If you’ve ever been told ‘don’t worry’ or ‘calm down’, then you can relate. Many times we feel emotions and don’t know how to change them. Can we change them? How do we know what we can and cannot control? How does that help? It’s easy to feel anger and frustration when we can’t control someone or the situation. However, we can affect people by what we say and do and that is our form of ‘control’. Therefore, we must flex the control we do have because when we focus on what we can control, we can feel good, confident, decrease anxiety, decrease stress, feel empowered, which leads to successful performance(s).
We will look at whether we can control our thoughts and feelings? How? We will look at how to overcome things we can’t control. Lastly, we’ll explore methods using mindfulness to help control what we want to control.
Pushing unwanted thoughts out of our mind is a desirable skill, but ineffective. What if someone told you do not think about purple elephants. You try to put all thoughts of the color purple and elephants out of your mind, but you find yourself thinking about it anyways. The very thoughts you are trying to push away are the thoughts that keep creeping their way back in. This is called the rebound effect of thought suppression. Spending time on trying to put thoughts and feelings out of our minds can give us less control over how it affects us and it is impossible to control. We may all be able to temporarily forget painful thoughts and feelings, but it’s like sweeping them under a rug to only find the mound under the rug right behind us.
What can we control?
We can control paying attention and being mindful to our thoughts and feelings. How would we know what to change though, if we are not paying attention to our thoughts and feelings? Watch them like the clouds floating by or on a conveyer belt getting further and further away. Regaining control can be achieved through Mindfulness. Mindfulness is the practice of being present, self-aware, and engaged in what you are doing and where you are at in the moment. In practicing mindfulness, we train our attention to observe our thoughts and feelings. Slowly we can train ourselves to pay attention to the present and be more open with what is going on in our minds. We are going to have thoughts that are not true and cannot be trusted. This is why mindfulness is so important because if we don’t know the thoughts, we can’t change them.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) tells us that our thoughts lead to our feelings and our feelings lead to our behaviors. Since our feelings are never wrong, we can change our thoughts. When we change our thoughts, we can change our feelings, which then also changes our behaviors. We must tell ourselves what we want to be thinking. It is truly like programming a computer. For example, when playing a golf game, would we tell the computer not to hit it to the right? No! We would say ‘hit it in the center’ or straight. Our thoughts are not always correct. This would lead us to talking about the details of self-talk which will be another lesson for another time unless you contact me now for your own coaching or counseling session.
Lastly, we must believe that we have the control over our thoughts to produce our desired results. The research says it best.
“Increase a performer's perceived coping efficacy, in order to reduce anxiety. Anxiety is effectively reduced when individuals feel that they have control over an uncertain future and the potential threats or risks that exist in those unknown situations. By concentrating on short term goals, learners' feelings of uncertainty are likely to be reduced” (Druckman and Swets, 1988).
Therefore, “belief in one’s ability to exert control over the environment and to produce desired results is essential for an individual’s well-being. Thus, the perception of control seems to be important for regulation of emotional responses to stressful situations. Perception of control is adaptive.” (Leotti, Iyengar, & Ochsner 2010).
In summary, we have control over what we say and do and how we try to affect people. We do not have control over other people and what they say and do. We do have control over our thoughts which lead to our feelings, feelings then leading to behaviors. We must use mindfulness in order to recognize what we are saying to ourselves and feeling, causing the behaviors we want to change. Otherwise, we don’t have a starting point. In essence, tell yourself what you want to believe and what you think you should be telling yourself, in order to get your successful performance. Flexing our control where we have it will increase our perceived perception of control, leading to decreased anxiety, decreased stress, and feeling and performing well.
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