The emotion behind our beliefs

“But creating a new thought is pretending everything is okay. I want to be real.”

Is this how you feel when someone says that you are choosing your thoughts and, by that, creating your life experience?

I think you’d be RIGHT to say that pretending doesn’t make anything better. We can’t just DRILL a new message into our brain, and sustain that outlook long-term.

There is a very important exercise in between an old thought and a new one that needs to occur for any of this to be helpful. But it brings discomfort. It is something that our reactionary brain is flagging us to avoid AT ALL COSTS. We have to sit with the current thoughts first and ask where they come from.

Think about where you first heard that or adopted it as your truth. Really question the validity of this dialogue you have going about who you are. Challenge yourself with some evidence that the opposite might possibly be true. Dig DEEP for why this is your thought.

Most of the time, it’s because of something that we’ve buried much further down (which is where coaching can be helpful).  Something from our childhood, or a past relationship, or life experience that gives us a poor view of ourselves. So, spending time on this can bring up emotions that we’d rather not have.

That’s because for most of our lives we’re taught that emotions are bad things. If that doesn’t come to us in a very straightforward way, we infer it from how others react in the face of emotion. Meaning that we’re conditioned to just NOT want to go there.

Part of the work is to learn that we CAN feel emotion, any emotion, and be just fine. It’s uncomfortable in the moment, but it passes (actually rather quickly in the grand scheme of things). When we learn that we can experience that feeling and be BETTER for it. So many things get easier.

The critical step in this process is to get really curious about where these thoughts originated. Once we do that, we are able to see that a belief is clearly not based in reality - and how (much of the time) it is bringing us exactly what we DON’T want in our lives.

When we allow all of that to become obvious, letting go of the thought and creating a new one doesn’t feel inauthentic. It feels like a beautiful gift to ourselves.

The gift of TRUTH actually. It’s not a falsehood at all!