7 Ways to be Totally Okay, Exactly Where You Are Right Now (part 4)
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As you guys know, everything I write about is premised on a four-step problem-solving approach:
Understand what you’re thinking right now, and how it’s creating your current experience
Decide what you want to think about your situation
Build real, tangible belief in that new perspective
Decide how to react to your old thinking when it pops up again
This series zooms in on step #4 — how the heck are you supposed to react when that old thought and old feeling keep popping up again and again?
In Part 0, I introduced the foundational technique for this whole series: separating yourself from your knee-jerk response and deciding how to think about the thoughts in your brain and the feelings in your body.
Then we covered three ways to react to your own thoughts and emotions: (1) relax into it, (2) treat your old thoughts like an optical illusion, and (3) imagine the emotion as an object outside of you.
Here’s way #4:
4: Treat the unwanted thought/emotion as a sensitive problem-solving instrument
We’ve talked about how your automatic brain makes snap interpretations of everything around you and is ultimately the source of all your problems.
But we need to give your automatic brain some credit too. It is also the source of all of your breakthrough genius.
Think about the last time someone asked for your advice, and you just opened your mouth and smart ideas came out of it, even though you’d never been asked that question before.
Or the last time you were staring at a tough problem at work… just thinking…thinking… and then suddenly the solution appeared right in front of you.
That is your automatic brain at work!
Your sudden flashes of insight, your expert intuition, your tingling spidey sense, your breakthrough epiphanies — all of those come from your automatic brain.
And sometimes, an unwanted thought or a crappy feeling is your brain’s way of sending you its insight.
When you sign off from a meeting, and you feel dread because you’re convinced you did something wrong…
When you can’t seem to get started on a project because you have a nameless unease that you can’t put your finger on…
When you had a plan for what you were going to do, but now you’re flying off the handle and doing something totally different…
Or even when everything is going right, but you can’t shake the feeling that something is off…
You don’t have to “solve” your feelings and “get to the happy path” asap.
In those moments, your automatic brain is like a sensitive scientific instrument that’s picking up a signal and trying to communicate it to you.
You may agree with its message, or you may not.
But you can’t decide until you look at what the message is.
So the next time it feels like something is going wrong, ask yourself:
What is really bothering me right now?
What do I really want here?
What message is my brain trying to send me?
Your brain may send up a package wrapped up in anger or stress or “laziness” or something else you just want to delete from your life.
But within that wrapping may be a solid gold nugget of insight that you absolutely don’t want to throw away.
So go take a look.