Change Your Life!: Powerful Tools for Life Changing Results

by Fox, David

• ISBN13: 9781452532653
• ISBN10: 1452532656
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-03-07
• Publisher: Author Solutions

Summary

'Change your Life' is about the power you have to use your mind, both the conscious and subconscious, to change anything in your life for the better and to feel good about yourself and your life on a daily basis. It provides a range of easy to apply tools and techniques whilst providing real life examples of how others have used these same techniques to make measurable changes in their lives. 'Change your Life' covers some of the most useful and proven techniques in cognitive behavioural therapy that help people who are anxious, depressed or those who simply want to feel better about themselves and their life. You will learn how to regain control of your emotions and your life in a sustainable and practical way without the use of drugs or any other artificial mood enhancers. A range of topics will provide you with the tools and techniques that you can immediately put into action to change your life. These include: the benefits of exercise how to meditate and why it is so effective how to cope with negative Emotions how to remember to praiseyourself how to develop meaningful and powerful goals how to turn these goals into realityWith over 15 years of personal experience as well as extensive experience coaching and counseling others, the author has gathered and distilled the best tools and techniques for creating lasting, positive change in a person's life.

Excerpts

We all know how powerful our emotions can be. They sometimes seem to take on a life of their own and leave us feeling out of control. There are times when you won't be able to get yourself out of negative emotions by thinking your way out. I have had to learn this lesson a few times before it finally sunk in that it's true. There is a direct correlation between how bad you feel physically and how negative and depressing your thoughts can be. If, for example, you come down with the flu and you really feel down physically and your levels of energy are very low, it is very likely that you will also feel a corresponding low sense of overall well-being that will influence your thoughts. I have noticed this time and again whenever I come down with the flu or when I am physically tired or irritable. I feel physically down and it clouds my thoughts and my reasoning to such an extent that I might actually start to believe the load of rubbish that is going on inside my head! I'm really learning that this is a one-way street to misery and unhappiness. What goes on inside your mind when you are physically low is a big show about how miserable and horrible your life is and that there is no end in sight! What we are actually doing in these instances is basing our thoughts about our reality around how we are currently feeling without any reference or even the ability to reference the objective reality of our lives. This is called emotional reasoning (i.e., I feel therefore it must be so!) You think that just because you feel bad, things must be really bad. And the more you try and think your way out, the more you think about your life, the more the negative irrational thoughts keep flowing through your head! So, what can we do about it? There is a cardinal rule when it comes to these types of situations and it's very complicated, so read carefully and get your pen and paper out. The cardinal rule when you feel so low and your life just looks like a bad movie that won't end is..... STOP THINKING! Don't spend one more minute trying to think your way out of it. Just stop thinking. Make the decision — and you can even tell yourself verbally — that you have decided for the rest of the day to not think about anything important. How easy is it to do? It's damn hard, let me tell you, but it's well worth the effort and the resulting feeling of letting go and relaxing about your life. There may be a hundred real issues that you may need to deal with, but when you are really physically not at your best, you have to make the mental decision to avoid thinking about anything that is of major importance in your life. I call these days "mind-stop" or "cruise control" days. Slip your mind into neutral and just let the day happen by itself. If you want to think about something, think about a movie you've seen recently or a funny thing that happened to you the other day. Think about your dog or a beautiful place you've been to. Run back a mental movie of yourself walking through the woods or sitting on the beach watching the waves. Or even better yet, don't think, picture, or visualise anything at all! Do you think you could do that? Like I said, it's not easy, but it can be done. There's no doubt that it can be done. It's a skill that you can learn like any other skill — the ability to just be, to not judge your life or anything in it for a few hours. If you are working on something, just focus on that one thing. If you are taking the dog for a walk, just focus on doing that activity. It's like Zen Buddhism — you know, the concept of "when I am chopping wood, I am chopping wood and when I am carrying water, I am carrying water." I am not carrying water and thinking about the hundred and one things I need to do tomorrow or how horrible I feel or how hopeless everything feels at the moment. JUST STOP IT! The opposite of the Nike slogan! Be easy on yourself. When you feel that low physically and emotionally, you need to treat yourself well. You need to take some action that will nourish your soul and make you feel good about yourself. Take a hot bath, go for a long walk, take a ride on your bike, or play with your pet if you have one (that's my favourite). By doing these things for yourself and taking care of yourself as a parent would a child who is sick, you will find that after a while you "wake up" from this world of just being and doing and you feel remarkably better. You feel more calm, more centered and at peace with your life. The reason is, you have given yourself that much-needed mental break from the incessant negativity going on in your mind and your mind calms down and allows itself to be more positive and focus on other things. Just recently I had a prime example of this when I was having quite a bad day and was really feeling frustrated and down emotionally. There was nothing really major going on in my external world that would lead to me feeling like this, so I knew that I had to take action and that I had been spending too much time in my head and not enough time using my body and being out in the world. So I immediately stopped what I was doing, got into exercise clothes and went for a bike ride. After a thirty-minute bike ride, a few push-ups and sit-ups (which I never do enough of), and a cool shower, I felt completely different. My thoughts were now spinning with ideas and possibilities. My energy levels were up and I was clearly in a much better place emotionally to carry on with the day. It works, I know it and you know it too. I am not saying that one should avoid emotion and feeling one's emotions. Not at all. There are times when you can, and indeed must, tap into your emotions and feel them fully because to bottle them up and try to avoid feeling any emotion is very dangerous for your mental well-being. Genuine emotion, which is related to a stressful life event, should be felt and dealt with. We all need to go through the process of grieving and healing in order to move on in a healthy manner from any sad or tragic event in our lives. Even in these times, however, one may get to a point where the body and mind need a break from all the pain and the hurt and this is where the practicing of "just being" can be helpful. Even if it's only for a few hours, it can be very necessary and helpful to decide to stop thinking for a few hours and just be. On a lighter note, this technique of "thought-stopping" can be utilized anytime, anywhere. Whenever you feel like you just need a break from all the thinking going on inside your head, just make the decision to stop. Start a process of being aware of your thoughts instead of just letting them ride roughshod around in your mind like some crazy motorcycle gang on drugs, and then begin to let them go and let them leave your mind. Imagine that you are slowing your thinking down and possibly use the example of your mind as a lake that I gave you in the beginning of the book. Let me, if I may, give you another personal example of how I apply this in my own life. When my wife and I moved to London from South Africa, we left behind all our friends, all our family, our jobs, and everything we love and care about. We left behind all our possessions, all the presents we got from our engagement and our wedding. Our entire social fabric was stripped away from us as we made the decision to emigrate. On the scale of stressful life events, I think emigration falls just under the death of a spouse as one of the most stressful life events that people can go through. I can attest to that because we went through it — not once, but twice in a period of two years! Considering all of the above, we have generally done very well in coping emotionally and mentally with the changes.