Demo Day for your Brain (no sledgehammer required)

By Amy Isaman | August 21, 2020

Do you watch HGTV? I love the house renovation shows, and they all start with “Demo Day.”

The show’s host (who’s usually pretty good looking) hands the excited homeowner a sledgehammer and they go to town, tearing down walls, destroying old cabinetry, and finding more and more problems that need fixing.

Watching demo day is fun.

Doing it? Actually taking down a wall? Not nearly as fun as it looks.

I learned this by actually taking down a wall this spring in a fixer-upper my husband and I bought.

We’d officially achieved “empty-nester status.” Our kids were launched – done with school and on their own. We even bought kayaks, so we could spend our summers camping and paddling.

Then, this house happened.

We haven’t gone paddling or camping once this summer.

Instead, I’ve learned how to take down walls, painstakingly remove cabinetry (sans sledgehammer so we could resell it), put in insulation (which is a horrible itchy job), tear off trim, remove tile, rip out old linoleum (another not so fun task), and a myriad of other random, dirty, dusty, exhausting demo tasks.

We’ve had to take down ALL the old so we can put it back together how we want it. We’ve dreamed for years of having a kitchen that we can both fit in at the same time, and it’s finally happening.

I’d have loved to hire the Property Brothers from HGTV to do all the demo but unfortunately, that wasn’t in the budget.

It’ll be worth it.

But it hasn’t been easy – demo is hard work.

And frustrating. Especially when your husband tells you to take out a wall, and you spend HOURS tearing down, by yourself, only to have the contractor tell you that it didn’t need to come down.

Yes, that happened, I almost cried.

He had to rebuild it, pretty much exactly as it was.

Demo-ing and removing thoughts that are in our way, and old, and icky can be just as hard as taking down all the old stuff in a thirty-year-old home.

Maybe even harder.

Those thoughts, like ‘I don’t have enough time for my creative work,’ or ‘I’m not creative’ or whatever it is that you tell yourself either consciously or subconsciously, can be a bugger to find and destroy.

But it is possible.

This week, on the podcast, I had the pleasure of talking with Selena Maestas, a brilliant life coach, about exactly how to begin to tear down those thoughts that get in our way and block us from reaching our goals and creative dreams.

I’ve actually been using her ladder technique (with some EFT/tapping) since we spoke, and it’s been SO helpful.

So often we hear that changing our thoughts can help us. The question then becomes…HOW?

Selena not only gave the BEST explanation of what a coach does but also some super clear strategies to start changing your own unhelpful thoughts and to begin doing your own “demo” work on them.

Give it a listen.