Month: March 2023

From Celebrate Life Cafe 3-13-23

Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess – 5 Steps – More in Depth

1. Gather.

Become aware of your emotional warning signals, such as bitterness, rage, anxiety, worry, self-pity, envy, pride, jealousy, cynicism, or hopelessness. Gather awareness of any associated physical warning signals like headaches, heart palpitations or GI issues.

2. Reflect.

This is what I call the “mental autopsy” step, where you capture these emotional and physical warning signals and ask yourself questions to find the informational warning signals, that is, the information contained within the dendrites of this thought.

Here are some questions to guide your thinking:

• Do you struggle to find your meaning and passion?
• Why are you feeling this way?
• What has happened in your life to affect your identity?
• What are you good at?
• What have you developed in terms of your skill set?
• Has your identity been affected by social media?
• Do you battle with envy and jealousy?
• Are you spending more time on worrying about what others are doing with their life instead of focusing on and enjoying your own?

Here is an example: say you notice feeling a lot of jealousy in a certain situation. Because you are aware of this feeling, and you know and have heard certain things about envy and jealousy, you also feel guilt. With mind-management, you can use this complicated emotion to your advantage by asking yourself questions like: “What exactly am I jealous of? Why? What can I learn from that person I am jealous of? Why did this particular person/situation trigger my jealousy? How can I use this to inform my future decisions?” By doing this, you shift from comparison to curiosity.

3. Write.

Write down what you have reflected on above. You can do the Reflect and Write steps simultaneously if you wish. This is a useful way to organize your thinking and get to the heart of the matter and the root of your thinking!

4. Recheck.

This step a great place to start identifying and analyzing patterns in your thinking and behavior that could help you further define and shape your identity. Is there something you are proud of and want to see yourself doing more of?

It is also a useful step to start identifying flaws and common mistakes you may be making that are part of your identity issues. This is not a shaming exercise; rather, you are getting to know yourself better! Remember, our biggest flaws are simply our greatest strengths channeled in the wrong direction. You may have identified a recurring problem in your life, such as becoming impatient too quickly with others and reacting in an irritable way because you feel your time was wasted. Looking closer at this, you may notice that you are deeply driven by a desire for efficiency and effectiveness, and your strength could reside in your incredible ability to strategically think and direct people and resources. So, by noticing this, you can learn to channel this strength in a more positive direction, perhaps by creating schedules, for example. This is reconceptualization in action!

Not sure where to start? A good place is how you answered the question, “Why am I feeling this way?”. Perhaps you discovered you were triggered by something someone said at work that you tracked back to a thought you built as a child (a core belief you developed) when someone at school laughed at you and called you a name. Rechecking this would look something like: “What that person said to me was their perception, which was based on their assumptions and not the truth. The truth is that I do have value in the area of…”.

5. Active Reach.

What simple action or phrase can you say or do that encapsulates the work you did in the Recheck step? Once you have figured this out, create a reminder to prompt yourself to say it aloud at least seven times today, which will help you practice the new thought.

An identity Active Reach for day 1 can be as simple as “I am aware that looking at other people’s Instagram profiles makes me feel like I am not achieving my goals.” By day 2, this can progress into, “I actually feel quite paralyzed by looking at other people’s Instagram profiles, so I am going to not look for a week and see how I feel”, and so on.

These are progressive, daily growth reminders to help drive your changing brain in the right direction, and in doing so, clean up the mental mess!