Welcome back to another episode friends, Today we are going to be going in on two important concepts. The concept of deciding ahead of time and also how to cope with negative emotions and how to stop resisting them.
Learning how to focus my brain on one thing at a time all the way through the end, has really taught me how to manage my mind and what my thoughts are. Instead of trying to think of everything that I have to do, I think of one thing at a time. We all have about 60,000 thoughts per day and it is hard to manage all those thoughts right?
Two of the tools that you want to learn in order to manage your mind are focus and constraint. Your brain needs supervision as you have to tell it what you want it to do, and what you want it to focus on, the feelings you want those thoughts to create for you. When you don't manage your mind, the feeling you will feel most of the time is, overwhelm. What is overwhelm doing to you? It makes you Procrastinate, quit, change direction, and doubt yourself. Your brain is trained to constrain so it can become efficient. It knows where to focus on, based on your history. So direct it and constrain it as to where it should focus on so you can create different results in your life.
I also want to shed some light into this concept called emotional childhood is when we blame events or people in our lives for how we feel, and leave ourselves completely disempowered and helpless. This leaves you in a dependent childhood state because you are dependent on the external world to change how you feel. I don’t know about you but I think that is exhausting and putting the key to your happiness in someone else’s pocket. You can give others the power and be a victim or you can own that you get to decide how you feel, and other people don’t have control over how you feel or don’t feel. When you take responsibility for how you feel and you know that the reason you feel the way you do is because of how you’re thinking, that truly can change your life and you can be empowered at a different level.
When we can think about our life ahead of time, we make much better decisions for ourselves- what we want to do, what we want to create, the decisions we want to make. It’s so much easier for me to decide right now what healthy things I’m going to eat tomorrow. How many times have you done that? You decide in the spur of the moment when you finally get tired of feeling a certain way: I’m going to eat a salad, I’m going to eat some really good protein. Then when you find yourself in that moment, you’re like “Okay, I’ll take that brownie or pizza.” Deciding ahead of time and honoring those decisions is the key. You prevent a lot of negative emotions and a lot of negative reactions by supervising yourself ahead of time and deciding ahead of time.
Next up I want to talk to you about this concept of how to cope with negative feelings and why we usually try to avoid them.
If you are anything like me, you’ve spent a lot of time avoiding and resisting negative feelings. The biggest reason for this is because they are uncomfortable and I didn’t want to feel anxious or fearful so I tried to resist these feelings. But what I resisted only persisted. So, I had to learn a better solution to end my suffering. I started realizing that we get access to changing our feelings by naming them, paying attention to them, and looking at them within our bodies--not reacting to them, but naming them.
Feelings are nothing to be afraid of. We don’t need to resist, react, or avoid them. No one’s taught us this. No one’s taught us how to actually feel our feelings. We realize that feelings are not that big of a deal when we feel them all the way.
A lot of the time, when we’re not feeling a positive emotion, we don’t understand why. Remember, it’s usually because of what we are thinking, so we feel this emptiness and want to feel better right away. But it’s not that easy. Joy comes from within us, from managing our minds whereas pleasure comes from outside of us. If you’re always relying on something external like a pill, cigarette, or food to change how you feel, you become less adept at changing how you feel from the inside while becoming more dependent on how you change it from the outside.
Another powerful example is the situation of the Corona pandemic. Most of us are feeling anxious and isolated because of how we are thinking about the situation itself and the meaning we are giving the stories we are hearing or the news from the media. We need to be aware of the separation and space from our current reality and our thoughts about that reality.
Stay safe my friends. I'll talk to you next week, were we will speak about the benefits of hiring a life coach!