57. The DO's and DON'Ts of managing your mind

In today's episode - I talk about some of the most important aspects of thought work and the biggest errors I see my clients making when learning to manage their minds.

Listen to find out the key DO's and DON'Ts - and how to take your self-coaching to the next level.

Mentioned in this episode:

MYRMD group programme info and waitlist.
Processing emotions meditation.

Transcript

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Hey guys! How’s everyone doing? I’m feeling really good this week because in my group coaching programme, Master Your Relationship Mind Drama, we’re now on week 7 - and it’s just amazing watching people in the Facebook group and on the live calls really grapple with these tools and put them to work. And have their own mini revelations on their journey. 

It’s honestly amazing - and one of my favourite things about coaching is watching so many people to back control over their minds. People I’d never have even met or known existed, without the programme and this work. And this particular round is such a supportive group. Everyone is cheering each other on in the Facebook group and being really supportive on calls - not that other rounds haven’t been, I always have lovely supportive group members - but there’s just such an energy on the calls where people are really encouraging each other to be vulnerable and holding space for that which is amazing, because that really is how we get the best results.

And so when I was thinking about what to talk about this week, I decided I wanted to do a bit of a summary of what I think are some of the key do’s and don’ts for those learning how to manage their minds. Of course, this summary isn’t all encompassing - there will be things you could add in - but these are the sticking points I find myself having to coach my clients the most on when they’re first trying to do thought work and utilise what I teach. 

So let’s dive in, and let’s start with the do’s. So number 1) DO write down your thoughts. I say this to my group members and 1:1 clients until I’m blue in the face. We cannot do thought work in our head, especially when we’re first starting out, we have to really get our thoughts out of our brains and in front of us to look at. That is the whole point of this work. To separate yourself from your thinking and look at it objectively. If you’re not writing your thoughts down, you’re making that job a lot harder for yourself. So grab a pen and paper and write them out. 

We call this doing a thought download. So you could write down all your thoughts about a particular situation, or a person, or just literally what’s in your head in that moment. And get it all out onto a page in front of you.

Number 2) DO separate facts from thoughts. When you’re looking at your thoughts, your brain is going to believe that a lot of what you’ve written down is just a fact. She’s being rude. They don’t like me. I’m never good at anything. This is so unfair. Your brain will say these sentences to you as if it’s just stating a fact. Like it’s just observing and reporting the reality. But it isn’t. And thoughts and facts are two very different things. 

Facts are undeniable and proven to be true. Think of them as things everyone involved would 100% agree with. They could be proven in a court of law. They are free from opinion, interpretation, and assumption. So when you’re looking at your thoughts, it’s important to then separate out - what are the actual facts of what’s going on here?

For example - my partner’s ex has liked his picture on social media, is a fact (if we can see that she has). My partner’s ex is trying to get him back - is not a fact - as that’s just your interpretation of what that means. You actually have no idea if that’s true. Your brain believes it is and is trying to convince you it is - but the only fact you have right now is that she liked the picture. 

And the reason why doing this is so important is because this work is all about taking control of and managing your thoughts. But that’s impossible to do when you believe all your painful, unhelpful thoughts are facts. Because we can’t change facts. 

Number 3) DO understand how your C is neutral. For those of you have no idea what I’m talking about when I say your ‘C’ - I’m talking about your Circumstance. And if you’re client of mine, you’ll know about a tool we use call the Model which separates out the facts (which we call the Circumstance) from our thoughts, feelings, actions and results. So whatever your C is, whatever your circumstance is - the facts that you’ve just uncovered are the indisputable facts of the situation - we want to really help our brain’s understand how those facts are actually completely neutral.

And I know - they will not feel neutral. You’re going to have so many thoughts and feelings about the circumstance that it won’t feel neutral at all. But the idea is to understand that the facts themselves are just facts. They just exist. Husband said ‘I’ll be late home’ is just a neutral fact. Suzan didn’t come to my wedding - is just a neutral fact. As in, it just is. Human man said words. Human woman didn’t attend event. They’re just neutral things happening in the world, until a human brain - your brain - thinks about them and interprets that to mean something.

I always think of this example with my cat. My cat brought in a bird once, it was a tiny baby bird and it was alive but injured. Now to me and my fiance - this was heartbreaking. It was not neutral at all. We had so many thoughts about it - about how it’s family would be looking for it, about how scared it must be. And so we tried to save it - which also involved my fiance naming it Peggy - but that’s a whole other story and kind of irrelevant. But my point is - to my cat - it was totally neutral.

She saw the baby bird lying there, in pain, scared - and felt… nothing. It was just was. It was neutral. She felt no guilt. No sadness. No shame. It wasn’t until a human brain, the human brains of me and my fiance had thoughts about how awful it was - that emotion was created about it. And of course this doesn’t mean we want to feel neutrally about all circumstances. I didn’t want to feel neutrally about the little bird’s pain. And we want to feel sadness, grief, and disappointment about some of the things that happen in our lives and around the world. 

But by separating out the neutral facts, we then get to decide how we want to think and feel about them, intentionally. And a lot of the time - your brain is going to want to resist the reality of your circumstances. It’s going to want to change them in order for you to feel better. Which makes us incredibly powerless and stuck when we aren’t able to change the facts. But you don’t ever have to change the facts of a situation (that isn’t within your power to change) in order for you to take ownership of your mind around it. In order for you to feel better, or more in control, or more empowered. You only need to challenge and change the way you’re thinking about it. 

Okay number 4 - Be curious. Once you’ve got separated out the facts of the situation and you’ve identified your thoughts about those facts. Pick one thought and notice how that thought makes you feel. What emotion does it create? Is it anger, sadness, anxiety? Identify the emotion. And then get curious. Ask questions and write down what comes up. For example, let’s keep the example of the circumstance ‘Partner’s ex likes his social media picture’. Get curious and ask - so what? Why is that a problem? What am I making that mean? That will give you a thought you’re thinking about it. Maybe ‘She’s trying to get him back.’ Again take that thought and question it. 

Ask yourself, is that really true? How might it not be true? What else could be true that my brain isn’t considering? So what if it WAS true, what then? Because even if that thought WAS true and was a fact - it would then be a neutral Circumstance in your Model, for you to have thoughts about. So get curious, why would my brain think it was a problem even if it were true? What is it afraid of?

The point of getting curious is to really understand your brain and your thinking about this circumstance. AND to poke holes in what you find and challenge the sentences in your brain is telling you. This is something you learn how to master in my group coaching programme - so if you struggle, listen till the end and I’ll tell you about the next round!

Okay let’s move onto some DON’Ts. Number 1 - Don’t be in a rush to feel better. And I know - that might sound strange. You may be thinking - but Rebecca, I want to use thought work to change my thoughts and feel better. That’s the whole point. But actually feeling better is not the point.

Feeling better is often the bi-product of choosing how we want to think and feel intentionally, but it’s not the sole purpose. And where I see a lot of my clients going is, they feel a negative emotion that they don’t like. Maybe anxiety - maybe shame. And they want to escape it. So they frantically rush to write down their thoughts, do a Model, and try to change what they’re thinking to escape the pain. They’re being driven by this urgency. And the problem with that is - it doesn't allow you the time and space to actually slowwwww down and get curious. 

And remember - getting curious was one of the most important things we need to do. We need to be able to sit and be curious about our current ways of thinking. Understand them. Pull back the layers on them. Question them and create wiggle room around them. We aren’t able to do this when we’re just frantically trying to get from A to B. And even if you were to try and offer yourself a ‘better feeling’ thought, if you haven’t slowed down and gotten curious about the original thought and shown your brain how it isn’t actually true - that new thought is unlikely to stick. Because you’re still convinced the opposite is a factual representation of reality. 

So don’t be in a rush, slow down. Which leads me to number 2) Don’t resist your emotions. And this one goes hand in hand with the last. Because it’s resisting and being unwilling to feel our emotions that makes us want to rush to ‘feeling better’. So we need to actually be fully willing to feel whatever it is that’s coming up for us.

Whether that’s sadness, or guilt, or shame, or anxiety, or disappointment. We have to be willing to feel the vibrations and sensations of those emotions in our bodies. Fully, without trying to escape them. And as humans, we are very good at trying to escape negative emotion. We have so many great ways to do it, like scrolling on social media, buffering with food, alcohol, drugs, sex - we have so many fun ways to avoid having to feel our feelings. But for a minute just imagine, what would it be like if when those sensations came up in your body - what if you didn’t panic and try to run away from them? What if you noticed where they were and just sat, watching them for a while. Observing them. Breathing around them and giving them full permission to hang out with you as long as they needed to.

This is so important when doing thought work. Because when we’re not able to feel our emotions, we’re never going to be able to fully understand them. I’ll drop a link for my free processing emotions mediation into the show notes of this episode, which walks you through how to process an emotion - so will be really useful for those of you that struggle with this!

Okay number 3 - don’t use thought work from a place of self judgement and shame e.g. I didn’t like how I acted, so if I change myself I can stop feeling shame. Of course we want to use thought work to work on how we show up in our relationships - that makes total sense. But doing this from the motivation of shame is not useful. Because shame is just created by mean, self critical thoughts about yourself. And shame will never help you become more of who you want to be.

Think about it - if the goal of thought work is to be curious and understand yourself and your brain on a deep level - is shame going to really help you do that? Or is it going to block you? How curious and understanding can you be when you’re calling yourself a bad person, or an idiot or whatever else your brain is saying to you? 

The key is to clean up the thoughts creating the shame first. So if you notice you’re having judgemental thoughts about yourself, your thoughts, or your behaviour - take a minute to do thought work on THOSE thoughts. Get curious about them. Challenge them. Call them out and consider how else you could choose to speak to yourself right now?

Judgement is the opposite of curiosity. Which means we can’t be curious about something we’re judging the hell out of. If you showed up in a way you didn’t like, you can’t be like ‘Okay, I wonder what was going on for me when I did that. I wonder what thoughts were driving me.’ when you’re busy beating yourself up. What I teach all of my clients is how to be a compassionate observer. How to compassionately observer what’s going on in their brains - without judgement or shame.

Which leads me to number 4 - Don’t judge and shame yourself for whatever comes up during your thought work. In my group coaching programme, a few of the members have said things like ‘I feel so stupid for thinking this’ or ‘I’m embarrassed I’m still having these kinds of thoughts’ and noticing the judgement here is so so important.

And I always remind my clients - you didn’t choose how your brain was programmed to think. The way your brain thinks is down to so many influencing factors - like your family history, your parents and upbringing, the society you’ve grown up in, cultural beliefs, religious teachings, earliest memories, traumatic events, your biology, the people you spend time with. All these things impact the messages and beliefs our brains absorb - and they’re things we have zero control over.

So beating yourself up for your default thoughts is kind of like beating yourself up for having a kidney problem. You didn’t choose the kidney problem, and you didn’t choose the programming you currently have. You only get to choose how you respond to that programming and how you choose to intentionally rewire it. The thoughts and beliefs you choose to think on purpose. So rather than judging yourself - be curious and fascinated by your brain. Like ‘Huh, my brain makes THIS mean THAT - interesting. I wonder why. What else might be an optional here.’

And a phrase I love to use, which I heard from one of my favourite coaches Kara Loewentheil is - ‘How very human of me’. Whenever you notice your brain is offering unhelpful thoughts - remind yourself - yep, this is what it is to be a human. All human brains do this. How very human of me.

And finally - number 5 - don’t expect to think a thought once and it to stick. Part of this work is coming up with new, intentional ways of thinking. And I’ve talked about in other episodes how we need to find believable thoughts, that feel true when we think them - not just pie in the sky, nice sounding affirmations. They actually have to create an emotion when you think them. So I help my clients come up with these thoughts, and we call them ladder thoughts or neutral thoughts. 

But some of my clients will come up with a new thought, that feels good when they think it and then naturally their brain goes back to the old thoughts - and they feel defeated. They think it’s all gone wrong and something hasn’t worked. But you can’t just think a new thought once and expect that to be your new default. Brains are wired through repetition. Think of how often you’ve thought your unhelpful thoughts. Likely thousands of times across years maybe even decades. 

In order to create a new neural pathway and a new thought pattern in your brain - you have to intentionally think your new thought, over and over. Like lifting weights, doing reps with it. And don’t panic - it’s not going to take decades for it to start to show up on it’s own. It could be a few weeks or months. But the more you commit to practising thinking that thought, the more it’s going to become a habit for your brain. A new default way of thinking and feeling.

Okay guys, that’s all I’ve got for you today - I hope it was helpful! The next round of my group coaching programme - Master Your Relationship Mind Drama - is going to be opening its doors in December. And in order to make sure you don’t miss out, you’re going to want to go and get yourself on the waitlist. So I’m going to drop the link with all the details and the waitlist in the information section of this episode.

And can I ask you to do something for me? Could you go ahead and give the podcast a little rating on whatever platform you’re listening from? This is how I can keep reaching more people and spreading the word of this work. 

Okay guys - have an amazing weekend, and I’ll speak to you all next week - bye!