Fit Mind E-Book

Pat Divilly

• Herausgeber: Gill Books
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Thousands Of Thoughts Run Through Our Minds Every Day, Forming An Inner Story Or Soundtrack That Controls Our Lives. Our internal voice can be critical, sabotaging our attempts to achieve the things we want. By tuning into and becoming more aware of the stories we are telling ourselves, we can free ourselves from the thoughts and beliefs that are holding us back. Alongside concepts, ideas and new perspectives, this book contains an eight-week practical programme for mental and emotional fitness. Through journalling, meditation and self enquiry we can begin to train our thoughts and mind to support us in the pursuit of our dreams, opening up to a fresh new outlook and appreciation for life as it is rather than life as we feel it should be. 'Fit Mind will change your life for the better.'Geoff Thompson, Bafta-Winning Writer 'Contains simple yet powerful practices that deepen attention and awareness.'Dr Easkey Britton, Surfer And Author Of Saltwater In The Blood 'A transformative guide for anyone looking to make a serious change in their life.'Yung Pueblo, New York Times Bestselling Author

Leseprobe

FIT MIND

8 WEEKS to CHANGE your INNER SOUNDTRACKand TUNE INTO YOUR GREATNESS

PAT DIVILLY

GILL BOOKS

To Ryan Johnson. Thank you for the encouragement and love you and your family showed me in my late teens. It changed the course of my life forever.

In loving memory of Eric Coleman, Chick Gillen and John Creaven.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

INTRODUCTION: Inner Exploration

PART ONE: From Patterns to Presence

The Conditioned Self

React or Respond

The ARC Method: Tools for Change

Integration Exercises (How to Use this Book)

PART TWO: Rewriting Our Stories

Week One: The Happiness Story

Week Two: The Success Story

Week Three: The Confidence Story

Week Four: The Emotions Story

Week Five: The Communication Story

Week Six: The Conflict Story

Week Seven: The Fear Story

Week Eight: The Purpose Story

PART THREE: Building Your Self-Care System

Building the Base: The 2/5/10 Routine

Habits and Behavioural Change

Your Next Chapter

Afterword

Eight-Week ARC Tracker

2/5/10 Routine – 30-Day Tracker

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Author

About Gill Books

Reviews

INTRODUCTION

Inner Exploration

This is a book about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and about the world, and the impact those stories have on our health, happiness and overall experience of life.

We speak to ourselves more than anyone else in this world. Thousands of thoughts, beliefs, stories and assumptions run through our minds every day. For most of us these stories and thoughts go largely unquestioned; we take them as gospel and blindly believe them, often with little or no evidence to back them up. With so many thoughts and beliefs going through our minds all day, every day, we might assume we are ‘thinking’. In truth, we are often just remembering old internal narratives played on a loop. These old stories or beliefs are the lens through which we see the world and serve as the ‘script’ or ‘blueprint’ for the story of our lives.

We walk through life with this largely unconscious blueprint, a collection of ideas and expectations about how things ‘should’ be in order for us to be happy. We then quickly make judgements about our experiences in life, labelling them ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, depending on how they match up to this unconscious script or blueprint of expectations in our minds. These beliefs or stories that make up our blueprint of how the world should look are shaped by our environment, our past experiences, the society and family we’ve been raised in, what we see in the media that we consume and what we’ve been told either implicitly or explicitly by others.

We have stories about how our bodies ‘should’ look, how our partners ‘should’ communicate, how we ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ feel given our circumstances and countless other stories about what we need to experience in life in order for us to be happy. The tighter we cling to these stories, the more conditions we set up for our happiness and the more conditional we become in our love for ourselves, for others and for life itself. It’s rare that we think to question or challenge these stories that run our lives and thus we can begin to feel that life is happening to us rather than for us as we see the same difficult cycles and patterns repeatedly showing up in our lives.

If we think of this one precious life we’ve been given as our very own movie, are we playing the role of the scriptwriter and director, creating the film and making it our own unique masterpiece, or are we the actor with no creative control who’s playing out a script written by others?

We often think that it’s the events or circumstances of our lives and relationships that cause our stress and problems, when in fact it’s the stories we tell ourselves about these events or circumstances that are so often the source of our suffering. The stress or suffering we associate with our relationships, our health, our finances or our career are really a result of the disconnect between how things are and how we think they ‘should’ be. As a result, day-to-day life can feel like an emotional rollercoaster and we can spend much of our lives trying to change the outside world to match the pictures and expectations we have formed in our heads.

When we begin to become more aware of our stories we can find appreciation, gratitude and freedom from our expectations and can be with life as it is rather than life as we feel it ‘should’ be. There are a great number of things outside our control in life and all too often our attention is focused on those things we can’t control. Taking responsibility in life involves bringing our attention back to the controllables – our thoughts and our actions.

In my younger years I had stories playing over and over in my head about not being enough, about not fitting in and about not being of value. I had stories about who I needed to be to be loved, stories about what I needed to achieve to feel successful and countless other stories and expectations – for myself and others – that made living with myself difficult and exhausting. It might surprise you when I tell you from the outset that all those stories that I used to live with still go through my mind frequently. The soundtrack is still there; the difference is that now I don’t believe everything I think and I have a simple toolbox that helps me quickly find perspective in times of stress or suffering – to help me change my internal tune.

This toolbox not only enables me to question or challenge the stories, thoughts and beliefs that surface in the present, but also to look back on past experiences and become aware of the origins of my beliefs and stories. It also helps me to see that thoughts and emotions I previously deemed ‘negative’ are actually where many of my lessons and much of my potential lie. I have learnt through the consistent practice of the tools in my toolbox to go from identifying with my disempowering thoughts to instead being aware of those thoughts, recognising the impact they have on my feelings and actions and then choosing whether I’m going to blindly believe the difficult thoughts or take some time to explore their purpose and origins. I have also learnt to accept and work with the ‘negative’ thoughts and emotions I once tried to dismiss.

I look forward to sharing this toolbox with you in the coming chapters.

Self-care has become a real buzzword in recent times. It is often used in the context of looking after yourself through diet, meditation, exercise, or lighting some candles and having a bath. There’s merit in all of these, but I can’t think of any greater act of self-care than actively choosing to improve the way we speak to ourselves.

We improve our relationships with ourselves, not by achieving more to fill voids or wounds that we feel within, but by accepting parts of ourselves that we’ve yet to accept, by coming to more intimately know and understand ourselves, our fears, our values and our drivers.

How we talk to ourselves matters the most.

As a kid I’d often arrive home from school and announce that I was ‘stupid’ or that I didn’t ‘fit in’. Without skipping a beat my parents would quickly challenge these stories by shifting the perspective to things I was doing well or to the groups I did fit in with. You’ve probably done something similar with your own kids or your friends, helping them to find perspective beyond the narrow lens of their inner story.

This book invites you to begin challenging the thoughts, stories, beliefs and assumptions that are causing you dis-ease in life, and it arms you with the tools to do so. Alongside concepts, ideas and new perspectives, I will share an eight-week practical programme of journalling, meditation and self-enquiry techniques that offer a chance to immediately begin implementing these new ideas and practising mental and emotional ‘fitness’. I encourage you to pick up a journal that you can use alongside this book as you go through the eight-week self-enquiry programme. You can also find guided versions of the book’s meditation exercises, along with other bonus material, at patdivilly.com/fitmind.

Despite the comforts of the modern world, there’s an overwhelming collective experience of disconnection, isolation, addiction and depression. Our connection to others starts with our connection to ourselves and so it’s in the work that we begin to do in this book that we improve every relationship in our lives.

In the coming chapters I will share how you can:

1. Become aware of the meanings you are giving to your external experiences.

2. Learn to go from believing your difficult thoughts to finding perspective and choice.

3. Recognise how your memories and origin stories influence your current worldview.

4. Understand the ‘characters’ in your head that seem to want to hold you back.

5. Implement a simple daily practice for improving self-talk and emotional awareness.

I look forward to going on this journey with you and helping you ‘take back the pen’.

Grá mór,

Pat

PART ONE

From Patternsto Presence

The Conditioned Self

‘Give me a child until he is seven andI will show you the man’ – ARISTOTLE

GOLD BENEATH THE CLAY

The tale of the clay Buddha sets the context of the origins of our own internal narratives.

In 1957, at a monastery in Thailand, a number of the monks decided it was time to move a giant clay Buddha that sat outside. The statue stood over ten foot high, so the monks needed a crane to move it. As the crane began to slowly lift the giant clay Buddha, a small crack appeared in the statue and it became apparent they had underestimated its fragility. They quickly instructed the crane operator to gently lower the statue so that they could rethink their plans. Worried about damaging the statue further, they decided to defer relocating it to the next day.

That night, one of the head monks came outside with a flashlight to inspect the statue. As he scanned the Buddha with his flashlight, he saw, in the crack, reflected light shining back at him. Intrigued, he got a hammer and chisel and began to chip away at the covering of clay. As he worked, he began to see bright gold light shining back at him. Over a number of hours, as he continued to chip away, he came to see that what he’d thought was a clay statue was in fact a golden statue that had been covered in clay.

Historians believed that the golden Buddha had been covered in twelve inches of clay three hundred years earlier when the monks in Thailand (Siam at the time) got word that the Burmese army were set to invade and attack their monastery. Eager to protect their beloved statue, they covered it in clay to hide its value and beauty. During the attack by the Burmese all the monks were killed and it wasn’t until years later that the clay Buddha was discovered and assumed to be just that, a clay Buddha, the gold hidden for so long that it had been forgotten about.

This story of the clay Buddha serves as a metaphor for our own experience of life, the gold representing our potential and wholeness and the clay being the layers of stories, masks, fears, defence mechanisms and beliefs that we have built up in our unconscious efforts to ‘protect’ our gold, the authentic self.

This clay is what prevents us from connecting honestly and openly with ourselves and with others and prevents us from allowing our potential to shine brightly in the world. As the years pass and we continually add layers of protection, it isn’t surprising that we sometimes forget the gold beneath and see ourselves as the collection of ideas we have accumulated, not the golden potential we once were.

The more stories we build about who we are and how we fit into the world, the smaller our world seems to get and the more limited our options in life seem to be. Our labels and judgements put us in a box that seems to get increasingly smaller. The tighter I cling to who I have decided I am, the more I limit myself in who I could be. Rather than look inward in our efforts to reclaim our gold we often go outward and look to gain external achievements and validation largely based on societal conditioning and other people’s dreams.

Take the example of a child who comes into the world with pure potential but develops a belief as a young person that they are flawed in some way. In their efforts to find acceptance and approval, that person might go on to chase material success to prove to themselves and the world that they are ‘good enough’, forgetting in their chase that there isn’t anything actually missing. This person might achieve every goal they set their sights on in life, but they unknowingly hold on to the clay exterior, the belief they are in some way inherently flawed. Our efforts to accumulate more or be given external approval for our achievements or position in society are based on the belief that there is something missing within us, and as a result many of the things we seek and efforts we make to ‘improve’ ourselves come from a place of wounding rather than a place of worth.

When we become aware of the stories and beliefs that cover our gold and come to see that our potential and wholeness lies beneath the clay exterior, we can begin to approach life with the aim of seeking fulfilment and authenticity rather than trying to compete with or challenge others in a game we can never win.

When I achieve the thing I thought I wanted and am left unhappy and unfulfilled it is likely I have come from this place of wounding and wanting to prove myself to others. When I find my flow in life and experience fulfilment in the journey, I am coming from a place of worth and living a life that is authentic and true to myself.

The golden Buddha in our story represents the full expression of ourselves that is born into the world open and judgement-free, full of potential, hope and possibility. The clay Buddha is akin to our ego or conditioned self, who has learnt who we think we need to be to survive and win acceptance based largely on the information we received in our earliest years. As human beings we enter the world pure gold, without fear, expectation or worries about being judged for who we are or what we do. Watch a carefree young child dance and play without any fear of judgement, happy to be the centre of attention and admired in all their glory.

At a given point something changes. The child whose dancing was once a source of entertainment and affection is now ignored, shamed or frowned upon. The child is told to grow up, and gaining approval and love isn’t as easy as it once was. Acceptance and love become conditional, it seems, at least through the eyes of the child.

In subsequent years we see that same child begin to collect countless implicit and explicit messages from their parents or primary caregivers as to who they need to be in order to receive love and acceptance and fit in within their family structure. Certain emotions, behaviours, hobbies or beliefs are frowned upon, shamed or criticised while other emotions, behaviours, hobbies or beliefs garner praise and acceptance. Of course as children we do not have the ability to understand context or find perspective and thus we often misinterpret our experiences and come to the false belief that we are in some way flawed, not good enough or not deserving of love.

Though we come into the world curious and open, our ego begins to emerge as we form judgements about ourselves and others and judgements about what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in life, largely as a result of what we learn at home. When the young child follows the rules at home and meets the expectations of their parents they are labelled a ‘good’ boy or girl and are given praise and approval. When they don’t follow those rules or meet the expectations, love is temporarily removed, a frightening experience for a young person completely dependent on the support of their parental figures. This conditional love leads to the child editing, filtering and conditioning themselves to act in certain ways and repress or deny other parts of themselves which have been deemed unacceptable.

Imagine a child is scolded when they refuse to eat their vegetables at dinner. As grown adults with perspective and logical understanding of the importance of eating healthy foods we can see why the parents insist on the child finishing their dinner. However, through the naïve eyes of the child their interpretation of the same experience is perhaps that love is removed or withdrawn when they say ‘no’ and refuse to meet their parents’ expectations.

When the child goes to school they encounter a new set of conditions as to who they need to be to gain and maintain the approval of their teachers and peers. Slowly, the carefree, spontaneous, expressive child becomes self-conscious and ashamed of the aspects of themselves that others deem unacceptable. Now they wear a collection of masks in order to fit into their environment. Maybe when they are laughed at because they stumble over their words while reading from the textbook in front of the class the child comes to the belief that they ‘don’t fit in with their classmates’.

Taking just these two examples – a child coming to believe they aren’t supposed to say no to their parents and that they don’t fit in – you can start to see how our earliest memories and the meanings we give to our experiences start to shape how we see ourselves and how we think we ‘should’ act in life.

As children we are like sponges absorbing implicit and explicit messaging from our family structures, society, teachers, friends and other influences. Certain judgements are implied, while others are explicitly spoken. Of course, at this time in our lives we don’t have the tools or the capacity to find perspective. Because we aren’t responsible for anyone else and because so much of our world centres on ourselves, we tend to make things all about ourselves. We don’t understand that our parents are tired or stressed after work and we take their lack of engagement as a withdrawal of love. Harsh words said (or kind words unsaid) by others when they are stressed or overwhelmed can be internalised and taken to heart, further shaping our identity and adding layers of clay above the gold, limiting our potential and possibilities.

It is said that every inner voice was once an outer voice that has become internalised; the voice in our head that tells us we’re not good enough emerged from something we perceived or heard from someone else in our younger years. Maybe when you think of your own ‘inner critic’ it reminds you of a voice from your youth?

Acceptance over Authenticity

Public speaking is often said to be one of the greatest fears that people experience in life. It isn’t the actual speaking that is scary, of course; we do that all the time. It is the fear of judgement and potential rejection.

Growing through our childhood and into our early adolescent years, after we have passed the stage of feeling unconditionally loved, we do all we can to avoid rejection and negative judgements. As a result we all experience the battle between the desire to express ourselves authentically and the desire to be accepted and stay connected to those around us. As young children who are completely dependent on the care of others, in this battle between authenticity and acceptance the desire and need to be connected, supported and loved by others usually wins. This means that our authenticity takes a back seat and we begin denying, repressing or filtering parts of ourselves that are deemed unacceptable by the ‘tribe’.

In years gone by this tribe will have been relatively small. In the modern world, social media and larger communities have opened up a much larger audience whose acceptance we hope to win and maintain at all costs – the ultimate cost, in fact, when we reject ourselves in the pursuit of acceptance from others.

Our stories and beliefs about who we need to be in order to fit in, be accepted and loved accumulate over time and the more conditions we collect about who we need to be, the further we can feel ourselves drift away from our authentic selves and our potential.

Defence mechanisms and roles we have taken in younger years to keep ourselves safe from abandonment can bleed into our adult lives and, like the clay on the statue, we can feel fragile and unstable, forgetting that at the core we are pure potential, masked by self-doubt, fear and stories. We see glimpses of the gold, our authentic self, at times – when there is a crack in the clay and we temporarily forget the story about who we need to be to fit in. It might be in a moment of play, connection, love, joy or even grief, when we ‘lose ourselves’ and show up in the present moment without judgement.

Watch a group of grown men cry and embrace as they watch their favourite football team win the championship for the first time in years, or a stadium full of people singing along without shame or self consciousness, losing themselves in the moment of watching their favourite band. Notice moments of vulnerability, when the hard edges of how we see ourselves and others begin to soften and allow us to communicate from the heart (love) and not the head (fear).

Outside these glimpses of our potential, we often quickly revert back to protecting ourselves and steering clear of being judged negatively for being seen in all our glory. As a means of protecting ourselves from hurt, abandonment or disconnection, we continue to cover our gold in layers of clay in the form of further evidence that protects our limiting beliefs, societal masks and fears.

PLAYING OUT PATTERNS

The tens of thousands of thoughts we have every day throughout our lives would perhaps more accurately be described as ‘remembering’, as we form this fixed identity and conditioned self with a rigid perception of who we are and how we fit into the world.

In my own life an early experience of bullying led me to believe I didn’t fit in. ‘Being an outsider’ unconsciously became a part of my self-image and it was something I believed for years as I replayed the same thought in my head without ever questioning it, repeatedly finding evidence that backed up my existing belief. In efforts to avoid further rejection from other social groups I became like a chameleon in school and college, drifting away from my authenticity and changing aspects of my appearance, personality or attitude to win the approval of others and avoid risking further rejection. This craving for acceptance from others often led me to abandon my own internal voice and self and go on a relentless and exhausting journey of ‘achievement’ to prove to others I was lovable. Needless to say, this self-abandonment had a dramatic effect on my self-esteem. It led to a journey of looking outside myself in pursuit of anything that would bring about validation from external sources that I hadn’t found internally.

This can start to point to the importance of exploring some of the meanings we gave to our earliest experiences and how those early experiences have shaped us.

• A young boy who is told that ‘boys don’t cry’ becomes the man who cannot connect to his own emotions or be vulnerable with others.

• A child who rarely sees their parents because they are always out working becomes a grown-up workaholic and struggles to be present with their own family.

• A child who is not allowed to make their own decisions has a hard time expressing their needs or putting down healthy boundaries later in life, as they have been implicitly taught to place the needs of others above their own.

From my early teens to mid-twenties I read every personal development book I could get my hands on in an effort to find the secrets to success and happiness. I learnt lots of strategies on time management and goal-setting, but I found nothing that explained why, irrespective of my accomplishments, I never felt good enough. I wasn’t ever going to find a book that would show me directly how my own early years had shaped my unconscious blueprint of the world which was running my life in the present.

There won’t ever be a book written that does this work for us. Personal responsibility is required in doing the work of shining a light in the dark, a process described by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung as ‘making the unconscious conscious’.

By becoming aware of our stories and beliefs, we allow ourselves to show up as the capable, mature, brilliant adults that we are. However, when these stories stay in the dark, we often feel ourselves reverting back to the scared child within, irrespective of our current age. In the work that I’ll introduce in this book I will invite you to walk back to earlier life experiences with a new perspective and adult eyes to see if you might come to a more empowering understanding of experiences you may have previously resented or deemed negative.

CLEANING THE FILTERS

My own personal work in recent years has been to slowly chip away at the clay exterior and protection I have built up over many years to fit in and be accepted. By going back to my past and exploring the meanings I gave to my early experiences and how those meanings have played out since, I’ve been slowly able to reclaim aspects of my natural state. Revisiting childhood experiences and viewing them with a new perspective and through adult eyes has allowed me to understand and override much of the conditioning I lived with for many years.

It’s important to note that the nature of conditioning is that our past experience affects our present and our present thoughts and actions affect our future. In my own experience we cannot outrun these emotional blocks and sticking points. We must face them head on rather than continually looking outwards for the answers that are within. As adults looking to excel in different areas of our lives, we are often quick to try to ‘overcome’ or banish the inner critics or voices in our heads that seem full of negativity and self-doubt. What if, rather than trying to overcome this voice, I befriended it, saw at what point in my life it tried to protect me, and then allowed it to be in my life but not running my life?

As an example, when a voice in my head tells me, ‘Don’t put yourself out there, people will ridicule you and you’ll be rejected,’ I become curious. I know this story is part of my ‘conditioned self’ and not my authentic self and so I look back and see where that voice may have originated in my life and how it might have tried to protect me. Maybe after the hurt of being bullied as a kid that voice looked to keep me safe, and maybe it did a good job at the time. I can thank it for that, but let it know it isn’t needed right now.

By slowly chipping away at that clay and bringing awareness, compassion and context to our past we begin to reclaim some of the gold we haven’t seen in a while and we begin the process of true self-acceptance.

Life is too short to spend it over-analysing every childhood experience and what we came to believe about ourselves and the world via the meanings we gave to our experiences. However, if there are painful or disruptive patterns and cycles playing out in my life repeatedly or I find myself stuck in rumination and incessant thinking, it is worth exploring the origins of these patterns and working on finding perspective and freedom from the unconscious stories that keep me stuck.

MEANING-ATTACHING MACHINES

The meanings that we give to our experiences in life ultimately become our experiences. What I mean by that is that from the time we are kids we begin making judgements and giving meanings to everything that happens in our lives. These meanings will be based on our conditioning and thus our memories, assumptions and beliefs play a large role in how we show up in the present.

This ties to the idea that there are always two triggers in the context of us forming stories about our experience: the external trigger and the internal.

• The external trigger is what actually happens without any judgements or emotions placed on it.

• The internal trigger, then, is the meaning that we give to what happens.

Only by becoming more aware of the internal triggers and separating our stories from our experiences can we take full ownership of our lives.

Take, for example, three people going for a job interview and all three being told, ‘I’m sorry, we don’t think you’re the right person for the role.’

This external trigger – the situation – is the same for all three candidates. The internal trigger, the meaning each candidate gives to what’s happened, will dictate how they feel and act in response.

One candidate might see this as a great learning experience – they got to practise their job interview skills and they’ll be better prepared for their next interview. The second candidate may have seen the interview as a wake-up call – perhaps this isn’t really the type of work they want to do. The third candidate may attach the meaning that they’ve been rejected.

Here we have the same experience, with three very different meanings attached. These meanings or stories the candidates tell themselves will dictate how they feel and act going forward, and their resulting actions will dictate the course of their lives. Here lies the power of the meanings we attach to our experiences and the stories we tell ourselves.

We can go back in time and explore our past experiences, such as the childhood examples shared earlier, but it is perhaps easier as a starting point to work with any current stressors we may be dealing with in life.

Before encouraging you to get into the practice of separating the external and internal triggers in your stressful experience I would like to share a few examples.

Book in the Bin and no Love on Social Media

It’s May 2016 and I’m presenting an eight-hour workshop in Dublin to a full room of eager attendees. The ‘discovery day’ session is centred on setting goals and putting a game plan in place to attain them. About two hours into the day I head to the bathroom while the group complete a journalling exercise from the workbooks they’d received upon entry. After I’ve washed my hands I throw a paper towel in the bin and out of the corner of my eye see that the last thing to go in that bin was a copy of one of the workbooks I’d given the attendees.

My heart sank and my head went into overdrive. What had I said or done to prompt someone to leave an eight-hour workshop within the first two hours, and to have not even wanted to bring the workbook home with them?

Walking back to the room, I did my best to shrug off the anxiety and self-doubt I was feeling ‘knowing’ that someone had been so bored or upset at the workshop that they’d left within the first two hours.

• What must everyone else in the room be thinking?

• How am I going to engage a room of people who must be bored stiff for another six hours?

• Will there be anyone left by the end of the day?

• What ever made me think I’d be a good public speaker?

Around 6 p.m., as we wrapped things up, a friend who had helped me with registration that morning congratulated me and told me it had been a great day.

‘I’m not so sure,’ I said, and I told him about the workbook in the bin.

He burst into laughter and told me that an attendee had spilled a cup of coffee on her workbook at the registration desk that morning and he’d given her a new one before dumping the old one in the bin in the men’s bathroom.

I asked him to confirm he was telling the truth before breathing a sigh of relief, feeling a weight lift off my shoulders and feeling my heavy heart soften.

I shared this story at a corporate event two years later and a sceptical attendee, with their arms crossed, said, ‘Maybe your friend was just saying that to make you feel better and maybe someone did throw your book in the bin.’

That could be true too, of course, but recognising the conclusion I had jumped to and hearing that it might not be true reminded me that the meaning I had given to the situation was evidence of how quickly I make assumptions with little or no evidence to back them up. The feelings my assumptions had created within me were a reminder of the power that my thoughts hold over me.

Our ‘negativity bias’ will often send our focus to what’s not working, or where we’re falling short, as had been the case with the infamous ‘book in the bin’. The ‘negativity bias’ is our natural tendency to focus or dwell on negative thoughts or experiences rather than on the positive. Rather than judge ourselves for being ‘negative thinkers’, it is worth remembering that our brains are wired for survival, not for happiness. As such, it is essential that our brains are always looking out for possible threat, danger or difficulty.

Only a few weeks after the ‘book in the bin seminar’, I shared the story with an audience in County Kerry, where I spoke about how our minds quickly come to conclusions and attach meanings to situations with little to no evidence to back them up.

How often in life does the future rewrite the past when we receive new information that changes completely the story we had previously believed? Have you ever not heard from a friend, family member or new love and built stories in your head about what you’ve said or done to upset them, only to later find out that they’d just been busy, had a break from technology or sent you a message that didn’t deliver?

A man at the back of that room in Kerry shouted, ‘It’s all well and good you talking about us telling ourselves stories, but my family don’t like me and that’s not a story.’ I was taken aback at first, unsure how to respond and in admiration of his willingness to just say it in a room full of people. When I quizzed him about how he knew his family didn’t like him he said, ‘They never like any of my social media posts.’ The audience quietly laughed, but he was very serious. I did my best to help him challenge his thought that his family didn’t like him and invited him to look at the situation in different ways, but he wasn’t convinced. A few months later I smiled from ear to ear when I received an email from that same man over the Christmas holidays: ‘The stories we tell ourselves. I get it now.’

To cut a long story short, the man had a young son whose godmother, the man’s sister, lived in Australia. Disappointed she couldn’t get home to see her godson for Christmas, she texted her brother and asked if he could post a picture on social media of her godson with his Christmas presents so she could see him. The man responded that he would, but in the back of his mind he knew she wouldn’t engage with his social media post because she never did.

Twenty-four hours after posting the photo of his son with his Christmas presents no one had engaged with the post. When his sister rang on Christmas Day to ask why he hadn’t posted the picture he was enraged. He said that he had posted that picture against his better judgement and knew she wouldn’t acknowledge it because she never took an interest in anything he was doing. His sister calmly asked him to take a few deep breaths and to log on to his Facebook profile to check his settings. It turned out, whatever way he’d set up his profile, that he and only he could see any of the posts that he was uploading. No wonder his family weren’t engaging with any of his content. They couldn’t see it! ‘Maybe my family do like me after all,’ he wrote.

Now, this example might seem funny, but it was causing the man a lot of stress and, with our stories serving as filters to the world, it impacted on all aspects of relationships with his family. The belief that they didn’t like him led to feelings of resentment, sadness and anger, which led to him pushing his family away, and thus it acted as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Imagine for a moment Christmas dinner in that man’s household. Someone doesn’t think to pass him the gravy and suddenly in his mind it’s not an innocent mistake, but a spiteful way for them to show yet again how little they like him! Again, we always experience two triggers, the external and then the internal. The external one here would be someone not passing him the gravy, which in itself is a neutral event. The judgement comes from the internal trigger, the meaning that he gives that situation based on his beliefs about the world. The beginnings of our freedom therefore lie in our ability to create a space between what is happening in reality and the story or assumption we have jumped to about what is happening.

MAKING THE UNCONSCIOUS CONSCIOUS

All this being said, it is our job and responsibility to clean our filters, by challenging our painful and limiting stories about ourselves and the world.

This can start with simply separating our ‘activating event’ – what has happened – from our belief or story about what has happened. For example:

Activating event: No likes on social media accounts.

Belief: ‘My family don’t like me.’

From the time we are kids our minds get to work on attaching judgements and meanings to different situations and experiences.

Life is so fast-paced that we often fall into the trap of taking our judgements and meanings as gospel and never questioning or challenging them. Now, if I’ve got a judgement that supports me and makes me feel empowered, this doesn’t cause problems. However, if I’ve attached a meaning to something that disempowers me and is causing me stress and anguish it’s important that I create the space to question it, particularly in areas of life where I see the same difficult themes or experiences recurring.

Our negativity bias is there to act almost as a protective mechanism to help us identify and avoid potential threats and danger. At its core the purpose of our brain is to keep us alive. As a pattern recognition machine it works to keep us alive by recreating the patterns that kept us safe yesterday rather than by stepping out of our normal routines.

‘Positive thinking’ would have killed our ancestors if they spotted a wild animal and thought, ‘What a beautiful animal, I’m going to pet it and be its friend.’ On the contrary, they would have used negativity bias to identify that wild animal as a potential threat to their safety and lives.

One of the greatest threats to our old brains living in these modern times is the threat of standing out from the tribe. In years gone by it was essential that we fit in with our tribes as we were reliant on collaboration and protection to survive. Those tribes might have had fifty people, a world apart from the worlds we live in today where the internet and big cities open us up to a world of thousands. Our need to fit in with our ever-expanding tribes has led to us becoming invisible.

The term ‘waking up’ refers to the moments in which we see beyond our judgements and come to see that life isn’t happening tous. Life is just happening and we are either reacting to it or responding to it.

CHALLENGING YOUR THOUGHTS

When a child attaches a meaning that they are ‘less than’ or ‘not good enough’ in an area of life, a parent or primary caregiver will hopefully not reaffirm the child’s negative self-talk or disempowering beliefs. A good parent would be straight into challenging their disempowering beliefs about themselves. They’d find every bit of counter-evidence to disprove the child’s assumptions. However, when it comes to the disempowering stories we have about ourselves, we don’t think to create the space to challenge these stories and find counter-evidence. Instead, we take our negative thoughts about ourselves as gospel and place them alongside all the evidence of times we’ve failed or fallen short in our past.

Of the countless self-development and acceptance exercises I’ve completed over the years I think completing 365 days of journalling where I challenged my most stressful thought of the day had the biggest impact on my overall worldview and wellness. I simply took fifteen minutes a day to write down the biggest thought that was causing me stress and then challenged that thought and found perspective.

Notice I said the thought – not the person or situation – that was causing me most stress. Remember, it’s not bad weather that makes us feel stressed, it’s thinking that the weather should be different from how it is. The stress lies in the thought. The freedom from the stress lies in the ability to find perspective or acceptance of whatever is happening in reality.

We increase our awareness and bring a level of acceptance when we dissolve our judgements and accept reality as it is. When we go from awareness of all that’s happening to a focus on what’s lacking or missing from the situation, relationship or experience, stress ensues.

Typically in these moments of stress we become reactive and try to get away from what we deem the source of stress, unaware that the stress is the result of an internal reaction, not anything external. If we choose instead to respond to what is happening by checking in with the narrative we have attached to our experience and then becoming curious about this narrative, we can begin to learn from and grow through all our experiences and get away from the idea that negative thoughts or emotions should be avoided.

A/B/C/D Exercise

The A/B/C/D journalling exercise is a simple tool from cognitive behavioural therapy that I used daily for twelve months to help recognise my automatic judgements and find perspective.

As a way to begin recognising the meanings we attach to our experiences and the impact of those automatic judgements I would encourage you to complete this cognitive behavioural therapy-style exercise with pen and paper before going any further in the book.

First, identify an activating event, something that has happened which you may be pointing to as a source of your stress. Note what has actually happened as opposed to your feelings or judgements about what has happened. It is an observation and based on facts as opposed to feelings. For example, instead of saying, ‘I am upset because my friend turned up late for lunch,’ identify the activating event as ‘I was due to meet my friend for lunch at 2 p.m. and they didn’t arrive until 2.20 p.m.’

Next, we’ll look at the second trigger, the belief; the story we are telling ourselves about what has happened. Perhaps in this scenario, my automatic internal story is ‘My friend has no respect for me or my time.’

Now, having identified the activating event and our belief we want to write out all the consequences of this belief. For example, when I believe the thought that my friend doesn’t respect me or my time I feel bitter, judgemental and hurt. I am resentful and struggle to be present with them when they do arrive. It has affected my mood and thrown my plans for the day completely off course as it’s upset me so much.

Finally, we’ll look to see beyond our automatic judgement and dispute our automatic belief (‘My friend doesn’t respect me or my time’). Perhaps I am able to recognise in disputing the belief that this is the first time they have been late, that they were apologetic when they did arrive, that they’ve supported me a lot in other ways in recent months and that they have had a lot going on in their own life, which may have been the reason why they were late.

This exercise isn’t about toxic positivity, making everything perfect, ignoring reality or flicking a switch and removing the responsibility of ourselves or others. It is instead a tool for finding perspective and challenging our judgements to create some space and relief from unnecessary suffering.

Some days when I did this exercise I gained a completely new outlook on a thought that had previously been a great source of stress. On other days it provided me with the tiniest bit of perspective around the thought.

Like anything, this A/B/C/D exercise can be seen as just more information and a nice idea on paper, but if practised consistently it can be a profoundly powerful means of beginning to gain some freedom and liberation from the stories that cause us unnecessary suffering. If you were to close this book now and never open it again, I am confident that committing to this one exercise alone consistently would make a very meaningful impact on your life.

I don’t want you to close the book, of course! We are just setting out on a journey that will transform how you see your world, but I do want you to recognise the power of this simple exercise.

As you become comfortable with using the A/B/C/D exercise for small daily stresses you can start to go back in time and use the same exercise on situations, experiences or interactions in your past about which you hold resentment. In finding perspective from our past we create more freedom for our future.

Before moving to the next chapter, be sure to go through at least one A/B/C/D prompt.

The Conditioned Self – What to Remember

We come into the world with pure potential and without fear or judgement but begin to hide, deny or repress parts of ourselves in order to be accepted. These repressed parts make up our ‘shadow’; the parts of ourselves we accept and embrace make up our ‘persona’. True self-acceptance requires healthy integration of the parts of ourselves that we have labelled ‘bad’, ‘unacceptable’ or ‘wrong’. We can do this by exploring the meanings we gave to early experiences and finding perspective and context in our current stories and beliefs.

By going back to childhood experience with adult eyes we can begin to find perspective and rewrite some of the scripts that are running our lives.

While we think we are thinking, in fact our conditioned mind is remembering and playing out patterns based on these early judgements and the implicit or explicit messages we received early on about how life ‘should’ look and who we need to be to gain acceptance and approval from others.

We are meaning-attaching machines. Things happen and we give them a meaning based on our own worldview. Many of the meanings we gave to our early childhood experiences have a large bearing on how we see the world to this day.

Our mind is like an iceberg, with our conscious awareness as the visible part above the water, and the unseen bulk of the iceberg representing our unconscious thoughts, beliefs, assumptions and stories. Our goal in reflective work is to shine a light on some of those unconscious parts, making the unseen seen and the implicit explicit. In doing so we can integrate these unconscious aspects in a healthy way.