Supercoach - Michael Neill [38]
This gives us a remarkably reliable way of navigating through to our own wisdom. You can actually use your feelings as a sort of early warning system, like a traffic signal for trains of thought:
• If you’re feeling bad, that’s like a red light warning you to disengage from whatever toxic thoughts are in your mind. You don’t have to try to stop thinking altogether; just don’t climb on the train and don’t fall for the sense of importance and sudden urgency your thoughts may seem to have.
• If you’re feeling somewhat neutral, that’s like a yellow light that says “Proceed with caution.” It’s possible that the thoughts racing through your mind are worth paying attention to, but if you feel your mood begin to drop, jump off whatever train of thought you’ve been traveling on and wait until your mood rises before you reengage with your thinking.
• If you’re feeling content and at peace, you’ll tend to think higher-quality thoughts—and those thoughts can lead you to some pretty wonderful places.
Of course, one of the problems with being in a low mood is that your point of view is often so distorted that you don’t realize you’re in a low mood!
Here are some pretty reliable indicators:
• You feel bad.
• Your sense of humor has gone missing.
• You have an all-or-nothing mentality, coupled with a sense of either urgency or ennui. You either feel that you must put an end to all your problems now or you feel that there’s no point in doing anything about anything. Neither point of view is correct or particularly useful.
What’s interesting to note is that the feeling of urgency is one of the most reliable indicators that what you actually need to do is slow down and take a break. Rather than try to “change your state” when you’re feeling low, do your best to center yourself in the present moment, recognizing that no matter how urgent or pressing a course of action may seem, chances are it’s just a thought.
In You Can Have What You Want, I share the story of how as a teenager I finally learned to recognize the difference between the suicidal trains of thought that had occupied my thinking for years and any actual desire to end my life. Once I recognized the “suicide thought” as just a thought, no more significant than any other, I was able to quickly let it go each time it arose. By not getting “on the train,” my sense of fear and suffering diminished overnight.
In the same way, if you choose not to act on your thinking when you’re feeling low, you’ll find that as your mood lifts, the quality of your thinking will lift with it—and when you climb aboard a quality train of thought, it can take you a long way toward living the life of your dreams.
This is sometimes easiest to recognize in the case of small children. For example, my daughter Maisy came into our bed one night, sobbing that she’d dreamed that our cat had died and we’d had to bury her. No amount of reassurance (including the presence of the actual cat) would calm her until my wife agreed to remove the dream from Maisy’s head. (For those of you not familiar with this process, we’ve found that it is most effectively done through the ear after a bit of struggle and accompanying sound effects!)
When I checked in to see how Maisy was doing the next morning, she told me that although the dream had indeed been successfully removed, she was still able to imagine the cat dying, which made her very, very sad.
And herein lies the point:
It’s not the thoughts that pass through
your head that impact your life;
it’s the ones you take ownership of
and think about all day long.
Thoughtspotting
During the day, if you notice yourself feeling down or a bit worried or unsettled, see if you can spot the thought behind the feeling. As soon as you’ve spotted it, let it go. You can imagine it as a stick that’s become stuck in a river, and simply give it a nudge to set it free.
Here’s an example of the typical thoughts that might pass through someone’s head in any given minute on the way to work in the morning:
I’m going to be