Thought Awareness, Rational & Positive Thinking (2)

In our Performance Stress section, we looked at Thought Awareness, Rational Thinking and Positive Thinking specifically in relationship to performance stress. Here, we extend this important tool to apply to all instances of negative thinking.

This positive thinking tool also acts as the basis of the next two tools, Emotional Analysis and Cognitive Restructuring. Whereas this tool helps with general negative thoughts, Emotional Analysis helps you understand negative emotions, and Cognitive Restructuring helps you tackle negative moods.

First, we look at “Thought Awareness”. As you will see, this is a technique that helps you understand your fears and negative thoughts. We then look at rational thinking and positive thinking as ways of countering the negative thoughts that you have identified.

Using the Tool:

Thought Awareness
You are thinking negatively when you fear the future, put yourself down, criticize yourself for errors, doubt your abilities, or expect failure. Negative thinking damages confidence, harms performance and paralyzes mental skills.

A major problem with this is that negative thoughts tend to flit into our consciousness, do their damage and flit back out again with their significance having barely been noticed. Since we do not challenge them, they can be completely incorrect and wrong, however this does not diminish their harmful affect.

Thought Awareness is the process by which you observe your thoughts and become aware of what is going through your head.

In our Performance Stress section, we use Thought Awareness in thinking about an upcoming event. This is one way of using it. Here you observe your stream of consciousness as you think about a stressful situation. You do not suppress any thoughts. Instead, you just let them run their site while you watch them, and write them down as they occur.

Another more general approach to Thought Awareness comes with logging stress in your Stress Diary.

One of the benefits of using the Stress Diary is that you log all of the unpleasant things in your life that cause you stress for one or two weeks. This will include negative thoughts and anxieties, and can also include difficult or unpleasant memories and situations that you perceive as negative.

All of these can be looked at using the techniques in this section. By logging your negative thoughts for a reasonable period of time, you will quickly see patterns in your negative thinking. When you analyze your diary at the end of the period, you should be able to see the most common and the most damaging thoughts. Tackle these as a priority.

Thought awareness is the first step in the process of managing negative thoughts, as you cannot manage thoughts that you are unaware of.

Rational Thinking
The next step in dealing with negative thinking is to challenge the negative thoughts that you identified. Look at every thought you wrote down and rationally challenge it. Ask yourself whether the thought is reasonable: Does it stand up to fair scrutiny?

As an example, by analyzing your Stress Diary you might identify that you have frequently had the following negative thoughts:

• Feelings of inadequacy
• Worries that your performance in your job will not be good enough
• An anxiety that things outside your control will undermine your efforts
• Worries about other people’s reactions to your work

Starting with these, you might challenge these negative thoughts:

• Feelings of inadequacy: Have you trained and educated yourself as well as you reasonably should to do the job? Do you have the experience and resources you need to do it? Have you planned, prepared and rehearsed appropriately? If you have done all of these, are you setting yourself unattainably high standards for doing the job?



• Worries about performance: Do you have the training that a reasonable person would think is needed to do a good job? Have you planned appropriately? Do you have the information and resources you need? Have you cleared the time you need and cued up your support team appropriately? Have you prepared appropriately? If you have not, then you need to do these things quickly. If you have, then you are well positioned to give the best performance that you can.



• Problems with issues outside your control: Have you conducted appropriate contingency planning? Have you thought through and managed all likely risks and contingencies appropriately? If so, you will be well prepared to handle potential problems.



• Worry about other people’s reactions: If you have put in good preparation, and you do the best you can, then that is all that you need to know. If you perform as well as you reasonably can, then fair people are likely to respond well. If people are not fair, then this is something outside your control. Often, the best thing to do is to rise above unfair comments.

When you challenge negative thoughts rationally, you should be able to see quickly whether the thoughts are wrong or whether they have some substance to them. Where there is some substance, take appropriate action. In these cases, negative thinking has been an early warning system showing where you need to direct your attention.

Positive Thinking & Opportunity Seeking
Where you have used Rational Thinking to identify incorrect negative thinking, it can often be useful to prepare rational positive thoughts and affirmations to counter them. It can also be useful to look at the situation and see if there are any useful opportunities that are offered by it.

Affirmations help you to build self-confidence. By basing your affirmations on the clear, rational assessments of facts that you made using Rational Thinking, you can use them to undo the damage that negative thinking may have done to your self-confidence.

Continuing the examples above, positive affirmations might be:

• Feelings of inadequacy: “I am well trained for this? I have the experience, the tools and the resources I need. I have thought through and prepared for all possible issues. I can do a superb job.”



• Worries about performance: “I have researched and planned well for this, and I thoroughly understand the problem. I have the time, resources and help I need. I am well prepared to do an excellent job.”



• Problems issues outside your control: “We have thought through everything that might reasonably happen and have planned how we can handle all likely contingencies. Everyone is ready to help where necessary. We are very well placed to react flexibly and effectively to unusual events.”



• Worry about other people’s reaction: “I am well-prepared and am doing the best I can. Fair people will respect this. I will rise above any unfair criticism in a mature and professional way.”

If appropriate, write these affirmations down so that you can use them when you need them.

As well as allowing you to structure useful affirmations, part of Positive Thinking is to look at opportunities that the situation might offer to you. In the examples above, successfully overcoming the situations causing the original negative thinking will open up opportunities. You will acquire new skills, you will be seen as someone who can handle difficult challenges, and you may open up new career opportunities.

Make sure that identifying these opportunities and focusing on them is part of your positive thinking.

Summary:
This set of tools helps you to manage and counter the negative thinking.

Thought Awareness helps you to understand the negative thinking, unpleasant memories and misinterpretation of situations that may interfere with your performance and damage your self-confidence.

Rational Thinking is the technique that helps you to challenge these negative thoughts and either learn from them or refute them as incorrect.

Positive thinking is then used to create positive affirmations that you can use to counter negative thoughts. These affirmations neutralize negative thoughts and build your self-confidence. It is also used to find the opportunities that are almost always present to some degree in a difficult situation.

The next article helps you learn from your emotions...

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• To download this section in PDF format for use at your convenience, click here
• Read the next article in this series, and find out more about using your emotions as an important "early warning system"
• Find out how to overcome persistent unhappiness
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