HOW TO CONTROL YOUR THOUGHTS: A SMALL EXERCISE TO DO IT

 Dear Readers and Friends,                                                                                                                       original article

As in every Life Coaching context we are examining, there are only small explanations and many questions. Finding these answers is our task, discovering ourselves and then improving ourselves and loving ourselves for who we are is the ultimate goal. As has already been said in several articles: 

“A question at the right time can change your life or at least your vision of it.” 

So let's continue the series of Life Coaching articles with the same pattern.

Last but not least, nobody can deceive themselves, they can believe they can, but if we don't accept ourselves and are honest with ourselves, nothing we're doing will work.

This is the safe place where you can show your True Self without receiving criticism or suggestions, just questions at the right time.

When was the last time you checked to see if a thought or image came to mind? 

While we can’t control the thoughts that come to our mind, we can control what we focus on and how we respond to those thoughts and choose which ones we validate. We are not our thoughts—they are not worth beating ourselves up about unless we act on them or allow them to consume our lives.

We must learn to discern wise, mature, and accurate thoughts from useless and destructive ones.

While it may seem like our negative thoughts are natural and part of how our minds are wired to be, we can choose to focus on the thoughts we want and ignore the ones that hurt, upset, or destroy us. We may feel stress in our stomachs and anger in our chests, but during these moments of physical discomfort, it is our minds that we must rely on; monitoring and changing to alter the way our bodies respond. We must use our free will to validate and focus on the thoughts that we know will produce the emotional consequences and reaction we want to happen.

HOW CAN WE START TAKING CONTROL OF OUR LIVES?

Self-regulation is based on an individual becoming his own thought police and asking himself questions like:

• What was the cognitive distortion/bias? 
• What thought did I just validate? 
• What thought occurred that shouldn't have?

A GUIDE TO CONTROLLING YOUR THOUGHTS

Consider a particularly unhelpful thought you have had in the past, write it down, and examine it with the following outline\guide. Challenging these thoughts can often help us change them, which also helps us change the way we feel.

THE USELESS THOUGHT: … ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

Answer the following questions to evaluate your thinking:

• Is there any substantial evidence to support my thoughts?
• Is there any evidence to the contrary?
• Am I trying to interpret this situation without all the evidence?
• What would a friend think of this situation?
• If I look at the situation in a positive way, how is it different?
• Will this matter in a year? How about in five years?

Once you have asked yourself these questions, read your answers and try to find a more balanced or rational view. Moving forward, try to apply these questions to the unhelpful thoughts you come across. You can use this technique to check whether your thoughts are realistic and balanced or not; with practice this can become a very effective tool for thought management.

This exercise seems very difficult to implement, certainly not because of its complexity but because of our lack of habit, the one that is built every day with a thought and following it. 

I leave you with the hope of an increasingly fruitful work on yourselves and that my articles can be useful to you on your journey. Leave a sign of  your passage in the comments.