What is mindfulness? Mindfulness is the practice of bringing our awareness to the present moment, without judgment. We are usually taken up with our thoughts and feelings and reacting to them as we think and feel them. Mindfulness is a way of being in the present and simply observing ourselves. …
Personal Dialogue and PACE
Many people have an active monologue or dialogue going on in their thoughts – a monologue or dialogue with themselves. It can be a conversation that is well worth paying more attention to. Often, we don’t realize that changing what we say to ourselves, or how we say it can have a big impact on our …
Thinking and Behavior
The diagram in our previous post, Behavior, shows how behavior can affect thoughts, and how thoughts can affect behavior. Let’s start by looking at how thoughts can affect behavior. We mentioned the RAI strategy – Reflect As If. This involves reflecting (thinking) on the person we would like to be, …
Behavior
In a previous post Next Up: Feelings, we used this diagram to illustrate how thoughts and feelings influence behavior, and how behavior also influences thoughts and feelings. What do we mean by behavior, as it relates to emotions and thinking? Behavior can be a direct expression of an emotion, …
More Thinking Aids
One of the strategies for countering rigid or harmful ways of thinking is to ask ourselves questions about our thoughts and assumptions. Likewise, we can treat our thoughts as “best guesses” rather than as facts. We can also use the PACE model in our own inner dialog: Playful, Accepting, Curiosity …
Better Ways of Thinking
We’ve talked about several ways of thinking that are not helpful—and even harmful, along with suggestions about how to counter each one. Let’s do a round-up of these: Black-and-white thinkingAsk questions to arrive at a more balanced viewpoint: “Really?” “What do you mean by…?”Use more nuanced …
Overgeneralization
Overgeneralization is another way of thinking that can add to negative feelings and sabotage constructive effort. The motto of overgeneralization is not “if you don’t succeed the first time, try, try again.” It is rather “Because you didn’t succeed the first time, you are doomed to failure” or …
Negative Filters
Have you been wearing dark glasses lately? Negative filtering is one way to get ourselves into a negative-feedback loop that can be challenging to get out of. This type of thinking keeps us aware of and dwelling on negative aspects of ourselves or our situation, and either discounting or entirely …
Labeling
Labeling is a form of negative over-generalization used for people. We take a single event, behavior, or characteristic and use a label to generalize it to the whole person. We can label ourselves, or others. This is also called global labeling or mislabeling. The problem with this kind of labeling …
The Inner Prosecutor
Self-blaming often goes along with mind-reading, but it also has a life of its own, separate from mind-reading. In self-blaming, we attach too much power and responsibility to ourselves. We hold ourselves accountable for things that are outside our sphere of control, and take responsibility for …
Mind Reading
Mind reading and taking the blame are two skewed thinking patterns that often go together. We think we know what the other person is thinking, and it’s probably our fault. That can bring on a lot of stress! “The boss looks upset. She’s probably unhappy with me again.” “Jack looked a little …
Black and White Thinking
Black and white thinking, also called polarized thinking, is a way of viewing situations that fails to acknowledge the nuances that exist between two extremes. With black and white thinking, situations, problems, outcomes, and even people are seen in extremes. Accompanied by our tendency to …
Thinking Skills
Our thinking patterns have a big impact on our emotions and our ability to act in positive ways. Becoming aware of how our thoughts affect us and developing helpful thinking patterns is a skill that can help us realize more positive outcomes in our career, our relationships, our health, and in our …
Coping Skills Overview
As you’ve seen in the past weeks’ posts, there are a great many coping skills available to us to deal with the demands and challenges of life. Let’s jump up to the 30,000-foot view to categorize some of these. We are complex beings, with thoughts, emotions and behaviors all working together. Our …
Flexible Thinking
Physical flexibility can help us reach places and do things that we couldn’t otherwise, keep us from getting hurt if we fall, and help us to make progress by getting over, around, or through obstacles. Mental flexibility is much the same. It can help us solve problems, reach conclusions, be safe …
Self-Awareness
One valuable life skill is self-awareness. It is very useful to know ourselves. Maybe somewhat un-intuitively, knowing ourselves also helps us to communicate with others more effectively, and to be more empathetic of others. One aspect of self-awareness is to be able to find out more about …