Who’s Running Your Life, You or Your Circumstances?

Assuming YOU’D rather be in charge of your life than your circumstances, then ‘noticing’ is a crucial skill to develop. Thoughts and feelings you’re unaware of will run your life for you unless you notice them, and sometimes even the ones you notice will dominate unless you put yourself in charge of them! Cultivating the part of yourself that is more detached and can observe or witness your thoughts and feelings is crucial to you being in charge.

FTC – Feelings, Thoughts, Choosing

With noticing, you bring yourself the freedom of choice, and with choice, you have the possibility of making a conscious decision to focus on more of what you want. At this point, YOU demonstrate being in charge. In any given situation, you need to provide answers to the following statements (FTC – feelings, thoughts, choice)
a) what am I Feeling?
b) what am I Thinking?
c) do I want to Choose to change my thoughts (and thereby my feelings)?

Thoughts determine feelings

Although thoughts determine feelings, it often feels like they’re all muddled up. If you find yourself wondering what on earth is going on, practice getting as specific as possible about what you’re feeling. It’s much simpler to identify a ‘bad’ feeling than a ‘bad’ thought. So get clear about the feeling you want to change, and then you can use the power of your thoughts to affect the feeling. If you’ve any doubt about how thoughts determine feelings, do the following exercise. For five minutes, think the worst possible things that you could imagine happening to you (eg your loved ones dying, your health being seriously affected, losing all your money etc etc). Let yourself really imagine this as fully as possible – and at the end of 5 minutes (if you can manage that long!) notice how you’re feeling. It’s likely to be rather depressed, to put it mildly! Now take another 5 minutes and imagine the best life you could possibly have. This will be very different for many people, but might include being in a state of love the whole time, sharing your life with your dream partner/family, living in a dream country, with plenty of money and your ideal house, car, lifestyle, work etc. Now notice how you feel when you fully give yourself permission to imagine this scenario as if it were true right now. A much cheerier scenario, hopefully!

Self-sabotage

When I’ve done this exercise, I feel terrible with the first scenario, and these days don’t have it last for even a couple of moments before I’ve had enough. The second scenario is much preferable, even if I also then find myself with thoughts such as ‘Yeah but that’s not true yet’, or ‘ dream on!’ Sabotaging your dreams by thinking things like this (when in fact these two comments could equally apply to the disaster scenario) is common. If this is the case, then you can choose to change your thoughts, and thereby change your feelings again. Sabotage in this way is only your ‘small mind’ trying to get back in charge again, and keep you stuck.

Choice — the point of power

The real point of power is with choice – do you choose to continue to feel bad, or do you choose to make the effort to change your thoughts, and thereby invite yourself to feel better?

For example, an ex-client of mine Melanie (not her real name), had a goal to increase her income by $3000 per month. She’d been making steps towards this by setting up a new business, but suffered a setback when she could find no bank to lend her start-up capital. This she found very hard, and noticed she was beginning to listen to her negative thoughts. However, she applied FTC:
Feelings: disappointed, let down, fed-up, flattened.
Thoughts: Oh no, I can’t stand this any more; it would be so much easier just to go back to what I was doing; it’ll never work, I must have been mad.
Choosing: she stated to herself ‘I want to feel better’, and sat down and consciously started to think thoughts like: ‘Am I really going to let this result get in the way of what I want? There must be other ways of getting this money. Perhaps I can start this up in another way without needing so much initial cash. I could see this apparent setback as another opportunity; how could it be an opportunity? No matter what happens, I am committed to starting this business’. The result was that she started to feel stronger again, hopeful and, more importantly, completely committed with a certainty that she was going to make this business happen. That gave her the impetus to think more creatively, which led her to finding private funding from a source she’d previously not thought of.
None of this can happen unless you refine your ‘noticing’ skills. If you need practice in this area, start by constantly asking How am I feeling? What am I thinking? and move on from there.