Automatic Thoughts and the Three Good Things Habit
This is the Mindset for Life podcast, a place for personal stories, coaching, neuroscience and my favorite positive psychology tools to master life, relationships and work. I'm your host. Bethanie Hansen. Welcome, welcome. I'm so glad you're here. We're going to talk about automatic thoughts and the 3 good things habit
We're going to talk about a positive psychology tool called "3 Good Things," a little bit of coaching neuroscience on interrupting your automatic thoughts to create new neural connections, and a story about seven good things on Monday. The theme of this podcast is about habits and windows where you can change them.
And really the problem is that we all have well-intended changes that just don't happen. For example, I have a box of things on the floor of my bedroom. Now, I'm not in the habit of just keeping a box here and there for no reason. I set the box there perhaps a year ago, and I thought, I'll go through the things in this box, and I'll deal with them, and I'll put them away and take care of them.
And then life happened, and a lot of things happen, then the box is still sitting there. I saw that box today, and I thought, what is it that keeps me from changing the routine of my day to stop and take care of this box? Why is my life so routine oriented?
What about you? Do you have routines and habits that you experience in your life?
I bet you do we all do. We get up in the morning and we do certain things. Then we go to work, or we go to school or whatever we're going to do, and we do certain things. Then when we get back to the home, we again do certain things, and then we finish out our day with habits of certain things that may or may not be the daily habit, but we typically live in habits, and our brains have habits too.
So, our brains have all kinds of habits that keep us from doing the things we think we want to do. Something else takes over, and we don't do the thing, or we do something else instead. I've always been fascinated with this, really.
I am amazed by the power of the brain to control everything we do. So, we have well intended changes that don't happen. And this happens for a lot of reasons. I've collected a little list of these reasons, in case one of these is hitting you right now, so you know, it's kind of a normal thing.
SELF SABOTAGE
So self-sabotage comes from a lot of things. One of them is fear of failure. Another one is fear of success. Imagine, what if I succeed? Others will expect me to keep performing at this level. I have to work harder all the time, or fear of failure, like, what if I don't do it just right, what if it's not perfect, I'll never be able to keep going. So, either way, fear of failure or fear of success, these things can really get in our way.
Not feeling mature enough, old enough, or wise or experienced enough to take on that task. Or maybe not even feeling enough ownership of the thing. So, we self-sabotage because we just don't think we're the right person to do it.
Maybe we lack self-awareness. We have these negative thought patterns, and we don't have any idea that we're thinking them. I know that happened to me yet again recently, when I learned something new about myself and realized I had been thinking a certain thing about myself for my entire life without even realizing it. A lot of this self-awareness has come up for me over time, but here I am, age 51 and continuing to learn that I have thought certain things since my childhood that just never came up before.
Or maybe another self-sabotage source is poor coping with pressure, like we have a lot on our plate, so then we end up sleeping too much because we're feeling down or overwhelmed, or sleeping too little because we think if we work harder, we'll get it all done. Then, we're exhausted and can't get anything done. Or maybe we're just feeling inadequate or eating foods that cause brain fog. Or other physical factors that keep us from being able to even function to get the thing done.
Then there are the Ds, discouragement, doubt, delusion and delay.
Discouragement means you simply lose your courage, like you started out boldly thinking, I'm going to make this change, I'm going to do this thing. And then you lose courage to get it done and pretty soon you just move on.
Doubt means you don't believe your capacity or someone else's capacity, or the situation's capacity, whatever it is, you're not really believing in the reality even happening.
Delusion, which is one step beyond that, believing that you're failing even though there's evidence all around you of your success.
And lastly, delays. Waiting for the perfect time, the right moment, the right opportunity, or for everything to be in its place. There's a longer list of self-sabotage I'm sure we could create, but all of these eight things are prevalent.
You're probably feeling one or more of them if you're facing something that is a change you want to make that just isn't happening. So, in that idea, I want to share with you a bit of coaching neuroscience about interrupting automatic thoughts and creating new neural connections. And before I do that, let's tell the story about seven good things on Monday.
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SEVEN GOOD THINGS ON MONDAY
So, I sat down to do my work today, and it was Monday morning when I recorded this podcast, and I thought I have so much to do at work today. But sometimes I face a day of work where I have a list of things to get done, and by the end of the day, I've done a lot of working, and I have felt like I didn't really accomplish anything that mattered. Or I didn't check off enough things off that list, or things didn't get done, because projects take many days to complete, so there's no completion.
And I started to feel this feeling--that every day at work is kind of like that. There are projects that start and stop. There are cycles of things that flow, but there's not a sense of real winning or celebrating to be done.
And then I looked at my list I wrote last week. Last week on Monday, I wrote down some things at the end of the day that went well, and there were seven of them.
The first one was that I started out the day by getting coached by one of my Reciprocoach partners, and she did such a fantastic job. It was our sixth time meeting together, and by the end of that session, I had a really nice format for self-evaluation that I really want to use, and I have used since that call. And I considered that coaching session a win. It was very effective, and I was the client, and I came away with amazing stuff.
The second thing that went well last Monday was there was a colleague of mine that was trying to get a proposal through a committee, and that person had gone to committee over and over and over again, and kind of worked on this, and it felt like it was a real roadblock, but that day it all concluded, we voted, it moved through, and it was a real win for everybody on the collaboration and also helping that person move to the next level with that proposal. So, something good is going to happen for them. And that was a win.
So, number three was that I had a conversation planned for later in the week, and I needed to send out invitations to get people involved. So, I wrote an initial email, I invited all the people, and I started getting replies. So, I just called that, inviting people to the conversation. And just for that day, it was a win to start getting all of those responses coming in.
The fourth good thing that happened that day was that I emailed some leaders about the same topic I wanted to have that conversation about, asking for their feedback. And all of them replied right away. I got good information, and I felt like I could move forward with my project.
The fifth good thing that happened last Monday was that I graded and posted discussions in these online classes I'm currently teaching. I was so happy about it because, well, I might have five days to do all that grading. If I get it done the first day, it feels so much better because I'm ahead of the game. Students got their feedback quickly, and I can move on with other work projects that I also need to do.
The sixth thing was, there was something that happened that I needed to share with the security team, the Help Desk team at my university. And I sent them the information and all the details, and they were able to take action. And it made some difference for everybody else and for me, I suppose.
And the seventh thing was, I had a presentation coming up in a few months, and instead of waiting a few months to start planning it, I created the outline and slides and sent them to my colleague that I'm doing that with.
So, I got these seven things written down. I wanted to capture what was done so the next day I could get started on the next few things. What I also used that for was today, when I was feeling like nothing ever feels like it's complete. There're all these projects that just keep going.
And here it is Monday again. I want to get started with enthusiasm. I saw that list and realized every day there are huge wins. There is so much to notice, to write down, to share. And if I hadn't looked at that list, I literally would have forgotten how well Monday went last week.
But seeing it reminded me that Mondays can be amazing, and I can accomplish some things today that are going to go well too. Not everything is going to be great. But there are a lot of things that go well, and I need to capture those. I need to notice them, and I need to celebrate them and reflect on them. But I need to take it one step further.
3 GOOD THINGS
And this is kind of in the spirit of that 2005 study published by Martin Seligman and his colleagues called "3 Good Things." It was actually called, looking at the title here, "Positive psychology progress,
