I hope you enjoyed my first blog post, I’m happy to say that I’ve had some wonderful feedback from it, so that’s an excellent start. Thank you to everyone who’s taken the time to read it and give me their opinions.
At the end of that post I said that I’d give you some tips on how to manage negative thoughts and emotions. One issue that my clients often come to me with is that a negative thought floats in to their head and they dwell on it and once they begin to dwell on it, it gets worse and worse and they start to feel more and more upset. One theme that you’ll see running through a lot of my posts is that “WE GET MORE OF WHAT WE FOCUS ON” – if we focus on good things, more good things come. If we focus on bad things, more bad things come. And that’s not some hairy fairy, touchy feely, New Age idea I’ve come up with ... that’s hard, Quantum Physics FACT*. I’ll go into this in more in a separate post, as it’s too big a subject to cover here.
I can illustrate what I mean more clearly by using an example:
One of my recent clients told me that her husband said something in passing to her, nothing that in the cold light of day was really bad it was just a small, throw away comment. However, for some reason, she latched on to it and couldn’t stop thinking about it. Over the next couple of days, she dwelt on it more and more and as she did so, she started to feel more and more upset, until she got to the point where she was so upset and down about it that she thought she must be bordering on depression (she has no history of depression I must point out).
She said the feeling was like ‘walking around with a lid on the world - everything was grey and bleak’. After a few days of feeling like this and letting her husband know (non-verbally) that she was unhappy with him, he asked her what was wrong. That’s when she said she exploded. She said that ‘the rational side’ of her recognised that she had blown things all out of proportion, but the ‘non rational side’ had totally taken over control and she just couldn’t stop it. When she explained to him that she was upset because of a comment he made, he told her that he didn’t mean what she thought he did at all and he was really quite shocked that she’d taken it that way. Once she’d calmed down and listened to him and accepted what he was saying, she felt completely foolish. She said that even when they’d sorted things out, that negative feeling stayed with her for a few days after, she just couldn’t seem to shake it.
I don’t think my client’s story is uncommon. I’ve heard it so many times and experienced it myself – a negative thought pops into your head and before you know it; more negative thoughts are flooding in like a broken dam. However, we do have choices with how we deal with a negative thought once we recognise we’re having one:
1. We can dwell on it until we bring on more and more negative thoughts that make us and those around us REALLY unhappy.
2. We can choose to acknowledge it (it’s only a thought after all, it only becomes a problem when you put an emotion or feeling to it), thank it for popping up and let it go – wave it on by.
3. If you’ve waved a thought on but it still keeps popping up, do something about it. If you get a recurring negative thought, it usually means that there’s something unresolved that you need to take some action on. If you take the action, the thought will usually disappear. The fact that you keep getting that thought is your subconscious mind’s way of telling you that you have something unfinished that you need to deal with.
When I put these options to my client, she just looked at me for quite a while not saying a word, and I’ve got to be honest, I began to worry a bit. Then she broke into a huge smile and started to laugh - she said that she didn’t realise she had a choice! “Well of course you have a choice ... they’re your thoughts after all!” When I asked her what she could have done when she first had that negative thought, she said that she could have talked to her husband as soon as he made the comment and it dealt with it there and then, thereby sparing the whole family a weekend of misery!
The following week, she called me to say how much better she was feeling and how she’d had a couple of negative thoughts, which she’d just waved on by. She’d also had a couple of negative thoughts that she’d waved on, but they came back and she knew they were things she needed to deal with. The outcome? I’m happy to say that she said that she felt like a weight had been lifted and she was feeling better than she had done in years.
Here’s something for you to try, over the next couple of days, watch your thoughts – if you have any negative ones, thank them and wave them on. If they reoccur, do something about them. You’ll be glad you did!
Next time I’ll talk about the power of your emotions, how they affect your life and how to manage them.
Thanks for reading.
Jo
* There is a lot of documented research on Quantum Physics and the Law of Attraction, so I won’t go into it here. If you want to know more, I suggest you Google it. There are also lots of good books about it too.
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