Thought Liberator - how to break free from the prison of one's thoughts

Posted on June 25, 2019 by Charlotte Haggie, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

I have decided to use my Toastmasters speech from last week as a post. I ummed and ahhed about this a bit and then decided to go for it anyway as I think it has a useful message – a message that says that we actually have the power over how we live and what we do with our lives. We have the option to choose our path and we can tell all those thoughts that tell us otherwise where to go. YAY!!!!

Thought Liberator

If I were to tell you what makes me most excited about my role as a coach, it is that I have the incredible opportunity and privilege of being able to liberate people. So tonight, my speech looks at one of man’s greatest prisons, his thoughts.

Victor Frankl, in his book ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ says ‘Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognise that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible’. Frankl’s writings served as inspiration for Alex Pattakos who wrote a book called Prisoner of Our Thoughts. What I gained from his book and from many others I have enjoyed reading is that we have a choice in how we live our lives. We have a responsibility to respond to life when it asks us ‘what is your life’s meaning’ in a way that allows us to be certain of our life’s meaning and able to achieve it.

I think it is probably easier to be certain of one’s life’s meaning than it is to actually go out there and DO IT!!! Brooke Castillo, founder of The Life Coach School, has developed a model that can help us in reaching that ultimate goal. She calls it the Self Coaching Model and I love its simplicity and that it is something that we can carry around with us every day. The model is made up of the acronym CTFAR. C stands for circumstance, T for thoughts, F for feeling, A for action and R for result.

I think you can probably see the feedback loop that the model provides but just to help illustrate it, I might use myself as an example. So, my circumstance is that I am a newly qualified coach. My thought around this might be ‘oh, no. There are so many life coaches out there. I am never going to make it in this field’. Because of this, I start to feel despondent, overwhelmed, like there is no hope for me. And so I sit at home, moping about the fact that I am never going to get clients and that I will never make it as a coach (my action). And the result? 3 years later, I am still sitting at home moping and I don’t have any clients and I certainly am NOT making it as a coach!!!

OR….I could be thinking ‘Oh, my GOODNESS. This is SO exciting. The world is my oyster and I can do anything I like. As a result of this, I feel exuberant and exhilarated which leads me to (action) wake up and get going on setting up my business, marketing myself and inviting clients to come to me for coaching! The result of this (I hope) is that in a few years time, I have a thriving business, I do what I love and have helped many others out of the thoughts leading them to a result that they are unhappy with.

The question you might ask is how we change our thoughts when we are in a perpetuating cycle that leads us to unwanted results so that we are imprisoned and lose our choice. Pattakos, in his book, talks about how it is our responsibility how we react to a situation. But in a paper written by Barbara Fredrickson, a positive psychology researcher at the University of North Carolina, she talks about how negative thoughts do not allow us the choice to take on this responsibility.

She states that negative emotions such as fear, which might once have been the result of seeing a tiger in one’s path, cause us to shut off the outside world and limit the options we see around us. Today, the chances that a tiger might cross our path at Constantia Village or even while hiking on the mountain are quite slim but our brain is programmed to respond to today’s negative emotions in the same way. The brain then focuses on the negative emotion and you become paralysed or reactive rather than having the choice to be responsible and choose one’s thoughts about the circumstance.

Like Fredrickson, Dr Peter Zafirides, in his writings on how our emotions can affect our decision making ability, recognizes that negative emotions narrow our perception of available options and solutions.

So, it would seem that a great deal of it comes down to positive emotions. Fredrickson notes that emotions of joy, love and contentment can help us to shift our thoughts to something that will serve us much better in leading us to the results that we desire.

To develop these, she suggests meditation, writing and play. Although all three sound fun, Craig Henen, the owner of the EQ Institute, focuses on mindfulness and I have taken to this option, although play sounds like more fun! Henen states that mindfulness can help us to grow our prefrontal cortex so that our reactions become responses, less ‘reactive’ and more thought out, making us more responsible.

He says that with the growth of our prefrontal cortex, we can develop the positive emotions that Fredrickson emphasizes. As a result, we no longer react out of past hurts that cause negative emotions like shame or fear and the thoughts around these. We are able to pause, look at our much wider range of options and choose the thoughts that will bring us to the result that we desire. We become able to choose how we respond to life because our options are broader.

Within the model then, there is a sub loop between the T and the F. If we can work on the development of positive emotions, these will have an impact on the thoughts that we can choose from. And in the same vein, if we can amend the stories that are inside our heads, we can change the way that we feel. And so I have learnt that we have the key to our prison, to the bars that hold us locked away and the lock is well oiled and just waiting for us to slip the key in and turn it. My job is to help my clients see that key in their hand and to guide it to the lock, help them turn it and see them run free into the sunset, fully liberated, joyful and careering towards their life’s meaning! THIS is what I am curious and passionate about and this is my life’s meaning. Thank you for allowing me to share it with you tonight.