1. Understanding 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 paralyses 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 as they occur.
Another more general approach to Thought Awareness comes with logging 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 analyse 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.
2. Developing 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 analysing 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 sensibly
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.
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.
3. Positive Thinking Exercises
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. Fair people will respect this. I will rise above any unfair
criticism in a mature and professional way.”
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 and
your team. 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 of 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.
