people's favorite scripture and for good reason, and there is a lot more to it, obviously, than, you know, all things are gonna work together for good. There's a lot of deep theology in there as well. But, basically, it's saying, look, dude. God's in control, so chill.

Lanée Blaise [00:33:29]:
Yes. Yeah.

Sandy Kovach  [00:33:29]:
Maybe that's what it should've said. Maybe that's in the Sandy version.

Lanée Blaise [00:33:33]:
Yes. Chill. Trust. Don't try to think that it's your job to control God in the way he does things either. That's the other part. You know? God's gonna do things differently. God's gonna have patience and grace with people that we would not have. Just slow it down.

Lanée Blaise [00:33:50]:
Smooth it out. Try to let some of it go. Yeah. That seems to be all we have for today. I really hope and pray that we are really able to imagine our selves being on the lookout for what we're consuming and making sure that we are slowing everything down, giving ourselves some grace and putting some beautiful flowers into the garden of our soul.

Sandy Kovach  [00:34:22]:
Thanks for listening. We hope you found this episode helpful. Let us know what you thought. Drop us a rating or review, and get in touch with us. We'd love to hear from you. Hit us up at imagine yourself podcast.com. You can connect through there or any of our social media links, which you'll find in the show notes along with the way just to text us if you would like to do that. Until next time when we have something new to imagine.

Sandy Kovach  [00:34:46]:
God bless you and take care.