Episode 19: It's Not Actually About Controlling Your Thoughts

Some people, when they first start learning about life coaching, they get the idea that what we’re trying to do is control our thoughts. We gotta push those negative thoughts away, don’t let them in, and just figure out a way to make ourselves think positive.  What I teach, what I believe in, is actually not that at all.  In this episode, I share two words that describe what I’m aiming to do with my thoughts, and what I help others do with their thoughts when I'm coaching them.  Tune into today's episode to learn how you can notice your thoughts and understand your thoughts, rather than trying to control them. 

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100 Thoughts for More Joy

Wanna think some new thoughts?  Here are 100 of my favorites that you can try out. Be warned, though. Choosing to really, truly believe even one of these thoughts could drastically impact the way you view yourself and others, and might completely change your life. :)

Full Transcript:

You're listening to the Think New Thoughts podcast with Emily Ricks, episode number 19. It's not actually about controlling your thoughts.

I'm Emily Ricks, and this is Think New Thoughts, a life coaching podcast to help you find more joy in your relationships. In each episode, I'll share a simple idea that will help you see things in a new way. So you can love God, your neighbor, and yourself more deeply than you ever have before. If you're ready to literally change your mind, I think you'll like it here.

Hello. So glad you're here. Thanks for listening.

And thank you to those of you who have shared this podcast with friends. If you've been enjoying these episodes, could you take a minute and leave me a review? This will help others be able to find out about the podcast. So thank you for taking the time to do that if you're willing.

Okay, we're going to talk about control today. And here's a funny story. One time, I took my son Ethan with me for a quick trip to Walmart.

He was probably about three years old at the time. And unlike our typical weekly trips to the store, this time we had no grocery cart, no baby brother, no infant carrier, we were just going to get one thing. And I remember feeling really light and free.

And this was so easy and fun. At one point, I was holding Ethan's hand and we were skipping through an aisle together having a great time. And out of nowhere, this grumpy lady came over to me glared at me and said, control your child.

And I was like, wait, what? Are you serious? He's holding my hand, we're skipping through the aisle, lady. First of all, he's not actually misbehaving right now. And second of all, even if he were like throwing a tantrum, do you know that I can't actually control my kids? Whenever I think about that lady, I'm always like, why did she say that to me? So let's talk about control and specifically as it relates to your thoughts.

So I think a lot of people, when they first start learning about life coaching, they get the idea that what we're trying to do is control our thoughts. We got to push those negative thoughts away. Don't let them in, just think positive.

And that's actually not how I see it at all. So if you're listening to this podcast, I sincerely hope you don't walk away from this episode or any episode with an image of me glaring at you saying control your thoughts. That's not what we're doing here.

That's not what I'm saying. And I hope it's not what you're saying to yourself either. Control your thoughts.

Like, no, for me, if I'm trying to control my thoughts, then I'm judging my thoughts as good or bad. And then judging myself as bad. If I think a bad thought and I don't want to be bad.

So then I'm trying to push bad thoughts away. So I won't think them. So I won't be bad.

And for me, this approach actually produces all sorts of negative emotions. When I tell myself control your thoughts, then I feel a lot of pressure to not do it wrong. I feel judgment and fear and shame and disgust, like disgust for the thoughts.

I'm trying not to think disgust for myself when I do end up thinking them. And I view myself as an enemy that I need to suppress and overpower. And then I end up resenting myself for being a tyrant because I'm trying to control myself and it feels terrible.

Do you know what I mean? Can you relate to this? So here's what I want you to know. Life coaching thought work is actually not about controlling your thoughts. What I teach, what I believe in feels very different than all of that.

Today, I want to share with you two words that describe what I'm aiming to do with my thoughts and what I help others to do with their thoughts as a coach. Okay. The two words are notice and understand.

So notice rather than trying to control your thoughts, I recommend that you start with noticing them. Just notice your thoughts. So much of what happens in our minds is subconscious.

We often don't realize what we're thinking. We're not aware. So thought work starts with awareness.

One of the best ways to start noticing your thoughts is to clue into your emotions. Byron Katie says, any stressful feeling is like a compassionate alarm clock that says, sweetheart, take a look at what you're thinking. So if you want to notice your thoughts, view your emotions as a compassionate alarm clock.

Your emotions have something to tell you, information to give you about your thoughts. But a lot of times we don't want to feel our emotions. The chemical vibrations we experience in our bodies, when we feel lonely or insecure or inadequate are unpleasant to us.

So instead of allowing that discomfort and finding out what the compassionate alarm clock is trying to say, a lot of times we run away from our emotions and find something to distract us like eating or shopping or consuming media or blaming other people for how we feel. And this kind of takes the edge off the uncomfortable emotion, but it's like putting on headphones to drown out the alarm. We can't hear it.

So when you're running away from your emotions and trying to distract yourself from your emotions, you can't hear what your emotions are trying to tell you about your thoughts. If you have a pot of water that keeps boiling over, you can grab ice when it's boiling over and dump the ice into the pot, and that will cool the water down. But if you don't turn down the heat on the stove, then the pot is going to keep boiling over and you will need to keep putting ice on it every time.

Putting ice in a pot of boiling water is what we do when we stuff our feelings down and don't want to notice our thoughts. And it sounds like, no, I don't want to feel inadequate. I'll just check more stuff off my list today.

No, I don't want to feel overwhelmed. If I eat some cookies, that will help me feel better. No, I don't want to feel empty.

I'll just go shopping and buying stuff will be like putting ice in the boiling water. And the problem is when you try to tamp down your emotions with external stuff, you're focused on getting more ice to cool down the water and not focused on learning how you can turn down the temperature on the stove. So the pot won't keep getting to boiling over and over and over.

So like if you're angry every time you interact with a particular person, the anger is telling you that you have some deeply held beliefs that could use some adjusting if you want to turn the heat down on the stove. So noticing your thoughts actually involves a willingness to feel uncomfortable emotions, and then listen to what the emotions are telling you. This is how we become aware of our thoughts.

Also here is one other really important thing. Noticing your thoughts means not being in a hurry to change them. And this might sound strange to you since my podcast is called think new thoughts.

And that is what I do. I help people think new thoughts, right? But it's not an urgent matter. We don't think new thoughts as a quick fix for not having to feel negative emotion.

So if you're feeling a sense of urgency about it, if you're in a hurry and saying, oh no, I feel angry. I need to think a new thought so I won't be angry. That's actually just another way of putting ice on the boiling water and avoiding the real problem, which is the temperature of the stove.

Noticing your thoughts means being willing to observe what's going on, which includes sitting with negative emotion and listening to what it has to say. Turn on the lights, take off the headphones and listen. If you're not willing to do this, you forfeit being able to learn so much about yourself, your thoughts and your emotions.

Okay, the second word for what you can do with your thoughts that's very different than trying to control them is understand. You can understand your thoughts. Noticing comes first.

You can't really understand your thoughts until you have taken the time to notice them. The opposite of understanding your thoughts is judging them as bad or wrong. And a lot of times it sounds like, oh, I shouldn't think that.

And then we try to stuff it down. We try to get that thought to go away. But on the other hand, if we're aiming to understand a thought, we actually don't push it away.

We invite it in. We get curious about it. We go, oh, this is so interesting.

This is fascinating. It becomes like doing research in a laboratory. We go, oh, look at the bacteria that grows on this Petri dish.

When I let this thought culture and I act on the feelings that this thought creates, there's not a feeling of urgency to get the thought to go away. There's actually a feeling of fascination. Oh, I see what this thought creates.

And the CTFAR model is an amazing tool that can help you understand a thought. So if you take time to write down circumstance, thought, feeling, action, result in the model, then you can go, oh, I see when my son isn't doing his homework and I'm making that mean I'm a bad mom and telling myself I'm a failure. I feel inadequate and ashamed.

And when I feel inadequate and ashamed, I blame that feeling on my son. And then I speak in a harsh tone and get upset. And I don't show up as the mom that I want to be.

Oh, I see. Right. I understand this thought and what is happening when I think it.

Or you could make a CTFAR model and write down what goes on each line and say, oh, I see when I'm scurrying around thinking there's way too much to do. I'll never get it all done. And I feel unfocused.

And when I feel unfocused, I flip around the house and jump from putting away a few dirty socks to sorting a few pieces of mail, to cleaning up half the kitchen counter, and then checking a few emails. And when I feel unfocused, I don't center myself. I don't pray for guidance to know what really matters.

And in the end, I accomplish very little and don't finish any of the things that need to be done. Interesting. This is fascinating.

I understand what this thought I'll never get it all done creates for me in my life. Let me give you one more very recent example. When I'm trying to get a podcast episode recorded as fast as possible, because I have a house full of sick people, and I'm worried that I'm going to get sick soon.

And I frantically type at my computer in the middle of the night. When I'm telling myself, I have to do this and I have to get it done right this second, I feel stressed. And when I push down the stress and try to ignore it and don't listen to myself, I don't end up creating an episode that I feel excited to share.

This episode's first draft was not my best work because of my thoughts, not because several members of my family are sick, not because I had to rearrange my work time, even though that's what I was thinking was creating my negative feelings. I was trying to ramrod it through and force myself to do it. And that thought that I have to was creating negative emotion and resentment that actually took away from the joy of creating the podcast.

And originally I was like, I don't want to know what I'm thinking. I just want to think something else so that I can get this done. Let's just do it.

I don't have time to make a model. But once I realized that that was not working, I remembered, right? Oh, I'm going to make a model and find out what I'm thinking. I'm going to notice and understand my thoughts so that I can create a podcast episode about noticing and understanding thoughts.

So I laid it out at a model. And once I saw it, I went, Oh, I see this thought that I have to. That's actually not true.

I choose to do this podcast. I actually want to. And from that place, I could see that it wasn't so urgent that I could give myself some space and recenter and try again a little bit later.

And I was able to reframe and get back into a joyful place to be able to record this episode. So noticing and understanding your thoughts is not fear-based. It's not urgent.

We're not in a hurry to escape negative emotion we've created with our thoughts. We actually lean in and fully allow all of it so we can learn from it. Okay.

So my invitation to you is not control your thoughts. My invitation is notice your thoughts, understand them, take off the headphones, turn on the lights and invite your emotions and your thoughts to teach you about yourself. Then you'll be ready to evaluate your thoughts and choose new ones if you'd like to.

But noticing and understanding comes first. And if you want to hear about evaluating and choosing your thoughts, I'll be talking about that on the next episode. So tune in next Thursday.

Thanks for joining me today. I'll talk to you next week.