Quite often, the way we feel about a situation comes from our perception of it.
Often that perception is right, but sometimes it isn't.
For instance, sometimes we're unreasonably harsh with
ourselves,
or we can jump to wrong conclusion about people's motives.
This can
cause problems and make us unhappy, and it can lead us to be unfair to others.
Thought Awareness, Rational Thinking,
and Positive
Thinking are simple tools that help you turn this around.
Introduction
A commonly accepted definition of stress, developed by
Richard S. Lazarus,
is that it occurs when someone thinks that the demands on
them
"exceed the personal and social resources that the individual is able
to mobilize."
In becoming stressed, people must make two main
judgments:
First, they must feel threatened by the situation.
They must judge whether their capabilities and resources
are sufficient to meet the threat.
How stressed someone feels depends on how much damage
they think the situation
can cause them, and how far their resources meet the
demands of the situation.
Perception is key to this as (technically) situations are
not stressful in their own right.
Rather it's our interpretation of the
situation that drives the level of stress that we feel.
Quite obviously,
sometimes we are right in what we say to ourselves.
Some situations may
actually be dangerous, and may threaten us physically, socially,
or in our
career. Here, stress and emotion are part of the "early warning
system"
that alerts us to the threat from these situations.
Very often, however, we are overly harsh and unjust to
ourselves,
in a way that we would never be with friends or team members.
This,
along with other negative thinking, can cause intense stress and unhappiness,
and can severely undermine our self-confidence.
Using the Tools
Thought Awareness
You're thinking negatively when you fear the future, put
yourself down, criticize yourself
for errors, doubt your abilities, or expect
failure. Negative thinking damages your confidence,
harms your performance, and
paralyzes your 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 effect.
Thought Awareness is the process by which you observe
your thoughts
and become aware of what is going through your head.
One way to become more aware of your thoughts is to
observe your stream of consciousness
as you think about a stressful situation.
Do not suppress any thoughts: instead, just let them run their course while you
watch them, and write them down on our free
worksheet as
they occur.
Another more general approach to Thought Awareness comes
with logging stress
in a
Stress Diary
. One of the benefits of using a Stress Diary is that, for one
or two weeks,
you log all of the unpleasant things in your life that cause you
stress.
This will include negative thoughts and anxieties, and can also include
difficult
or unpleasant memories and situations that you perceive as negative.
By logging your negative thoughts for a reasonable period
of time, you can 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 most damaging thoughts.
Tackle these as a priority.
Thought awareness is the first step in the process of
managing negative thoughts,
as you can only manage thoughts that you're aware
of.
Rational Thinking
The next step in dealing with negative thinking is to
challenge the negative thoughts
that you identified using the Thought Awareness
technique.
Look at every thought you wrote down and rationally challenge it.
Ask yourself whether the thought is reasonable, and 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 in the ways shown:
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've done all of this, then you've done
everything that you should sensible do.
If you're still worried, 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 that you need
Have you cleared the time you need, and cued up your support team
appropriately?
Have you prepared thoroughly? If you haven't, 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,
and you stay
focused on the needs of your audience, then fair people are likely to respond
well.
If people are not fair, then this is something outside your control.
Tip:
Don't make the mistake of generalizing a single incident.
OK, you made a mistake at work, but that doesn't mean that you're bad at your
job.
Similarly, make sure you take the long view about
incidents that you're finding stressful.
Just because you're finding new
responsibilities stressful now,
doesn't mean that they will always be
stressful in the future.
Often, the best thing to do is to rise above unfair
comments. Write your rational response
to each negative thought in the Rational
Thought column on the
worksheet.
Tip:
If you find it difficult to look at your negative
thoughts objectively, imagine that you are your best friend or a respected
coach or mentor. Look at the list of negative thoughts.
Imagine that they were
written down by someone you were giving objective advice to,
and think about
how you'd challenge these thoughts.
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 given you an early warning of action
that you need to take.
Positive Thinking and
Opportunity Seeking
Where you have used Rational Thinking to challenge
incorrect negative thinking,
it's often useful to use rational, positive
thoughts and affirmations to counter them.
It's also useful to look at the
situation
and see if there are any 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 undo the damage that negative thinking may have done
to your self-confidence.
Tip:
Your affirmations will be strongest if they are specific,
are expressed in the present tense,
and have strong emotional content.
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 that I need. I have
thought-through and prepared for all possible issues.
I can do a really good
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 that I need. I am well prepared to do an excellent
job."
Problems with issues outside your control: "We
have thought about 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.
air people will respect this. I
will rise above any unfair criticism in a mature and professional way."
If appropriate, write these affirmations down on
your
worksheet,
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 these situations
will open up opportunities. You'll gain new skills, you'll be seen as someone
who can handle difficult challenges, and you may open up new career
opportunities.
Make sure that you take the time to identify these
opportunities and focus on them as part o
f your positive thoughts.
Tip:
In the past people have advocated thinking positively
almost recklessly,
as if it is a solution to everything. The approach should be
used with common sense, though.
First, decide rationally what goals you can
realistically attain with hard work,
and then use positive thinking to
reinforce these.
Key Points
This set of tools helps you to manage and counter the
stress of negative thinking.
Thought Awareness helps you identify the negative
thinking, unpleasant memories,
and misinterpretation of situations that may
interfere with your performance
and damage your self-confidence. This allows
you to deal with them.
Rational Thinking helps you to challenge these negative
thoughts and either learn from them,
or refute them as incorrect.
You can then use Positive Thinking to create positive
affirmations that you can use to counter negative thoughts. These affirmations
neutralize negative thoughts and build your self-confidence. You can also use
this approach to find the opportunities that are almost always present,
to some
degree, in a difficult situation.
Warning: Stress can cause severe health problems
and, in extreme cases, can cause death.
While these stress management
techniques have been shown to have a positive effect on reducing stress, they
are for guidance only, and readers should take the advice of suitably qualified
health professionals if they have any concerns over stress-related illnesses or
if stress is causing significant or persistent unhappiness.
Health
professionals should also be consulted before any major change in diet or
levels of exercise.
This site teaches you the skills you need for a happy and
successful career;
and this is just one of many tools and resources that you'll
find here at Mind Tools.
Subscribe to our free newsletter,
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