Hello and welcome back to another episode of Change Wired Podcast. My name is Angela Sharina. I'm your host. I'm your coach partner in change and personal and collective transformation. And on this podcast, we are passionate and dedicated to the process of growth, of change, of creating more positive impact, and just building the life we want. And today, guys, I'm very excited to uh talk about practical strategies from the book Dealing with Feeling, Harnessing the Power of Your Emotions to Create the Life You Want. Today I'm very excited to share with you strategists from the book that will help you to shape and form and change your feelings in a way that helps you to move towards your goals. And by the end of this podcast, you're gonna have at least six strategies. Maybe in the middle of the podcast, I'll remember something else that I used in my coaching practice and learned through my coaching certifications as well. But today, by the end of this podcast, you're gonna have very practical, very simple, down-to-earth strategies that you can start applying today. Not to get it perfect, you know. Sometimes you think, well, I'm gonna get this tool, and from now on, because I know this tool, I'm just gonna be perfect at using it, and all of a sudden I'm gonna become this emotional master, and emotions are not gonna be something that holds me back, and I'm not gonna be struggling with my emotional responses. But that's not the case, that's not how growth, mastery, self-improvement, getting better works. It's like going to the gym. If you haven't gone for a while, you don't expect yourself to become an athlete just because you stepped on to the gym floor. You expect yourself to get better. With every time you get in there, you have the opportunity to work on things, not getting results as soon as you get on that floor. So any practice, anything that we are working on in life, it takes time to get better. You know, a simple example from my personal cooking life. I got this vertical egg omelette maker, and I tried it and I followed somewhat instructions, and it didn't really come out as on videos online of this like perfect vertically shaped egg well omelette thing. And it didn't come out like that for three or four times. And then on the fifth time, it got almost perfect, and it's getting better ever since. So the purpose of this example is to maybe help you remember that everything, almost everything you are good and great at, and you know how to do, at some point you didn't know that, and probably you didn't get it for most things from uh uh from attempt number one. And so to sum it up, sum up this intro, don't expect yourself to get better just because you know the things, even the author of the book dealing with feeling Mark Breckett, who is also someone who oversees center of emotional intelligence in the US, even he still has moments when he's not proud of his emotional responses. So it's not the goal is to get it perfect, the goal is to get better and have less of those moments when you regret how you dealt with your feeling and create more of those moments when you're proud of how you dealt with them. So let's jump in. The first what the first method, the first tool I want to share with you comes from cognitive behavioral therapy, one of the most effective, if not the most effective, kind of therapies that help people to rewire their thinking and their behavioral patterns, which allow them to then change their life. So this is one of the I don't know, simplest, most applicable. Like I use this tool myself and with my clients so often that it sometimes feels like, well, this is the answer to any form of self-sabotage. So what is it? It's restructuring, reconstructing your own thoughts in a way that helps you to achieve your goals. And it has four parts. And it's applied when, for example, somebody gave you a negative comment, whether at work or in life, or you got the result that frustrated you. Maybe you tried a recipe, maybe you tried public speaking, maybe you tried a different kind of feedback, maybe you tried different kinds of analysis for your client and then flopped, right? So, what do you do in those situations when you know it's not less than positive? Hey, first, like you might start thinking to yourself, things like I'm not good at it, uh why have I why have I thought this in the first place? I'm never gonna get good at it, I'm just gonna stick to what I know, right? Kind of like keeping yourself in the stuck zone, thinking that you're just not capable. So, first catch this thought and then ask yourself, do I have evidence to think that I'm just not capable and I just can't get better and I'm worthless and I'm hopeless? Do you have the evidence for that? Not for the fact that the thing didn't work out, but for the fact that you are hopeless in that thing and you can't improve. Do you have any evidence? So this is step number one, evidence, evidence. Step number two, well, maybe there is some evidence like this thing didn't work out, but is it universal truth? If you were to ask every single person about this fact that just happened, will they tell you that you are hopeless? If nothing else, is it universally true? So universally true, or that comment or that feedback, it's one person's opinion. So is it universal truth to support now your thought that you're hopeless? Number three, you ask yourself, hurting or helping, hurting or helping, right? Number step number one, evidence, number two, is it universal? Number three, hurting or helping. Is the thought hurting or helping me right now? How does it make you feel? Is it hurting your notion of self-worth capability, ability, something that will help you grow? Is it hurting you or helping you? And number four, you ask yourself, what is the more helpful way to think about this thing that will help me to achieve my goals? So, okay, this piece of analysis or this feedback or that omelette flopped. But is it helpful for you to think that you are hopeless now from now on and never should try cooking again, for example? Or is it more helpful to think, yeah, I just tried it, I've never actually done things like that, or I didn't have enough repetitions and opportunity to practice. And I know that with practice, just like with a bunch of other things that I tried in my life, you get better. And so this is just one of the reps. And instead, uh how I'll think about how I can get better, I get some better feedback, more practice opportunities, whatever that is. But the fact is, like, what is a better way to think about this in a helpful way that's gonna keep you moving forward towards achieving your goals, right? So, what is a more helpful way to think about that? Let's sum this part up. So, the message to reconstruct your unhelpful thinking patterns that might be stopping and delaying your growth and development. Number one, evidence. What is the evidence of my unhelpful thinking? What in actual reality, objective, what is the evidence to support it? Number two, is it universal? Is if I were to ask each person, will each person tell me the same? Is it universal? This unhelpful thought. Number three, is this way of thinking hurting or helping helping me right now and moving forward? Is it hurting or helping? And number four, what is a more helpful way, more helpful way to think about this that will help me to achieve my goals moving forward? So if you just master this, and by mastering, I mean get better with more repetitions. If whenever you catch yourself thinking the thought that makes you feel disempowered, just apply this. And with practice, guys, you'll become you'll get very close to mastering your negative thinking to a point that it will never stop you in your tracks. It might still come to you, but you know how to deal with it. Let's get into other methods of handling your thoughts, unhelpful thoughts that often lead to unhelpful emotions. Different situations, and these tools apply better to different kinds of scenarios. Next one, spatial distance. That can be applied when you're in a situation and someone is giving you a hard time or or constructive feedback that you deserve, but you start feeling that your emotional responses coming up and not helping you to move through it, to work through it. You can imagine yourself literally the power of your imagination just so undervalued. When you're in this situation in this difficult conversation, and you start noticing that your emotional response is not getting the best out of the situation and out of you. Imagine yourself floating above this whole situation and kind of looking from from above on this whole situation, this scenario, like watching a movie on a screen. Just project it on an imaginary screen and observe. And you'll notice how your emotional response starts going less, starts becoming less emotional. And because of that, you'll be able to think more logically and and more in a more balanced way, and because of that, you have the opportunity, you will have the opportunity to turn this thing around, and actually, in the situation of this constructive feedback, for example, instead of getting defensive, getting mad, or you know, rambling something that is not helpful, you stop yourself, you lean into that, and you ask some good questions, like, okay, I hear you, so what can I do to get better at that? So, spatial distance. The next one, so this is tool number three, temporal distance. You can also think about the same situation after the situation, or something you you know, you reacted and you regret it, or something happened at work that you're like, uh, this you know wasn't a good situation. And it's hard to deal with that because you know, there are people still there at your work or in your family, if that's something personal. Sometimes it feels like so heavy and so big that it's overwhelming you, and it's hard to constructively deal with that. So, another tool to apply in the situation is to ask yourself in a week, well, maybe a week is too little time, in a month from now, in a year from now, will this be important? Maybe you had a fight with your spouse or with your kid or with your partner or with your boss or with your co-worker, and your ego is getting in the way of constructively resolving this uh situation. So ask yourself, like, what is more important here a year from now? How would I love to remember this moment? How would I handle it a year from now? Like looking back, what would be the most important thing I think about? Yeah, is it somehow figuring out how to preserve this relationship despite the immediate perceived loss, maybe loss of face, loss of I don't know, yeah, status or some perk uh at work or something personal at home. Year from now, what choice would I be more proud of? So that is what temporal distancing is. The fourth tool, the next tool, the fourth tool, is distancing self-talk. And you can see the pattern here: distancing, distancing, distancing, because distancing helps us to get ourselves out of the situation almost and uh see it again from above, from different points in time, from a different person's perspective, to think observe from outside, which in research and studies shows consistently helps us to get less emotional and more balanced in our decisions and interactions and be more successful at creating the conditions, making the decisions, taking the actions that lead us towards better outcome overall. So the next one is distancing, self-distancing talk. That is when my personal example right now, I'm feeling a little bit overwhelmed with all the choices, options, and directions in my life. And so the example of distancing self-talk would be asking myself, Angela, if you're your friend, if you were someone to step into your shoes, like an alien stepping into your life and seeing everything for the first time, what would that alien do? Or if you were your friend, what would what advice would you give to yourself in this situation? And surprisingly, there is this pattern of human thinking and behavior. We give other people better advice than we give advice to ourselves. And so the trick that psychologists figured out is create different frame of reference, asking yourself questions like, what would I advise my friend to do in this situation? If I were an alien stepping into this body, into this life right now, how would I act based on all the evidence without all the sun cost fallacies and all the previous experience and past, just right now? What would I do? And thinking about the future that I want to create. So that is self-distancing, well, distancing self-talk. Tool number five is reappraisal or changing the way we think about things to create more favorable decisions, actions, and outcomes. Another example from my personal life right now. So I did some speaking lately, and while analyzing my experience and my delivery and my performance, I realized I wasn't satisfied with my progress of getting better. But instead of thinking I'm incapable or somehow flawed or I can't learn effectively or I can't improve, I actually thought to myself, you know what? I've actually haven't given myself enough practice to be able to improve and judge my ability to get better. So, how about I focus instead of giving myself more practice opportunities instead of having very few practice performance opportunities and then judge myself harshly on those? And that is a more helpful way to think about the situation because thinking that I'm not capable, not gonna move me anywhere I want to go, but thinking that you know I need to give myself more practice opportunities, and I know I can improve, and that is what all the research on practice and mastering getting better tells us. So that is a more helpful way of thinking, and I can choose either. And sometimes you just don't realize that you have a choice of how to think about the situation in order to create better outcomes in your future. So that is reappraisal or thinking, choosing to think about things in your life in a more helpful way to achieve your goals. And then last but not least, to be honest, I haven't used it quite as often these days, but that is not because it's less effective, it's because I I think I need to use more of it. Visualization. We often fall into a pattern of visualizing things in a negative way, like what if this doesn't work out? What if I say the wrong thing? What if they ask me the wrong question or it, you know, the difficult question? What if this person says this and that? What if I'm gonna get late or the restraining? Like we visualize so much negative stuff and then start feeling anxious and stressed, and that often uh decreases our chances to perform really, really well, whether you're speaking, presenting, delivering something, or something else. But if we choose to visualize, like many professional athletes do, situation the way you want it to go, like that perfect shot on a golf course or on a tennis court, athletes visualize their shots and also athletes who do different stunts, like in snowboarding or all kinds of sports where you perform this crazy stuff that is so cool to watch, or skateboarding. All these athletes visualize so actively the situation the way they want it to go to condition their nervous system to perform certain actions when they're in the actual situation. And not only that, the decreases nerves that get in the way of great performance. All that to say, if you are about to speak on stage or present, start visualizing the situation the way you want it to go. How you are composed, how you presenting everything super well, how everyone is delighted and clapping and ask you the questions and you answer them with ease and again this con, calm, confidence. Visualize that. The author of the book dealing with feeling, Mark Brackett, used it when he needed to do all these interviews for his the book before this one, and it was getting out of COVID, and so he didn't have practice just seeing other people, live alone being on TV and being interviewed. So he was kind of anxious and and maybe even stressed. But then he started using visualization in his mind's eye, being really great on camera, answering the questions, being that fun, witty, interactive speaker and person. And when he was in those actual situations, that's exactly how it went, because he conditioned himself to feel good and confident in those situations by playing those situations in his mind, like movies again. Athletes use it, all kinds of performers use it, high performance in business arena use it. So use it as well. And it's a reminder to myself to use more visualization in the right, in the positive, in a helpful kind of way, versus doom and gloom scenarios that make us not feel good and make us choke under pressure and in the situation of performance versus doing our best. To sum up the whole episode, first we started with one tool from a cognitive behavioral therapy, four-step tool, to help you reconstruct in a more helpful way your thinking, especially unhelpful thinking after the situations where you didn't perform that well, and you know we start thinking, oh, I'm worthless, etc. So that was tool number one, and it comp you know it consisted of four steps. A evidence is there real evidence in life? B is it universal evidence? C, is my way of thinking helping or hurting me? And number four, what is a more helpful way that to think about this that will help me to move towards my goal? So that was tool number one. Tool number two, spatial distancing, get yourself out of situation, float away, and look at this situation while in it as a movie so you can have less emotionally driven, regretful responses and more constructive ones. Number three, temporal distancing, look at the situation from let's say one year, five years, and ask yourself what I would be proud of in this situation if I were to look at it from a perspective year from now, five years, etc. Number four, distancing self-talk. What would you advise your friend to do in the same situation? Or if an alien would occupy your body, what that alien would do. Number five, reappraisal or changing the way you think about the situation to think better and in a more helpful way that leads you towards better outcomes. And number six, visualization in a helpful kind of way, not doom and gloom kind of way. I hope this podcast episode was very useful. And my suggestion to you well, first, do rate review this podcast episode if you find this useful. It really, really helps us to reach more people and to get through the noise. And with all the ads, AIs and clickbaits. Here we are on a mission to together to grow together in a not noisy kind of way, but in a very meaningful kind of way. We don't run ads, etc. So, please, guys, if you find value, share and learn with other people with this podcast as your guide. So that's that. But speaking of putting all of this into practice, I suggest you take one tool per week, or as we do in coaching, every two weeks, so we focus on one practice. So take one tool and ask yourself, how am I gonna practice it in which specific situations? And then just put it into practice as much as possible. Practice makes better. So one thing at a time, and then put it into practice until you can say, you know, yeah, that's now how I deal with things. That's my new habitual response. And then take the next one and re-listen to this podcast from time to time to get the next one and to to practice to get better, and to create the situations where you're proud of your emotional response responses and not regretful of them. So that's how you put things into practice and get better. Besides that, thank you guys for tuning in. Thank you for listening, and till next next time, keep changing, keep improving, keep growing.