Thoughts about Thoughts 2 of 2

Well, hello, friend. Today, let's continue our conversation about thoughts about thoughts. In the last episode, we talked about the power of thoughts. We talked about where your thoughts come from. Today, I'd like to share some ideas about thinking on purpose, choosing your thoughts.

Imagine the Thoughts That Go Through Your Brain

Sometimes the fish were too small. Sometimes we caught fish we wouldn't wanna eat like catfish. Sometimes we pulled up garbage that we just happened to hook. So there was some discernment in what we actually brought on the boat and brought home to cook. Now, what if you imagined that the thoughts that go through your brain were like the fish in the lake?

You pulled up a thought and decided which to keep and which to say no thank you to. This is important because your thoughts create your life. Choosing your thoughts is an important skill because your thoughts create your life. So I'd like to offer you a few steps for choosing your thoughts strategically.

First, understand that you are not your thoughts.

You are the person thinking your thoughts. When you pay attention to your thoughts, you might think something like, what kind of person am I to think these thoughts? So you might tend to judge yourself. I remember being in a mommy's group. 1 woman confessed, sometimes on those really tough days, I have fantasies about just leaving my child in the grocery store shopping cart and driving away without her.

I'd go to the spa and not worry about what I made for dinner. This would be a forbidden thought. Right? Abandoning your child. However, the other women in the group lacked and shared similar fantasies.

So you have thoughts because you are human. Your thoughts don't say anything about who you are. It doesn't predict what you will do. You have thoughts because you have a human brain. And understand that just because a thought pops into your head, it does not make the thought true.

Replace Judgment with Curiosity

Replace judgment with curiosity. Gee, if I put up my fishing rod, I wonder what I'll catch. So let's say for example, you have a thought about getting revenge and you think what kind of person am I? So again, just because you had that thought doesn't mean that you will seek revenge. A thought about revenge does not make you a bad person.

It makes you a human person. You don't have to beat yourself up for the thoughts that you have. When I'm fishing and I hook a sandal, I don't beat myself up because I'm a terrible person. I don't say, oh, you only catch sandals. You may as well go home and not continue fishing.

I can just say, well, this is what happens when you go fishing. Sometimes you catch things that you don't want. So next, understand that not all thoughts are keepers. Every thought you have is an opportunity to ask yourself, is this a keeper or do I wanna throw it back? 3rd, it's important to distinguish between a thought and a circumstance.

Distinguishing Between Thoughts and Circumstances

So I had a client Jolene who said to me, things never go my way. She was treating this like it was a fact. I asked her to think about a single circumstance in which things didn't go her way. She said, well, just this week, I made a special trip to the store to take advantage of the store sale. But when I got there, they were all out of the item.

I asked her, well, did you ever go to the store to take advantage of a sale and you were successful? She said, of course. I said, well, you're treating the sentence, things never go my way, as if it were fact. The fact is that this one time you went to the store and the store was out of stock. However, you've also had experiences in which you got what you wanted.

What would your life be like if you had the opposite thought, things go my way? Well, Jolene's brain had a temper tantrum. She tried to argue all of the evidence that proved her thought, things never go my way to be true. You see, our brains like to believe that they are always right. They don't like it when our thoughts are challenged.

But here's the thing. Ultimately, you get to decide what thoughts you accept and which ones you throw back. However, it's important to understand that there are consequences to each thought you allow to stay on board in your conscious mind. So Jolene and I started to explore the consequences of believing that things never go her way. Let's say that Jolene has the thought, it doesn't matter what I do.

The promotion is gonna go to my less deserving male coworker instead of me. When she thinks that thought, she feels resigned. When she feels resigned, she's less likely to bring her “A” game to work. She's less likely to take on new challenges. She might have already sort of given up even before the game started.

So there's an interesting connection between our thoughts and the results we get in our life. If you follow this sequence, the thoughts create feelings and the feelings generate certain actions or inactions and those actions and inactions create the results in our life. Almost always, we find that the result that a thought creates proves this thought to be true. This is why it's so important to pay attention to thoughts. How do you figure out what your thoughts are?

How to Figure Out Your Thoughts

Well, every day, I get a pencil and a piece of paper and I just write down what's happening in my brain. It doesn't have to be organized. I don't judge or censor myself. I'm just taking dictation for the things in my mind. Then when I've got it on paper, I can objectively take a look at it and I can ask myself, what do I think are the thoughts?

As you start to do this exercise, what you might find is that you confuse a thought for a fact, for a circumstance. So something is a fact if you can prove it in a court of law or capture it on video camera. But most things that we think are facts are in fact just interpretation of the facts. They're thoughts and every thought that you have is optional. Then you can sit and ask yourself, when I think this one specific thought, what feelings do I get?

And, generally, there should be one emotion. Just pick out the predominant emotion. Then ask yourself another question. When I think this thought and I feel this feeling, what actions do I take and what actions do I avoid? And this can be a very, very long list.

Then you can ask yourself, okay, just based on these actions and inactions, what results am I creating in my life? So your brain can actually see the connection between a thought and the result. Any thought that you hold is optional. When I go out fishing, I can decide whether or not to release that fish or keep it on board. You can do the same thing with thoughts.

Changing Your Thoughts

Now, let's say that you don't like the results that you're getting in your life. Then you can work backwards. You can ask, well, what actions would lead to the result that I want? Then you can go back another step. Well, what feelings would I have in order to make it more likely that I followed through on these actions?

Then you can take it back another step. What thought would be most likely to generate that feeling? So it is completely possible to swap thoughts so that you can get the result that you want in life. Now you might be thinking, well, I don't always know what I'm thinking. If that's the case, how do I figure out what that thought is?

And here's the answer. As you go through your download, you might notice times of really, really strong feelings. Like let's say somebody said, I got to the office and I started snapping at people, even the receptionist. Okay. You can trust your feelings.

Your feelings give you information about what's going on in the inner world. Now your brain will tell you that you have feelings because of certain circumstances in your life. Well, I got really mad because somebody cut me off in traffic. Well, being cut off in traffic is a circumstance. It's something that can be captured on a video camera.

Right? Why is it that some people are able to stay calm when they get cut off in traffic? It's because the feeling that you get is not because you got cut off in traffic, it's because of your thought about what it means to be cut off in traffic. And I know that this sounds like just a semantics exercise, but please stay with me. Let's say that being cut off in traffic triggers the thought, this is unfair.

People should follow the rules or people aren't respecting me. Those thoughts can lead to anger. You could have another thought though. You could have the thought, wow, maybe this person is responding to a personal family emergency. I'd love to help them get back to their family more quickly.

That thought would trigger compassion. So you notice that you're mad when you arrive at work, work backwards. What happened? What were some of the thoughts that contributed to your anger? Now, unlike thoughts, which we can't really trust to be true all the time, I think we can trust our feelings.

Our feelings give us information about what's happening in our inner world. And when we listen to our feelings, we're in a much better position of really understanding ourselves and why we do the things that we do. 3rd, understand that you can change any thought. Just because you've been thinking about it forever doesn't mean that you can hang on to it. Just because this is a thought that everyone in your peer group is thinking doesn't mean that it's a thought that you wanna hold on to.

So I coach physicians. Many physicians think that they have to really beat themselves up in order to achieve high levels of performance. If they were kind to themselves, they'd probably never get out of bed. But here's another thought, What if they had the thought, I'm not gonna beat myself up anymore. I'm gonna treat myself with the same kind of compassion I would offer my patient, that I would offer my children or anyone else that I love.

And that is the thought that they held onto. Most people who make that thought swap find that they actually get better results in their life. Then the question becomes, well, I have this thought here and I wanna get to this thought over here as a thought swap. How do I get there? And it doesn't happen all at once.

If there's a thought that we wanna throw back, we can't just tell our brains, just ignore that thought. Forget it doesn't exist. The brain just doesn't work like that. Instead, what we want to do is offer another neural path, another thought that we have on a regular basis to get to that new thought. It's sort of like you can drive on the well established freeway or you can go on the unpaid side road, which would you choose?

So your normal thought is the freeway. With intention, you can build another path and pave it by doing it frequently. Now it doesn't happen all at once. I was working with a client. She started with the thought, my fat is gross.

She wanted ultimately to get to the thought, I'm a sexual goddess. And so we kept on coming up with baby step thoughts that moved in the direction of the thought she wanted and away from the thought that she didn't want. It's possible that people who are overweight can be sexual goddesses. I'm exploring the possibility that I can be fat and still attractive to other people. So you are in control of your thoughts.

You are not your thoughts. You're the person thinking your thoughts. You may have thought a certain thought so frequently that you just assume it's true. So any thought that you're having, you can challenge it. What is the truth?

What would a video camera record? And how am I making meaning about what I see on the video? Those are your thoughts. Every thought that you have is optional. You can go through the exercise and connect the dots between your thoughts, your feelings, your actions, and the results that you're getting in life.

The Importance of Practicing Thought Management

If you want different results, the best thing to do is to interrogate the thoughts that are leading to the results you're getting and then choose a thought that's really gonna help you get what you want. Now, while we're talking about thoughts, you're here because you're part of the OCD community. And I just wanted to mention that the obsessions in OCD are really a special kind of thought. So you don't necessarily wanna use this algorithm as you look at your obsessions. You want to get treatment with ERP but your thoughts about the obsessions use this model and let me know how all of this is working for you.

Now this sounds so simple, right? But once you get started, you will understand that it's simple and not easy. This requires practice. But if I were going to recommend that you practice one new skill in your life, it would be thinking on purpose. It would be intentionally deciding what thoughts that you are going to think.

And that's what I've got for you today. Let me know below what your thoughts about this content are. Let me know if you've given it a try to think on purpose and how that's worked for you. I wanna thank you for your listening ear. I am so grateful that you are investing in yourself and your family by getting some new and different ideas.

And if nobody has told you yet today, I see you. I admire your courage. Learning how to manage OCD may be the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. And here you are showing up, making this investment in yourself. I honor you and I thank you.

I'll see you next time. If she believes that the promotion she wants will go to her less deserving male coworker, she might not apply herself at work and become a true contender.