My colleague, friend and mentor extraordinaire, Brooke Castillo just published a fantastic new book entitled “Self Coaching 101”. In this book Brooke shares and explains very simply, in language your 7 year old can understand, how your thoughts create the results in your life. She believes that thoughts don’t happen to you, they are actually a choice you make and when you choose what you want to think, then you can have everything you say you want in your life and more! She believes that we adopt our parent’s thought patterns without question and that’s it’s time to start thinking for ourselves. This is her definition on emotional adulthood…thinking for ourselves…love that!
Brooke shares her quick and easy method for becoming more aware of your thoughts, dissolving the ones that cause you to suffer and shows you how to create better feeling thoughts. It’s not about changing the action which is why diets don’t work or trying to change the circumstances which are why the divorce rate is higher in second marriages. It’s way better. It’s all about controlling what YOU think. Brooke once said to me and I’m paraphrasing “I never think a negative thought unless I give it permission to enter my mind”. Love that too!
Okay, enough about the book, you’ll just have to read it yourself so you can be as excited as I am. Let’s get to the juicy stuff…how the model worked with me! Although I have been using this tool quite a bit in the last month or so with my clients, I just recently used it on myself and my husband. I had such a profound experience that I just had to share it with you, my friends, my clients and whoever else is reading this blog. Many of you know that my husband and I own an automobile dealership. If you read the paper or listen to the news you know, ad nauseum I might add, how much the automotive industry has been affected by the current economic crisis. I do think the media relishes in sensationalizing bad news which is why I rarely read the paper or listen to it, but that’s a whole other topic!
Last weekend, my husband sat me down and explained just how awful business has been and what it might mean for us. He gave me the worst case scenarios from losing our business to potentially losing our home. I was devastated. Later that evening, or shall I say morning, I cried my eyes out. My biggest fear was coming to fruition. I woke up the next morning with swollen eyes, a stuffy nose and a pounding headache to match. I sat outside on our deck the next morning and right in the middle of my pity party I quietly decided that I no longer wanted to feel like crap. What I wanted to feel was happy, at peace and hopeful again I said goodbye to my drama, so long to poor, pathetic Jackie and consciously decided it was time to coach the coach using Brooke’s self coaching model. This is what it looked like:
Circumstance (These are facts, things that happen in the world that you have no control over) Our business is losing money.
My Thought: (this is what I think about the circumstance) We will lose everything including our nest egg, our home and our savings
My Feelings: (What I feel when I think this thought) Scared, Depressed, Desparate
My Actions/Behavior (What I do when I feel this way) Cry, undermine my husband, micromanage his business by telling him how he should handle things, and sometimes just do nothing.
Result: A husband who doesn’t want to talk to his wife hence a poor relationship with him,
In summary, there are circumstances in our lives over which we have no or little control. These circumstances trigger you to think a thought. This thought creates your feelings which cause you to act or behave in certain ways and these actions create the results in your life. So the idea here is to write down your current problem and plug it into the model. Is it a circumstance (fact), a thought or a feeling? . For me, our business is losing money is the circumstance and this triggered my thought which is we will lose everything. When I think this thought, I feel scared, desperate and depressed. When I feel this way, I cry, undermine my husband by questioning his decisions, tell him how he should handle things and essentially micromanage his every move. When I do this, the result is a husband who not only doesn’t want to talk to me but probably wants to run away from me. I will for sure lose everything including him.
What’s so fascinating about this is when you use this model, the result is always proof for the original thought. ….Yes I will lose everything if I continue to believe this thought. In other words, I am creating the very scenario that I fear.
We become our own saboteurs by the thoughts we believe.
Remember how I said I wanted to feel hopeful, peaceful and happy again? Read Part two next week to find out how. I will also share how I coached my husband using this same self coaching model and how things have progressed since then.
If you are interested in purchasing Brooke Castillo’s book, you can order it through my website using My Bookshelf.
