Ever felt life would be so much easier if your mood didn’t swing back and forth like a pendulum over which you seem to have no control?
Mastering our emotions can seem an impossible task but self hypnosis, NLP and EFT techniques put us back in the driving seat and enable us, if we wish, to choose how we feel in any given moment.
I first came across the idea that we really do have a lot more choice about how we feel, than most of us realise, when I read ‘Stop Thinking Start Living’ by Richard Carlson. It’s a great little book and I often recommend it to clients. If you find your waking hours are dominated by analytical thinking, either worrying about the future or going over and replaying past events, then this could well be the book for you. It’s an easy read and explains in very simple terms how our thought patterns affect our mood which in turn determines our behaviours and actions, and ultimately the outcomes we do (or don’t) get in life.
One of our commonest mistakes is treating our own thoughts as always being right, like what we are thinking is reality itself. An example might be when we think we know what someone else is thinking about us and that somehow becomes ‘fact’ in our own mind, like “he thinks I’m useless in this job”. It might be true but do we actually know that?.. probably not!
When we learn to take a step back from our own thoughts and see them as just that, suddenly we have a choice. We can choose whether to continue with a train of thought or move onto something else that serves us better. We can learn to challenge the content of our own thinking too. Just because we generally need to trust ourselves doesn’t mean that we need to believe all of our own thinking is always valid or indeed useful!
How often is it we can make ourselves feel totally miserable by either reflecting too much on past events or worrying about the future? Next time you feel bad, notice what you’ve been thinking and whether you have a choice about having those thoughts. A classic is lying in bed feeling sick with worry about something that may or may not happen in the future. If that happens take a deep breath and notice ‘where am I and what is happening right now?’ Yes, you’ll find you’re safely tucked up in bed and simply scaring yourself with your own thoughts! That can be a tough thing to realise but it’s an undeniable truth, which reminds me of a favourite quote:
"I am an old man and I have known many troubles but most of them never happened" ~ MarkTwain
Self hypnosis, NLP and EFT all enable us to harness our imagination in a way that works for our greatest benefit. All too often we instead use our imagination to scare or worry ourselves silly! Change what you imagine and think about, using these techniques, and notice how much easier it is to master your own mood :).
