“The only thing that’s keeping you from getting what you want is the story you keep telling yourself.”
– Tony Robbins
When I first heard this quote, it stuck with me in a big way.
For the first time in my life, I stopped and started asking myself,
What are the stories I’m currently telling myself that are shaping my life?
What are the stories other people are telling me that I’m blindly believing?
What are the thoughts that I’m not stopping to question?
The way we think shapes the way we see the world, and therefore our experience of life. We become the stories we tell ourselves.
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.”
– Henry Ford
It’s easy to think some people are happy and fulfilled because they are lucky or fell into the “right” circumstances, but that wouldn’t be the whole story.
Sure, circumstances might play a role, but two people can have the same luck and the same circumstances, yet feel very differently about them.
Some people saw the pandemic and resulting lockdowns as a terrible situation they couldn’t escape, so they spent their time just sitting around and waiting for it to be over. While others saw this as an opportunity to spend time with their family and prioritise their health and wellbeing.
The same situation, very different thoughts, therefore very different experiences and outcomes.
I often find myself stuck in negative thought loops, unable to see the silver lining. If you struggle with this too, I get it.
I never had poor circumstances by any means, so why did I keep feeling so stuck?
My bias towards negativity, and realising I was replaying these unhelpful stories over and over again, is what led me down the path of learning more about mindset and behaviour change.
Despite my natural tendencies, I was determined to figure out how to change my mindset, and therefore my experience of life. I wanted to learn how to tell myself better stories.
I now understand I can’t ever get rid of my negative thoughts. But what I can do is notice them when they come up, question them, and reframe them to help me move in the direction I want to go.
Today I’m going to share with you the process I go through to change my negative thoughts.
Step 1 – Become aware of your thoughts
Being aware of our thoughts without needing to immediately react to them is a skill.
There are many ways to build the skill of thought awareness, and I’ll share one with you today that I’ve found helpful.
The Sushi Train metaphor:
The idea behind this activity is to picture yourself sitting at a sushi train restaurant.
The sushi moving past you on a conveyor belt represents your thoughts. The chef who is making the sushi represents your brain – the creator of your thoughts.
Some sushi passes by and it looks delicious, other sushi passes by and does not look appealing at all. And sometimes, sushi passes by that you feel neutral towards – you could take it or leave it.
Throughout the day, we have a lot of thoughts run through our head. Like the sushi, some thoughts are uplifting and positive, some thoughts are painful or negative, and other thoughts are simply neutral.
When sushi that is unappealing is passing by, we can just watch it pass by without reacting.
We don’t have to grab it off the train and throw it in the trash.
We don’t have to leave the restaurant, frustrated that every single piece of sushi wasn’t to our liking.
And we certainly don’t have to yell at or chastise the chef for making a piece of sushi that wasn’t our favourite.
We can acknowledge that the negative sushi is there, and we don’t like it, but it’s going to pass by and a different dish will come by in a moment.
Our overall experience of the sushi restaurant can still be positive if we focus on the dishes we like, and let the dishes we don’t like simply pass by.
Step 2 – Question your thoughts
My life changed when I realised my thoughts aren’t facts.
Most of us live our lives believing every thought that runs through our head. We assume what other people are thinking. We make judgements of things, situations, or people we don’t necessarily understand. We assume that our thoughts and opinions about ourselves are the truth.
Believing your own thoughts leads to an incredibly limiting view of the world.
Facts are things everyone in the world would agree on. There’s no grey area, it either is or it isn’t.
Thoughts, on the other hand, are just sentences our brain comes up with. There’s nothing factual about our thoughts.
This is an empowering thing to realise.
It means we can keep thoughts that are helpful, and start to question, then eventually let go of, thoughts that are unhelpful.
Once we’ve gone through step one of identifying our negative thoughts, and realising we don’t have to immediately react to them, the next step is to question those thoughts.
There are many questions we can ask ourselves, and in a recent article (and YouTube video) I outlined some of those questions that have changed my life for the better.
However, in this article today I want to share with you 3 questions from the book “Soundtracks” by Jon Acuff.
When you notice yourself replaying an unhelpful story over and over, or you notice a negative thought that’s holding you back, ask yourself these 3 questions:
1 – Is it true?
Most of our thoughts are not true. Remember this quick fact test to filter your thoughts through: Would every single person would agree with it? Could you prove it in a court of law? Do you feel an emotional pull when you think about it? (Facts are neutral and don’t make us feel anything until we attach a thought to them)
If it can’t be universally proven, or if it makes you feel a certain way, it’s probably not a fact, it’s a thought and it could be argued that it’s not true.
Stop arguing to keep your limitations. Start arguing for your future.
2 – Is it helpful?
Put simply, if the thought you’re entertaining isn’t helpful, it’s time to let go. This thought is clearly not serving the future 2.0 version of you, so why are you letting it hold you back?
3 – Is it kind?
If your thought isn’t kind, you’ve gotta start asking yourself what sort of person you want to be. We all have unkind thoughts, but not all of us entertain or believe those thoughts. If you’re stuck on negative or limiting thoughts about yourself in particular, this is something that will continue to hold you back in life.
The next step is going to be incredibly helpful for you, as it was for me.
Step 3 – Reframe your thoughts
Most of us think reframing our thoughts means “think positive!” or “just think something different!”
But if you’ve spent any time trying to improve your thinking, you’ll know it doesn’t work like this.
Advice like, “Just think positive” isn’t helpful if we don’t believe the new thought we’re trying to tell ourselves.
This kind of advice can even be incredibly unhelpful if it turns into something called toxic positivity, which is the belief that no matter what’s happening we should always just be positive and happy!
That’s not real life.
As humans, rather than being positive all the time and avoiding our reak feelings, we need to learn how to feel a whole range of human emotions without necessarily getting stuck in them. We don’t want to avoid negative thoughts completely (because this isn’t possible), instead we want acknowledge our negative thoughts without being defined by them.
A technique that works much better to reframe our thinking is called a thought ladder.
The thought ladder:
Picture your thoughts like a ladder.
Your current negative thought is the bottom rung. It’s where you are currently standing right now.
Let’s use an example of “I feel like I’m not making any progress”.
The thought you want to eventually get to, your desired thought, is the very top rung of the ladder.
In this example, maybe that’s “I’m incredibly proud of all the progress I have made!”
You see how we can’t jump from our current thought immediately to our desired thought. It’s not believable for us right now, and that’s ok.
But just because it’s not believable in this moment doesn’t mean it will never be believable.
Instead, what we will do is work our way up the ladder, one rung at a time. We will improve our thinking one thought at a time.
Here you want to ask yourself, whats a thought that doesn’t feel as bad as “I’m not making any progress.”
If your current thought makes you feel like shit, then a slightly better thought isn’t going to be super positive, instead it’s going to be neutral. Something that doesn’t make you immediately feel bad when you think it.
In this example, a neutral thought might be “I am working towards making progress.”
Or “It’s possible that I will make progress in the future.”
See how these thoughts can be believable in the moment, but they don’t feel as negative or defeating as our starting thought. They might even make you feel slightly hopeful.
This small thought upgrade is a thought reframe.
When you find yourself thinking “I am not making any progress”, (which will continue to happen because we can’t just eliminate our thoughts) we can instead remind ourselves that we are working towards making progress. It’s ok that we feel like we aren’t making progress yet, but there is hope for our situation.
This then empowers us to take control of our situation and take steps forward to make progress happen, rather than sitting there and dwelling on the fact we aren’t making progress (which never leads to actually making progress, does it?)
The biggest thing I want you to take away from this article is the idea that we don’t have to be a victim of our current thinking patterns. We can step in and start to shift our thoughts to better serve the future we want for ourselves.
A lot of thought advice is hard to implement because it’s so vague. I really struggled with a lot of the advice I found over the years. It wasn’t until I learned the 3 steps I shared with you today that changing my negative thoughts started to be a tangible thing I could do.
I honestly believe these 3 steps changed everything for me.
I still have negative thoughts. As will you, even after reading this and even after practicing thought reframes for years. But what if our negative thoughts weren’t a problem?
What if we stopped believing them, and instead started to question them and come up with thoughts that served us better?
If someone like me, with a severe bias towards negativity, can change her negative thoughts and start not just feeling better, but also start taking better actions as a result, I have no doubt you can too.
