Research shows that if you had to choose one variable that influences the quality of your life the most, it would be relationships. It’s not money or fame or good looks, it’s relationships.
People who are deeply connected to their friends, family, co-workers and even the local community live longer, are healthier, happier, more fulfilled and live a better life in general. The good life.
And it’s not the number of friends on social networks or the marital status; it’s the quality of relationships that counts the most. You can be married but completely lonely, you can have many acquaintances but no deep connections.
Although please keep in mind that having quality relationships doesn’t mean a complete absence of fights and disagreements. A perfect relationship doesn’t exist.
The idea of a quality relationship is more in building strong codependent bonds, being on a shared life mission, following common values and goals, cultivating a sense of trust, knowing that you can count on others and that they can count on you.
It’s about doing things together that lead to joyful moments. It’s about being fully accepted the way you are with all your positives and negatives.
If we all intuitively know that relationships are that important, then why don’t we invest more effort into building quality bonds with other people? The answer is quite simple: because it’s hard.
It’s as hard as following a healthy diet or regularly saving money. Relationships do bring color to life, but they are also fluid, messy and complicated. They are hard.
It takes courage, dedication and consistency to build a quality relationship. There are no shortcuts or pauses. The moment you stop investing in a relationship, it starts to wither.
On top of that, you must first build a great capacity for love, meaning that you must first love yourself before you can build deep relationships.
The reasons why you must first love yourself are at least the following:
The more you truly accept yourself, the more you can accept other people
The more you love yourself, the more forgiving you can be towards other people
The better you understand emotions, the more constructively you can express them
The stronger you are emotionally, the easier you can deal with disappointments and people’s imperfections
A balance between quality and quantity
When it comes to the quantity of relationships, we know the approximate limit. Dunbar’s number states that we have a biological limit of maintaining around 150 social interactions at the same time.
Among these 150, all six fundamental types (six pillars) of relationships should be included:
Primary family – mother, father, siblings
Secondary family – spouse, kids
Friends
Superiors
Coworkers
Mentors
All the pillars are important in maximizing the value that comes from relationships. It’s hard to understand your roots if you don’t have a good relationship at least with some members of your primary family.
Choosing the right spouse is one of the most important decisions in your life. Kids are the most important legacy you leave behind, and friends are the people you want to share your interests with.
On the other hand, it’s hard to live a happy life if you hate your job and don’t enjoy the company of your coworkers. One very important indicator of how well you feel at your job is whether you have a few good friends there. And if you do some kind of meaningful work.
The math is pretty simple. You spend at least 1/3 of your life at work – work is basically your second home.
That’s why the following career directions are very important: don’t choose a job, but a boss. A boss from whom you can learn, whom you respect and who knows how to bring out the best in you.
Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. And finding a good mentor or a coach can fast‑track your progress in any area of life. All these directions tackle business relationships.
Now let’s jump from quantity to quality.
The road to quality lies in a proactive approach to relationships
As with everything in life, being proactive pays dividends. Relationships are no exception to that.
In general terms, being proactive means that you don’t just react to whatever is happening in your life, but you systematically, deliberately and assertively respond and find the most constructive way to meet your goals and needs.
Being reactive in relationships means that you don’t put any conscious effort into relationships or interactions. You put your relationships and communication on autopilot.
You let a “greater force” dictate who you meet, you let every relationship run its course, and when a disagreement occurs, you react in kind – you let your feelings dictate the outcome of a disagreement.
On the other hand, if you’re proactive in relationships, you consciously decide who new you want to meet, with whom you want to spend more time, into which relationships you will put more effort and so on.
In communication, you don’t only react (bluntly express your feelings), rather you express your feelings in a constructive manner, which can only be done when you’re feeling and thinking at the same time. In other words, you’re being proactive.
A very good start to relationship proactivity is to map all the people who are present in your life.
Source: Inclusion Europe
List all the 150 or so people that interact with on a regular basis and then arrange them in four categories; actually, in four different types of circles, based on how close they are to you:
The circle of intimacy – These are the people you can’t imagine your life without. They know your private self quite well, you spend a lot of time interacting with them – you usually live with them and you trust them the most.
The circle of friendship – These are the people who are also close to you, but there is less intimacy involved. They don’t physically live with you, share a bathroom with you or support you financially. But you do share your dreams, good news and troubles with them.
The circle of participation – Most coworkers, local community, acquaintances and other people that you interact with on a frequent basis (but are not your friends) fall into this category. All the friends you start neglecting can be quickly outcast into this circle.
The circle of exchange – The last circle contains people with whom you do transactions. They can be your doctors, a hairdresser, home cleaner, maybe even a customer, and so on.
You can use two different colors for business and personal relationships.
In the next step, draw an arrow to each person. Indicate if you want to move them more inwards (build a closer relationship) or if you want to create more distance, maybe even cutting them off (if a person is an energy vampire).
The intimate relationships circle – the most important people in your life
It’s a fun exercise to draw the four relationship circles (intimacy, friendship, participation, exchange) and map all the people in your life into circles. Adding arrows next to each person can give you a very good insight into where to invest more effort and where less.
But you can even take the exercise a step further, drawing a new diagram. In the second diagram, you can zoom into the intimate relationship circle and analyze which people are really the closest to you in your life.
It’s not an easy exercise to do, but it is a very valuable one. Take a piece of paper and draw a dot in the center. You can write “me” above the dot. As you have probably figured out, the dot represents you.
Then around the dot, start drawing circles. The circle closest to the dot is the person who is closest to you in your life. The second circle represents the second closest person, and so on.
You can write a name for each circle. There can’t be two people equally close to you and that can lead to a few hard choices to make.
Nevertheless, you can get a really good overview of the people who contribute to the quality of your life the most. Try to draw up to 7 – 10 circles, and you will have a very good overview of which relationships have the greatest influence on your life.
You can add another dimension to the diagram – do not make the space between the circles equally wide. Draw a circle further from the dot if there is a greater distance involved in a relationship. Look at the graph below, representing five people with different levels of closeness to a person:
After drawing the intimate circles, you can analyze at least three things:
How close did you draw the first circle? Is it too close to the dot, too far away, or just the right distance, illustrating secure attachment?
If you draw such a diagram every year, you can observe how much closer you get with some people and more distant with others. That’s pretty normal, since relationships are a very fluid thing.
Most importantly, you can be very proactive about which relationships you wish to put more effort in and bring closer to your center. You can draw an arrow of how close you want to move a certain relationship.
Narrowing the relationship gap based on the relationship circles analysis
Now that you’ve mapped all the relationships, including arrows pointing to the people with whom you want to build a better connection, another question comes to mind – how can you narrow the relationship gap between you and the chosen people? There are many ways how you can undertake this challenge.
Here are a few ideas:
1. Build multidimensional relationships
We tend to do the same things and open the same topics with the same people. To build new relationship dimensions, you must do new things and open new conversation topics with the same people.
Bring new touching points into a relationship and the bond will become stronger. It’s called building multidimensional relationships.
2. Replace screen time with people time
The best move you can make to improve your relationships is to turn off the TV and your mobile phone. Dedicate your full attention to people in your presence.
3. Make online communication an add-on to real communication
Interestingly, if you have only an online relationship with somebody, the connection can never be as good as in real life. But if you have a real-life relationship, opening new communication channels can deepen your relationship.
So, first meet people in real life often enough, and then make the online communication an add-on to personal interaction.
4. Do things together with people
People who do things together, stay together. Invite people on adventures, have hobbies and goals in common, do sports with people, offer them support, make time together meaningful and active.
Only gossiping over a cup of coffee is far from enough to build a good relationship.
5. Learn to properly regulate your emotions
How well you regulate your emotions is the greatest predictor of keeping a quality relationship in the long term. Expressing emotions in an unhealthy way (or stifling them, for that matter) builds tension that can quickly escalate and permanently damage a relationship.
Relationships are too important to leave to chance. For sure, there must be spontaneity involved, but only if you combine it with proactivity can you truly build meaningful and quality relationships.
Stop neglecting your friends. Find a way through family disputes. Reach out to people you haven’t spoken to in years. Put real effort into relationships. Aim for new relationship depths that will lead to the most memorable moments of your life. It’s the best investment you can make.
An organization is only as good as its leaders. It’s absolutely true that too much hierarchy can kill the company’s creativity and productivity, but so does an absence of great leadership.
Some companies, like Treehouse, experimented with a flat organization without any leadership at all, and soon found out that people felt adrift, like lonely islands without support, when they weren’t being led properly.
But becoming a good leader is not an easy job. Developing yourself into a great leader is one of the toughest challenges one can set for themselves. That’s why you can find thousands of books and research articles written on the topic.
Nevertheless, we still don’t have a simple and clear formula for becoming a good leader. I guess we could really say that leadership is like beauty: hard to define, but you know it when you see it.
No matter how much entertaining the comparison of leadership and beauty is, it would be foolish to stop at that. We definitely know several ways how one can become a better leader.
I cherry‑picked the best ones, describing the key personality and behavioral traits of great leaders.
You become a great leader by leading people
Let’s start with the most basic, fundamental mistake (new) leaders make. If you are a leader, your job is to lead people.
That means the majority of your time must be spent dealing with people. Many leaders never make the transition from doing their operational work to actually leading people.
Before taking a leadership position, most people excel at a specific job role. They are exceptional at marketing, sales, finance, product development or any other similar role. Because they excel at something, the natural course of things is to be constantly promoted until at some point they take the leadership position.
But succeeding as a leader doesn’t mean doing the same things you were doing before you became a leader. If the organization is small, you might not have the luxury of only leading people, but part of your daily schedule should definitely be dedicated only to leading people.
As a leader, you need to first set an inspiring vision and outstanding strategy for your team, and then you have to lead them. Yes, actually lead them.
You have to motivate people, empower them, hold them accountable for delivering and meeting certain standards, you need to coach them, see and develop their potential, and so on. It’s impossible to be a good leader if you don’t show care for the people you lead.
Here are some good questions to ask yourself:
Do you have a clear vision, strategy and operational plan for your team?
How much of your time do you dedicate to actually leading instead of doing operational work?
What’s your system of making sure people deliver results?
How much time do you spend motivating, empowering and coaching your teammates?
Building relationships and delivering results
There’s an endless debate over whether a leader should be an autocratic or democratic one, more result- or relationship‑oriented. There’s a very straightforward answer to that, based on research.
A leader should be both. An outstanding leader knows how to build good relationships (democratic orientation), but also makes sure that results are delivered (autocratic orientation). It’s not one or the other, but one and the other.
That’s a hard transition for most leaders.
Leaders who are relationship‑oriented are terrified of setting clear goals, boundaries in relationships, giving honest feedback and holding people accountable for their work. They are terrified that people will stop liking them if they became more result‑driven.
On the other hand, people who are result‑oriented have a deep‑rooted fear of showing the human side of themselves. Showing vulnerability, trusting people, having a friendly talk … these are things that productivity‑oriented leaders equate with losing respect. But consequently, they never develop their true potential as leaders.
People will like you even more as a leader if you actually lead them to the results. People will respect you even more as a leader if you show that you care about them.
In both cases, you have to start developing “the other side” of every great leader. If you care more about relationships than goals, you have to make the first small step towards holding people accountable for results.
Homework
A very good first step is to make a list of small behaviors that bother you with people that you lead (spending time on social media, taking too many smoke breaks etc.) and communicating with them clearly that they’re crossing the boundaries. Relationship‑oriented leaders find that terrifying, but once they set boundaries for the first time, it feels very freeing.
It’s not much different with result‑oriented leaders. Noticing that one of the team members has a bad day and asking them what is going on by showing genuine interest for their moodiness might be a great way for people to start feeling more welcome and appreciated.
Nobody wants to feel only as a workhorse at a job. If you are a completely result‑oriented person, you might soon find that people will respect you even more if you show your human side.
When looking for balance between being relationship- and result‑oriented, the book The first 90 days by Michael D. Watkins offers a very good guideline.
As a leader, you will build your credibility if you are:
Demanding but can be satisfied
Approachable but not familiar
Determined but reasonable
Focused but flexible
Executive but don’t cause too big shocks
Prepared to make difficult decisions that are also considerate
One more good notion is to be more democratic when you’re setting the strategy and gathering ideas, and more autocratic in the execution phase.
The major leadership credibility killers
People love to be led by great leaders, but they can also quickly identify poor leaders and leaders who are only enjoying formal power without having any clue of what real leadership is.
With poor leaders in position, organizational problems tend to multiply. Team members become more and more unsatisfied, politics kicks in, people stop performing, and relationships starts to crack.
Without a great leader, the organizational environment starts to become toxic (unless people are extremely mature). Poor leadership is a negative spiral, very uncomfortable for all the people involved.
Here’s why: individual behavior is always a function of personality traits and environmental culture. The worse the culture, the worse the behavior of people. The worse the behavior of people, the worse the culture, and so on. And bad leaders are in the middle of all this.
Organizational culture eats every plan or strategy for breakfast. Leaders shape organizational culture by what they allow and what they don’t allow.
With bad leadership and consequently poor organizational culture, problems start to pile up. And bad leaders have the tendency to start running away. Obviously avoiding problems like the plague is one of the major leadership credibility killers. But there are several others.
The major leadership credibility killers:
Trying to do everything by yourself as a leader and micro‑managing people
Not making any difficult decisions at all
Keeping people in wrong positions and not firing the rotten apples
Not admitting your own and the team’s weaknesses and finding consulting help
Not developing and empowering people, and not breeding new young leaders in team
Not leading people situationally, based on their competences, attitude and tasks (as a leader you can use directing, coaching, supporting and delegating accordingly)
There is more interesting thing that I noticed.
Many people who become leaders start exploiting their position by, for example, starting their own distracting pet projects, wasting time on unnecessary meetings, spending time on coffee breaks, and doing everything except the thing they should be doing – strategizing and leading people.
4F response – the ultimate challenge leaders have to overcome
If you want to become a great leader, you must first know how to lead yourself. A big portion of leading yourself represents managing your emotions. And managing emotions is hard for leaders.
Here’s why: as a leader, you constantly have to deal with problems, issues and people. The people are usually an especially big challenge, since they’re not robots with performance specifications who blindly follow orders, but rather have very different capacities, attitudes, opinions, respect for authority, and so on.
In other words, being a leader means you’re in a constant state of crisis, dealing with numerous challenges and issues. That’s emotionally hard. Every crisis, problem, threat or misbehavior can throw you into the 4F mode – fight, flight, freeze, fawn.
And evolutionarily speaking, we can all quickly get thrown into one of the 4F states. Consequently, many leaders start living in one of the 4F modes. Their leadership style becomes one of 4F toxic emotional states. You’ve probably seen them many times:
Fight mode – the aggressive, authoritative leader, feared by people
Flight mode – the anxious leader, constantly creating crisis and drowning in work
Freeze mode – the leader who buries their head in the sand, and is completely passive and numb
Fawn mode – the leader who plays politics, tries to please everyone, but pleases no one
We know from movies that every leader in any of the 4F states, gets thrown out of the game sooner or later.
The anxious leader always loses first, because when you lose your head, you lose any leadership or even following capability. The fight mode leader is usually the wicked character that everybody wants to defeat, or goes with his head through the wall until he gets killed. People who freeze become a burden for everybody else. And politics and pleasing others works only for so long.
The solution lies in turning 4F states into an advantage as a leader. It takes an extraordinary emotional and mind management to achieve that, but when you do, you can really become an extraordinary leader, since not many leaders are in that club.
You can achieve that by developing emotional resilience, managing your own sensibility, and learning techniques to get yourself out of the 4F mode as quickly as possible, if there’s no survival danger present.
When you manage to achieve that, you can turn the 4F response into your advantage as a leader. Below is a table showing the direction in which one must develop the 4F biological responses to become an exceptionally great leader:
Fight
Flight
Freeze
Fawn
Assertiveness
Disengagement
Acute awareness
Love & Service
Boundaries
Healthy retreat
Mindfulness
Compromise
Courage
Industriousness
Poised Readiness
Listening
Moxie
Know-how
Peace
Fairness
Leadership
Perseverance
Presence
Peacemaking
Develop yourself as a leader or let other people lead
Carrying a leadership badge or possessing an executive title absolutely sounds nice. It can be a great career achievement – unless it’s only on paper. Nobody wants that, because leaders with only formal power do devastating damage to the organization and all the people involved.
You don’t become a great leader by being promoted and earning the title. You become a great leader when you decide deep down that you truly want to become a great leader and you’re determined to develop your leadership potential no matter what.
Earning a leadership status just because you excelled as an expert in a certain role for so long is far from making you deserving of being called a great leader.
Thus, the first important question to ask yourself is if you truly, deeply want to be or become a leader. If the answer is yes, make sure you start to strategically develop your leadership capacities and that you actually lead people.
On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with staying an expert in your field, taking a consulting role or finding another way to advance your career. Many times, an even more important skill than leading people is having the capacity to be led.
Lead, follow or get out of the way.
Let’s end by talking about Google’s extensive research study on what makes great leaders. The leaders who know how to deliver outstanding results and lead teams where people feel appreciated, feel much happier and retain better.
Like we said, it’s a healthy mixture of being result- and relationship‑driven, and making sure you’re not leading out of any of the 4F states.
Here are eight traits you should develop to become a great leader, according to Google:
Be a good coach
Empower your team and don’t micromanage
Express interest in your team members’ success and well-being
The only way to develop as a leader is to constantly improve. Improving yourself means finding better ways to achieve results and changing your attitudes and behaviors.
As a final note, that means great leaders must have a great capacity for self-reflection and constantly find new better ways to communicate and behave towards the people they lead. So as a leader, start by asking yourself what you will stop doing and what you will start doing to lead your people better.
If you suffer from strong negative beliefs about yourself, others or life, constant relationship troubles, and durable self-defeating patterns, this article will help you understand why and how these things happen.
Besides learning how you form such negative beliefs, you will also learn how they automatically lead to negative thoughts, devastating feelings and toxic behavior.
Such deep negative beliefs about yourself and self-defeating patterns most often lead to self‑sabotage, low self-esteem, underachievement, depression, or even more serious psychological issues and illnesses.
Examples of such negative core beliefs are:
I’m unlovable
I’m such a big failure
People are cruel
Nobody cares about me
Everybody leaves me in the end
My needs are never met etc.
And it all starts with (maladaptive) schemas …
Schemas – the way you interpret yourself, others and the world
You view yourself, others, different situations and the world through schemas. Schemas are mental structures providing a framework for representing some aspect of the world.
They not only help you organize the vast majority of information in a manageable way, they also provide lenses for interpreting reality. Schemas are cognitive structures for screening, coding, and evaluating every stimulus from the environment.
You use schemas to organize your current knowledge, but they also provide a framework for further understanding – predicting what will or should happen in the future. They influence your attention and absorption of knowledge. They also represent your core beliefs and values.
Schemas are like lines of code that run in your brain, giving you instructions for how to interpret things, feel about different events, react and, in the end, also predict the future.
They create feelings, thoughts and lead you to certain decisions and actions. That’s why schemas are extremely powerful structures.
The main characteristics of schemas are:
They are mainly formed in early childhood, youth or adolescence
Majority of schemas run on the unconscious level, you are not even aware of them
They are beliefs and feelings you accept without question, about yourself, others and future
The maladaptive schema beliefs are expressed in absolutes (e.g. I’m not lovable)
They are constantly present and very hard to change (especially without therapy)
They fight for their own survival – in other words, a negative belief about yourself formed in childhood will persist through adulthood even if you invest a lot of effort into changing it
Schemas are valid representations of early childhood experiences, and later serve as templates for processing and defining reactions to different situations.
When schemas are triggered in interaction with the environment, they generate automatic thoughts, intense feelings, strong effects and behavioral tendencies. When schemas are toxic or when they lead us in a negative direction, they are called maladaptive schemas.
Repetition compulsion: Once a thinking, feeling or behavioral pattern is established in childhood (a schema), you tend to repeat it over and over. In your adult age, you try to create conditions very similar to those that were the most destructive in your childhood.
Most people have difficulty in at least one or more schema areas, even if they don’t have psychological issues.
Maladaptive schemas cause us all quite a lot of problems. They negatively distort reality, lead to negative thinking, devastating feelings and ill acting, and they are also the foundation of stereotypes, prejudices and cognitive biases.
That’s why understanding maladaptive schemas and how they function can help a person a lot in developing a healthier approach to life.
Schema domains and the 18 maladaptive schemas that are ruining your life
Maladaptive schemas are developed through schema domains. Schema domains relate to the emotional needs that a child has and are not being met. Maladaptive schemas can also be developed later in adulthood through traumatic situations.
Once a schema is formed, it is hard to change, because schemas are stored as experiences in the emotional part of the brain called the amygdala.
If we go into a little bit more detail, there are usually four main ways how maladaptive schemas are formed:
A child’s needs are not met. There are several groups of needs that need to be met during upbringing for a person to form healthy psychological foundations.
The child is traumatized or victimized, usually by a very abusive, highly critical and domineering caretaker.
By internalizing the caretakers’ voice. Every caretakes serves as a role-model with whom a child identifies. Toxic parents’ behaviors or punishing voice can be internalized in maladaptive schemas, for example.
Receiving too much of a good thing. It might sound counterintuitive, but too much protection, excessive freedom, no limits or overindulgence can also lead to maladaptive schemas.
The formula of how maladaptive schemas work is the following: A healthy environment is not provided or a need is not met during childhood, which creates a certain schema.
The job of the newly created schema is to prevent similar needs from being met for the rest of the person’s life or to relive the same experience over and over again with the goal of developing better coping capabilities.
Consequently, a schema becomes a lousy and destructive pattern that repeats itself throughout the lifetime and makes everyday life really hard. There are many obvious examples of such schema behavior:
Without a safe attachment experience as a child, you have no idea how to have healthy relationships in adulthood.
A child who was abused in youth will later seek abusive relationships. S/he basically goes from one toxic relationship into another.
Schema therapy knows 18 maladaptive schemas that have origins in early relationships and cause all kinds of psychological problems on the thinking, emotional and behavioral level.
The 18 maladaptive schemas are categorized in five sections:
As we said, maladaptive schemas cause instability, disconnection, rejection, impaired autonomy or performance, poor limit setting, fawning, over vigilance or inhibition.
The more entrenched the schema is in one’s personality, the greater number of situations activate it, and the more intense the negative effects are.
Now let’s look at the most common underlying beliefs and probable causes of formation for all the 18 maladaptive schemas:
Nobody will ever love me. Nobody understands me. Nobody cares how I feel.
Cold or removed parents.
2. Abandonment / Instability
Every close relationship I form will sooner or later end in some way or another. People are so unreliable and unavailable to me.
Divorce or death of parents or a parent who left home early or was consistently unavailable.
3. Mistrust / Abuse
Other people will take advantage of me in some way (lying, cheating etc.). People can be so abusive and like to hurt others.
Physical, emotional, sexual, verbal or intellectual child abuse.
4. Social Isolation / Alienation
I am very different from other people and I don’t belong to any community.
Perceiving oneself or family as completely different from other people. Or a child who was different in some way, but didn’t receive support from their parents.
5. Defectiveness / Shame
I’m internally flawed, inadequate, a mistake. If I let people close they will realize how flawed I am. I will never have a loving spouse.
Very critical parents making a child feel unworthy of being loved.
6. Failure
I’m incapable of performing as well as my peers. I feel stupid and untalented. Whatever I try, I will fail.
Lack of support, discipline and encouragement in youth. Constant criticism, repeated situations where the child could not compete.
7. Dependence / Incompetence
I’m not able to deal with life and take care of myself properly. The day-to-day responsibilities are just too hard. Life is so demanding.
Lack of encouragement to develop into an autonomous person and take care of oneself. A parent who implies that a child makes constant bad decisions.
8. Vulnerability to Harm or Illness
There’s a big catastrophe waiting for me around the corner (financial, natural, criminal etc.). I need to heavily protect myself.
Fearful parents who see the world as a dangerous place. Also, overprotective and phobic parents.
9. Enmeshment / Undeveloped Self
If the other person is not always in a good mood, I must have done something wrong. I feel empty. I would rather spend all my time with my spouse, thus I don’t have my own hobbies and friends.
Controlling, abusive and overprotective parents that don’t let a child develop a separate sense of self.
10. Subjugation of needs or emotions
I can’t stand up for myself. If I don’t submit to other people there will be negative consequences – they will get angry, reject me and show me no love.
Very controlling and domineering parents who did not care about the needs of the child.
11. Self-Sacrifice
My own needs are not important, the world is suffering too much. When I make a sacrifice, I feel good about myself.
A child who must have been overly responsible for one or both parents. Usually parents who are narcissistic or depressed.
12. Emotional Inhibition
I shouldn’t show any emotions, because I’ll be perceived as weak, I will get embarrassed or harm others.
Parents who discourage the expression of feelings. Controlling parents who made a child think every mistake will lead to terrible consequences.
13. Unrelenting Standard / Hypercriticalness in six potential areas:
Achievement, competition
Self-control, discipline
Moral, ethics, religion
Control of environment
Social status
Perfectionism
I must always strive harder, and meet all my high standards. There is a right way to do everything.
Parents who were never satisfied with their child and showed love to them only after bigger achievements. It’s about overcompensation for a core issue of defectiveness.
14. Entitlement / Grandiosity / Domination
I’m allowed to do, say or have whatever I want and whenever I want it, regardless of what others think or feel.
Parents who don’t know how to set limits and who overindulge their children. Parents who also make children feel like they are more special than others.
15. Insufficient Self-Control / Self-Discipline
It’s kind of an addiction, I just can’t help myself, I have to do it. I have a big problem setting limits for myself.
Parents who lacked self‑control or didn’t discipline their children.
16. Approval-Seeking / Recognition Seeking
What will other people think of me … I simply must fit-in.
Children who were not unconditionally loved and accepted by their parents. Parents who emphasize status, appearances and how things should look in other people’s eyes.
17. Vulnerability to Negativity / Pessimism
Things are going quite well, but …
Everything in my life goes seriously wrong.
A parent who was excessively worried or overreacted to every child’s mistake. Also, a child who did suffer some kind of a catastrophic event.
18. Punitiveness
He should absolutely be harshly punished for making such a mistake. I’m very intolerant and easily lose my temper.
Punitive upbringing with emphasis on performance. Unforgiving and punishing parents.
Identifying the maladaptive schemas
Many times, just reading about the 18 maladaptive schemas leads to the “aha” moment, where you become aware of the main maladaptive schemas that cause problems in your life.
To further explore the underlying maladaptive schemas, you can additionally seek answers for the following “should” questions:
What should or shouldn’t you do in a specific situation?
How should the world function?
How should you behave in a particular situation?
What should happen in a particular situation?
How should other people behave towards you?
What kind of food should you eat?
Let me give you an example of a schema I was recently exploring in my life. Sometime I am overconcerned with what I eat. An unhealthy bite causes a disproportional emotional reaction.
The point I’m trying to make is not that you shouldn’t eat healthy, but if you feel enormous guilt after one unhealthy meal after a long time, something is wrong. So, I analyzed the should statements in depth.
Why shouldI eat only the healthiest food? If I don’t, I will get ill. Why shouldn’t I get ill? If I’m ill, I can’t work, if I can’t work, something is wrong with me. If I can’t work, I’m not valuable, if something is wrong with me, nobody will love me. That’s a combination of shame, approval‑seeking and unrelenting standard schemas.
When a specific event happens and triggers a certain schema, you can also understand schemas better by asking yourself the following questions:
What does the [internal or external] event say about you? e.g. I’m … a failure.
What does the event say about other people? e.g. People are … so critical.
What does the event say about your life or how the world operates? e.g. The world is … cruel.
In Schema Therapy (ST), there are also many other techniques to identify and explore maladaptive schemas. For example, you can use the Young Schema Questionnaire or Schema Mode Inventory to identify the maladaptive schemas you are suffering from.
Another very popular technique in ST is to imagine yourself as a child with your parents. The image that appears to you often helps to identify the main toxic schemas.
An example of my results of the schema mode inventory test on a certain date.
Schema Coping Styles – Surrender, avoid, overcompensate or heal
A schema can be healed through hard work. When that is achieved, usually through therapy, it’s called schema healing. If a schema is not healed, it runs its course and dictates your automatic negative thoughts, feelings and behaviors. That’s called schema perpetuation.
A schema is trying to protect you by driving you to something familiar, something you already experienced and know how to handle. But at the same time, a schema is very toxic and painful.
That’s why we have developed three major schema coping mechanisms, which are:
1. Schema surrender
In the schema surrender coping mechanism, you simply just give in to the schema and let it run its course. You accept the schema as reality and truth, and then you act in a way and seek situations that confirm the schema.
You look for the smallest signs in the environment as proof for your toxic belief. An unanswered call is already a sign of abandonment.
2. Schema avoidance
Maladaptive schemas lead to automatic negative thoughts and painful feelings. Logically, avoiding any situation that would trigger the schema seems like a good way of coping with potential pain.
Schema avoidance is usually expressed in words that something is not important to you. We know cognitive, emotional and behavioral schema avoidance.
Cognitive schema avoidance:It means that you simply shut out the information that would be too upsetting to confront. You avoid thinking about the situation, person or event that would lead to negative feelings. You can simply forget a painful event.
Emotional schema avoidance:You become kind of numb in order not to minimize the pain and not let the negative feelings out. You can minimize the feelings (shame -> guilt or anger, anger -> annoyance). Feelings can also be numbed with alcohol, drugs, and other addictions.
Behavioral schema avoidance:You avoid situations that would trigger maladaptive schemas you are suffering from. In other words, you avoid facing your fears. You stay in the comfort zone, without any growth and progress, stifling yourself in procrastination, lack of ambition, hopelessness, and so on.
3. Schema overcompensation
Sometimes you try to do the opposite of what a maladaptive schema suggests, with the goal of completely avoiding the triggering schema in any way possible. That kind of thinking, behavior or feeling is called overcompensation.
Perfectionism is an example of overcompensation for the defectiveness schema.
Logically, schema perpetuation is not the goal, but schema healing is. You want to free yourself from toxic thinking, feeling and behavior, with which maladaptive schemas imprison you.
That can be achieved only by weakening the maladaptive schemas and coping styles, and building up the healthy part of a personality.
The modes – temporary states where schemas and coping mechanisms are triggered
A mode is called a temporary state, where a set of schemas and coping mechanisms become active. When you are in “a mode” you act out of several schemas and coping mechanisms. It’s about a temporary mindset you act out of.
A certain mode is always connected to a specific problem you encounter that serves as a trigger.
The most common triggers of modes are disturbing situations that bring back memories from early childhood. Sometimes these modes are also called emotional flashbacks.
In such states, severe rigid mind states are present, triggering very specific thoughts and emotions. A mode many times seems like it’s split off from the rest of the personality.
We know 10 schema modes, grouped into four categories:
Child modes
Dysfunctional coping modes
Dysfunctional parent mode
Healthy adult mode and healthy child mode
For example, if the Vulnerable child mode is triggered, the maladaptive schemas of abandonment, shame, abuse, and the coping mechanism of surrender might be triggered. The 10 schema modes are:
1. Vulnerable Child
Overwhelmed by painful feelings like depression, grief, shame, humiliation
Feels unloved, unsupported, incompetent, powerless, helpless and hopeless
Often also fragile, needy, frightened, anxious, worried and pessimistic
2. Angry Child
Feels enraged, anxious, frustrated, self-doubting, unsupported and vulnerable
Feeling that one should be punished for every small mistake
Finds it hard to forgive himself/herself and others
Sadness, anger, impatience, judgment
9. Demanding Parent
Unrealistic high standards and perfection
Strict rules that need to be followed
Tries to keep everything in order
Avoids wasting time
Doesn’t act spontaneously
10b. Healthy Adult
Nurtures, validates and affirms the vulnerable child mode
Sets limits for the angry and impulsive child mode
Promotes and supports the healthy child mode
Neutralizes or moderates the maladaptive parent modes
Combats the maladaptive coping modes
Appropriate adult functions such as:
Comfortable making decisions
Problem-solver
Thinks before acting
Appropriately ambitious
Sets limits and boundaries
Nurtures self and others
Forms healthy relationships
Takes on responsibilities
Sees things through and finishes tasks
Takes care of health
Does enjoyable activities (sex, hobbies etc.)
Values himself / herself
Expresses emotions in a healthy way
Forgives the past
No longer seems himself / herself as a victim, but rather as survivor
Schema-focused Therapy: The best way to schema healing
Schema Therapy (ST) was developed out of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which is one of the most popular psychological therapies nowadays.
Dr. Jeff Young worked closely with Dr. Aaron Beck, the founding father of CBT, and soon found out that a small segment of people had long-standing patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that couldn’t be solved with standard CBT techniques. The Schema Therapy roots are firmly embedded in psychoanalytical and attachment theory.
In Schema Therapy, emotive, interpersonal, cognitive and behavioral techniques of healing are used. Emotive techniques relate to encouraging the emotional expression in imaginary dialogues, connecting different modes with specific feelings or performing emotional expression with role playing.
Interpersonal techniques are focused on schemas in relations, especially on the relationship with one’s spouse or the relationship between the therapist and a client (based on transference and counter-transference).
Cognitive techniques consist of many different approaches with the goal of identifying dysfunctional thoughts, examining the accuracy of thoughts, and finding new alternative ways to view situations.
Emotional accounting and cognitive reframing are two examples of such exercises. And behavioral techniques consist of things like building up skills, exposure therapy etc.
Let’s look at some of the most popular techniques in Schema Therapy:
1. Identifying alternative schemas
The major goal of schema therapy is to identify alternative, more adaptive schemas as early on in the process as possible.
Focusing on more desirable schemas should be the focus of one’s work or, to be more precise, a schema change usually involves weakening the old schemas and strengthening the new ones.
The best way to identify alternative schemas is to think of how you would like things to be. These so‑called alternative schemas are most often the direct opposites of maladaptive schemas.
How would you like things to be?
How would you like yourself, others or the world to be?
If people weren’t [ ], how would you like them to be?
2. Limited Reparenting
Maladaptive schemas are formed when the needs of a child are not being met. The goal of limited reparenting is to provide experiences through therapy that were missed in early childhood. Such an experience serves as an antidote for maladaptive schemas and modes.
Limited reparenting starts by forming a secure attachment through the therapist, where needs of connection, joy, adequate limits and autonomy are being met.
The basis for the therapy is the so‑called empathic confrontation, which simultaneously takes tenderness and firmness. Through that approach, maladaptive child and adult schemas are addressed with the goal of forming healthier ones.
3. Guided Imagery
Guided Imagery is a technique that helps you understand schemas and modes more accurately. The idea of guided imagery is to bring up upsetting childhood memories in the form of images portraying significant people and dialogues with these people.
When these images are brought to the conscious level, emotional expression and grieving for losses are often encouraged.
In the next step, you try to identify which needs weren’t met in these situations and how maladaptive schemas were formed. The last step is to find a connection with a current situation that is triggering the maladaptive schema.
Guided Imagery can also help you revise the painful memories in a way that needs are met, with the therapist entering into the image.
4. Positive Data Log and Schema Diary
The Positive Data Log basically means that you keep a daily log of observations that are consistent with the new adaptive schema. Because the new schema is not formed yet, it’s very logical to expect that the log will be quite short in the beginning.
You discount, distort, see it as an exception, or even not notice the events that support a new, healthier schema. That’s why you must look hard for even the smallest experience that supports new schemas.
A Schema Diary is a log of what a person learns during therapy and how they apply it on the days until the next therapy. In such a dairy, thoughts, feelings, behaviors, underlying schemas, overreactions, realistic concerns, healthy perspectives and healthy behavior are noted.
5. Flash cards
Flash cards in schema therapy are written statements that help you access your healthy side. The idea of statements on the flash cards is to internalize and enforce healthy schema formation.
They are often developed for different challenging life situations, when each situation has a certain phase of treatment. Flash cards can be quotes, notes, poems or any other form of encouragement that disarms a maladaptive schema.
6. Continuum Methods
Continuum methods are very often used to evaluate negative schemas. Since the schemas represent absolute thinking, where maladaptive and alternative schemas are opposites, it’s easy to illustrate the thinking on a continuum (or a scale between 0% and 100%).
0% I’m a complete failure —————- 100% I win every time
After drawing such a scale, the goal is to examine the reality and see that all-or-nothing thinking or thinking in absolutes is a distorted view of reality.
By examining the accuracy of your own thoughts (or with the help of a therapist), you should get yourself a few precentages away from 0% to reduce absolute thinking and then move on from there.
Another good exercise is to place people you know on the continuum – those who you perceive in a better position than you are, and those who you perceive in a worse position. Besides the basic scales, advanced scales are also used in schema therapy:
Adaptive Continuum: A scale from 0% to 100% as we have discussed.
Criteria Continua: One personality characteristic (e.g. being normal) is broken down into several sub‑criteria (like having a job, friends etc.) and then you place yourself on the scale for each sub‑criteria.
Two-Dimensional Charting of Continua: It’s sometimes used when a schema consists of two interrelated concepts (getting a promotion is really tough, being close to people is painful, connection between perfection and worth). On such a two-dimensional chart, a prediction graph can be drawn and then exceptions are sought that do not fit the semantic equation.
7. Psychodrama, role‑playing and chair work
Psychodrama is a technique where you try to remember an early childhood scene that caused the schema to form and activate. It’s used to activate the entire schema experience. That usually causes a strong emotional reaction.
One very commonly used psychodramatic technique is role-playing.
While role-playing, the focus is on emotions experienced, beliefs activated and behaviors suppressed, and then similarities and differences with current life events can be explored. Often re-experiencing the event with role‑playing where you protect yourself with the adult voice is good practice.
Chair work is a technique where one chair represents the “schema side” of you, and the other chair the “healthy side” of you. Then you play a dialogue between these two sides, by switching chairs when a particular side takes over the internal dialogue. The dialogue can also be between you and some other person to practice assertiveness.
8. Historical test of schema
The historical test of schema is an exercise where you make two separate lists, one for confirming and the other for disconfirming evidence for the schema for different age periods. For each time period, a summary is then written that relates to the schema.
The historical test of schema starts with infancy or toddler time period and then for all major life transitions (early youth, adolescence, school and job transitions etc.). If there is amnesia for a certain period in the past, blank pages can be used.
Schema therapy knows several other therapeutic techniques, but the mentioned ones are the main ones.
Resources and additional reading:
Schema Therapy: A Practitioner’s Guide, by Jefferey E Young, Janet Klosko, & Marjorie E. Weishaar (2003)
Reinventing Your Life: The Breakthrough Program to End Negative Behavior and Feel Great Again, by Jeffery E Young & Janet Klosko (1994)
Breaking Negative Thinking Patterns: A Schema Therapy Self-Help and Support Book, by Gitta Jacob, Hannie van Genderen, & Laura Seebauer (2014)
All situations that happen to you in life have no inherent meaning. You are the one who signs a meaning, seeing a situation through a certain frame.
With cognitive reframing, you can change the way you look at something and consequently change how you experience it.
That kind of an approach enables you to implement the ancient wisdom that you can’t always control what happens to you, but you can certainly control how you react to different situations – no matter how tough your position might be.
And that’s the ultimate power you always possess.
If you want to change something, be it how you feel, how you do things or what you believe, the change always begins with you switching your thoughts and reframing how you see reality. Your thoughts about the situation that happened to you are always more important than the situation itself.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) offers two very practical and easily applicable exercises when it comes to managing thoughts and interpreting events:
Emotional accounting – transforming specific negative thoughts into positive ones
Cognitive reframing – transforming specific negative events into more positive ones
Both exercises work in pretty much the same way. Some event happens to you. You perceive an event as a negative one based on your toxic core beliefs. That causes automatic negative thoughts and negative feelings, which leads to inaction and depression.
With emotional accounting, you strive to transform automatic negative thoughts into more positive ones, while with cognitive reframing, you try to find a more constructive interpretation of what is happening to you.
That gives you an opportunity to neutralize negative feelings and be more action‑oriented.
The three key goals you want to achieve with cognitive reframing
Negative frames or stories that you tell yourself about different life situations are always based on irrational core beliefs that lead to self-defeating thoughts, emotions and actions. It’s like having a dark cloud above your head and seeing reality much darker than it is.
This is the so‑called cognitive triad, where you repeatedly emphasize:
The negative view of yourself
The negative view of the world
The negative view of the future
The main point of cognitive reframing is to find a more positive interpretation, view or experience of unexpected adverse events, concepts or even ideas that you dislike. With cognitive reframing, you challenge yourself to illuminate positive sides of challenging situations, avoid seeing only the negative, and identify a brighter narrative of what is happening to you.
There are three main goals you want to achieve by performing cognitive reframing:
Describing your situation as accurately as possible: Your negative mind loves to see reality darker than it is, especially when something negative happens to you. With cognitive reframing, you want to make sure you see reality as accurately as possible, including all the negatives and positives, but without big cognitive distortions.
Illuminating personal power: Just like your mind loves to see the reality darker than it is, it also loves to portray you as way less powerful than you really are. With cognitive reframing, you want to accurately understand your ability to cope with the event.
Brainstorming alternative views: You want to find better alternative views of what is happening to you. You want to seek a redemptive narrative. The redemptive narrative (frame) tells the story of a life where tough events also bring something good (with time).
If you manage to achieve all three goals with cognitive reframing, your ability to cope with the situation instantly improves and the negative effects, like severe anger, depression or hopelessness, are dramatically decreased.
Consequently, you can think, feel and act more rationally. What more could you ask for.
Where do the default frames come from?
Before we go to practical examples of how to do cognitive reframing, let me try to explain where frames come from as simply as possible. You’re experiencing life and everything that happens to you based on your subjective interpretation of reality. Let’s call it subjective reality.
Your subjective reality is anchored in your core beliefs, values, past life experiences, expectations and many other factors.
It’s your own lens of how you perceive life experiences as well as how you react to them – what’s good and what’s bad, what you like and what you don’t, what to focus on in a particular situation, which actions to take in a particular situation, what should happen, what you expect etc.
Consequently, no two people experience or react to the same event in completely the same way. We all experience life through our own subjective lens.
Let me give you two practical examples of how the subjective reality works:
Several movies were shot based on the life of Steve Jobs. But every movie emphasizes different Jobs’ characteristics, situations and challenges. The movie is based on what the screenwriter, producer and director found important in Job’s story, based on their own knowledge, values, beliefs etc. Every film was created based on the subjective lens of Steve Jobs life. That’s why the films are so different. Similarly, some people see Steve as a hero, others as an impudent and egocentric maniac.
Another example is when two people see a homeless dog on the street. One gets scared and carefully watches the dog’s every move, while the other runs straight to the dog and starts to pat him and show him love. Obviously in their subjective reality, one person sees the homeless dog as a danger and the other as an animal that needs even more love than others.
Different territories on your subjective map of reality are called schemas. Schemas are mental structures providing a framework for representing some aspect of the world. They help you organize the vast majority of information in a manageable way.
You use schemas to organize your current knowledge but they also provide a framework for further understanding – predicting what will or should happen in the future. They influence your attention and absorption of knowledge. They also represent your core beliefs.
Schemas, the main source of your frames, are extremely stable, enduring and hard to change.
When schemas are triggered, they generate automatic thoughts, strong effects and behavioral tendencies. Consequently, they can cause us all quite a lot of problems. Stereotypes, prejudices and cognitive biases are all based on negative schemas.
Schema therapy knows 18 maladaptive schemas that can rarely be changed without therapy and cause all kinds of psychological problems, including cognitive distortions. Examples of early maladaptive schemas are shame, sense of incompetence, entitlement, self-sacrifice, pessimism, and so on.
Many schemas are packed in “should” statements and your expectations towards yourself and others. When your expectations and “should” statements escalate into unrealistic proportions, they immediately become toxic. Play a little bit by answering the following questions (ask yourself why 5-times after initially answering the question):
How should the world function?
How should you behave in a particular situation?
What should happen in a particular situation?
How other people should behave towards you?
What kind of promotion should you get?
How many hours per day should you work?
What kind of food should you eat? etc.
If we take a step further, we could say that schemas are based on a set of frames. You can apply one schema to many different situations, and that’s called a frame. Your thoughts and feelings about the homeless dog are based on a schema you possess. Meeting a dog in a shelter or on the street are two different frames.
A frame is like stopping for a moment, taking a snapshot of something that is currently happening to you, and letting your mind analyze the situation in detail through your main schemas and overall subjective reality.
While schemas are really hard to change, switching to a new frame can be a little bit easier. That’s where cognitive reframing comes into play.
You take a very specific situation from your life and you try to develop a more positive view on it – with that, you influence your thinking pattern and feelings about that particular situation, but you also slightly update your schemas and overall subjective reality in a more positive way.
ABCDE – The formula for easily doing cognitive reframing on your own
It’s helpful if a professional therapist leads you through cognitive reframing, but you can also easily do it on your own. Cognitive reframing is based on the ABC model constructed by Albert Ellis, one of the fathers of cognitive therapy.
The first step is to write down three things:
Accurate description of the event: The event that bothers you and leads to automatic dysfunctional thinking is called an activating event. As the first step, try to describe what happened as accurately as possible.
Belief: Describe how you see the situation as accurately as possible. Try to identify your main beliefs around the event that happened. Help yourself with the following three questions:
What caused the situation to happen?
What does the event say about you?
What do you think should happen?
Consequence: The consequence of what happened interpreted through your beliefs results in a certain way of thinking, feeling and acting. As a consequence, there are three more questions to answer:
What kind of automating negative thoughts go through your mind? Write them down and identify the cognitive distortion.
How do you feel about the event? Identify all the negative emotions (on a scale from 0 – 100%).
What’s your automatic action? Describe your actual response to the situation.
This should give you a really good overview of how you see the event, what are your underlying beliefs and how you feel, think and behave as an automatic response to the event.
Now it’s time to do cognitive reframing. To achieve that we will add D – Dispute and E – Effective change to our model (ABC-DE).
Dispute: Dispute is about challenging your thoughts and beliefs in order to see reality more accurately. It’s about finding a better frame that enables you to neutralize the situational emotions and act more rationally. There is a set of questions you should answer in the dispute process:
If the same thing happened to your best friend or someone you love, what would be your interpretation of the event then?
How would [enter the name of your role model] interpret this situation?
What are other potential explanations besides blaming yourself?
What was under your control and you could have done better, and what was completely out of your control?
What are all the counterarguments to your underlying beliefs? Your past accomplishments, the things you do have, the praise you got, everything that proves the event is an exception.
What’s the worst thing that could realistically happen and how bad would that be?
What difference will this one-time event make in a month, a year or a decade?
Are you sure that you are completely powerless in the situation? List all the moves you can make to get yourself in a better position.
Is thinking this way helping the situation or making it worse?
What is the most positive interpretation of the event you can think of?
Effect: Write down the final effect. The final effect should be a more accurate view of the situation with a better narrative, disarmed negative thoughts and feelings, and an action plan for performing better in the given situation.
Write down your new thoughts about the event
Write down your new feelings about the event
Write down the action plan you will put in motion
You can download the free template below to professionally perform cognitive reframing whenever needed:
The point of cognitive reframing is to find a new better frame (angle, filter or story) of how you look at a specific event. A frame that can be supported by constructive underlying beliefs, one that doesn’t cause negative feelings and thoughts enables you to keep all the necessary personal power in your own hands for acting and responding properly and rationally.
Now, the most important thing is that your reframing is still based on truth. You absolutely shouldn’t start lying to yourself or suppress feelings or use the tool in any other negative way. It’s not about daydreaming and denying the seriousness of a situation. It’s about responding more wisely and rationally.
Practical examples
Here’s a practice example of cognitive reframing (a shorter version):
Antecedent: I just lost a big consulting contract.
Automatic belief: I’m worthless and nobody will hire me.
Consequence: Anger (90%), Depression (80%).
And now let’s describe the same situation by doing cognitive reframing:
Antecedent: I just lost a big consulting contract.
Belief after dispute: It was obvious that we weren’t a good fit. That gives me a very good insight into what kind of clients I should look for and how I can improve my marketing materials.
Effect: Now I can easily prepare a list of 5 potential clients and contact them. The new feelings present are – Anger (20%), Depression (30%), Inspiration (70%).
And, of course, then a detailed plan follows: The best way to find new better clients for me is to upgrade my marketing materials, prepare a list of 50 potential buyers, rank them according to how well we fit together and get in contact with them. For every client that rejects me, I must gather feedback to even better define my offer and market segment.
hurtful actions of others into understanding why they’re doing that instead of being a victim or engaging in fights, and so on.
But again, the idea is to turn a problem into an opportunity and ACT. You mustn’t only make yourself feel a little bit better.
Your goal is to try to view a situation differently, but you shouldn’t deny the reality of the situation.
You must fight hard to hold your frame after reframing a situation
When you do cognitive reframing, you will soon see that your mind constantly strives to slip back into your previous toxic thinking. Your mind, even after cognitive reframing, is like a small child (or rather a drunken monkey) constantly testing the limits and trying to wander off and bite you in the ass along the way.
That’s why you need to perform another exercise along with cognitive reframing. It’s called holding your frame.
When you do cognitive reframing and see reality in a more positive way, hold to the new frame strongly. Don’t let it go for even a second. Don’t slack off; hold your frame no matter what. No retreat, no surrender.
If you don’t stubbornly hold to your new positive frame, you will lose it and you will go back to your previous thinking.
So, every time your mind tries to wander off and hurt you by seeing life more negative than it really is, consistently hold your new positive view in your head. You have to be stronger than the “mind monkeys”, and sooner or later your mind will give up on the negative view.
Two useful tips for performing cognitive reframing
Cognitive reframing is a very simple and useful exercise, but it does come with a few challenges. Unfortunately, you can’t just force a new frame of thinking on yourself. You have to lead yourself towards the new frame slowly.
That can be achieved in two ways:
Ask yourself the right questions
Neutralize the negative feelings
Start asking yourself the right questions
You must start (if a therapist isn’t leading you through the process) by asking yourself the right questions, identifying new observations, systematically analyzing the accuracy of your thoughts, and finding internal or external misunderstandings.
Optimal thinking and questions like those found below can help you a lot with this matter:
What went right? What was positive in the situation?
What are the bright spots in this situation?
How can I turn this disaster into a win?
What is the best way to act in this kind of a situation?
What if I believed the opposite? And then try to find the evidence against your thought.
What did the person who raised me do well (not only wrong?)
By asking yourself the right questions and then performing cognitive reframing, you want to learn the cognitive errors you make, challenge your conclusions or limiting beliefs, replace toxic beliefs, or find a redemptive narrative for a tragic situation that happened to you.
Cognitive reframing comes in especially handy when something happens that completely throws you out of your emotional center.
Neutralize the negative feelings
Before even starting with the cognitive process, you have to neutralize the negative feelings a little bit. You must loosen up before changing your frame.
The negative mind is really stubborn and in the depths of struggle, it’s hard to see anything positive. Thus, you must first neutralize your severe negative emotions a little bit .
The best ways to neutralize your emotions are:
Some kind of a surprise or shock – exercise, shouting into a pillow, cold shower etc.
Curiosity over why something happened to you – curiously researching what lead to the situation and why
Practical demonstration of improvement – exploring how others solved the same situation or getting a mentor
Clear instructions for what to do next – getting madly educated about the situation
Humor as the best coping mechanism – finding the funny side of a painful situation
When you are performing cognitive reframing, make sure you don’t fall into potential traps. The most common ones are excessive fantasizing, seeing reality with rose-colored glasses or finding a good excuse for procrastination or malicious behavior.
That’s not what this exercise is for. The main point of cognitive reframing is to find the bright spots, neutralize negative emotions, prepare for action and scale what already works.
You are here on this world for three main reasons. The first one is to experience as many different things as possible and enjoy life to the full. The second one is to create, contribute, share, and leave a positive legacy behind.
And the third reason why you’re here on this planet is to improve, evolve, grow and become the best version of yourself. So the question is: what can you do to make sure you become the best version of yourself?
The initial step towards becoming the best version of yourself is knowing your ideal self very well. The best way to do that is to make a persona of your ideal self (mind-map, notebook with pictures, etc.).
In general, personas are used in marketing for fictional characters representing the ideal customer or a typical representative of a user segment, but they can easily be used to clarify who you want to become.
The more exactly, accurately and sooner you know your ideal self, the easier you’ll get there. When you are clarifying and brainstorming your ideal self (the best version of yourself), there are 7 areas of life where you have to determine your realistic potential and your goals, including metrics of your progress and the strategy of how you will get there.
The 7 areas of life where you have to constantly improve to become the best version of yourself and should be part of your ideal self are:
Body
Mind
Emotions
Spirit
Relationships
Assets
Career & Legacy
Before we continue to examine each of the life areas in detail, there is one more important fact to note. When you’re setting your goals, it’s extremely important that you consider your starting point.
And when you’re measuring your progress, you should compare yourself only to yourself. Well, to your previous self to be more exact. Other people can be your reference point, but what’s important is that you compete with your status in the past first and foremost.
Now, let’s go into detail of the 7 areas you have to pay attention to if you want to become the best version of yourself.
1. Take outstanding care of your body
Your body is the most amazing thing you will ever own, and without a healthy and firm body, it’s hard to become the best version of yourself. So the first thing you should do in order to achieve your maximum potential and peak performance is to take outstanding care of your body.
For outstanding care of your body, you have to pay attention to three fundamental areas of health:
We can add managing any illnesses or weak body points to the list (we all have them)
The good news is that there are very actionable metrics you can use to follow progress regarding your health and how well you’re taking care of your body. So you can have a very clear picture of whether you’re improving your body capabilities and becoming the best version of yourself.
Here are a few core metrics you can measure:
Calorie intake (macros, type of food etc.)
Body composition (fat %, muscle size etc.)
Aerobic endurance (VO2max, how fast you can run a mile)
Muscular endurance (push-up test, plank test)
Muscular endurance (one-rep max)
Flexibility, mobility, stability (yoga poses you can do)
2. Take outstanding care of your mind
The next thing you have to take good care of is your mind. We live in the knowledge society and taking care of your mind is extremely important.
Your mind is the greatest asset to create, deliver and capture as much value as possible on the markets; and you should also take care of your mind to make good life decisions.
To become the best version of yourself, there are a few aspects to taking proper care of your mind. Here are the main ones:
Make sure you control your mind and that your mind doesn’t control you
If you want to achieve your peak potential, you have to take control of your mind; otherwise your mind will hinder your potential instead of supporting you in achieving your peak performance.
If you don’t take over the control of your mind, the mind will instead focus on negative thinking, cognitive distortions and mental masturbation (entertainment).
The best way to take control of your mind is to practice meditation, focus on gratitude and what you already have in life, develop the abundance mindset, become aware of your dominant cognitive distortions and eliminate them with emotional accounting, and take regular updates of your brain’s “software”.
Yes, even if the brain is a remarkably powerful organ, the software it runs among neurons is quite buggy. Extremely buggy, actually. By reading, listening to lectures, talking to people, observing different situations, reflecting and other similar situations, you can update your software to be less buggy.
You also want to regularly improve your creative potential. We can all be creative; you just have to practice. There are two easy ways of developing your creative potential, without becoming an artist or something. Write down new ideas every day and constantly try new things in life.
To sum up, here are some very actionable things you can do to develop your mind to the maximum and become the best version of yourself in this aspect:
Meditate
Eliminate cognitive distortions one by one with emotional accounting
Write down one thing you are grateful for every day
Be a lifelong learner – constantly develop your competences, read and read a lot, go to lectures and seminars, take online courses, respect knowledge and make sure you acquire a lot of it.
Limit mental masturbation activities like watching TV, reading the daily news, spending time on social networks, participating in useless meetings etc. Make sure you become the master of the time management.
Every day, write down at least 50 ideas. Just open a notebook and brainstorm.
Always try new things in life – take a new route home, try a new sport or a hobby, brush your teeth with your non-dominant hand, do the opposite of what you usually do, travel, learn a new language, play mind-development games etc. There are so many things you can do and try.
3. Take outstanding care of your emotions
Taking care of your mind already has a very positive influence on your emotions. By focusing on the positive and extensively dealing with your cognitive distortions, your emotions will also become much more positive. But that isn’t enough for you to achieve your peak performance.
Your ideal self is kind of a vision of who you want to become. But vision without emotional backup and strong will to act is just an illusion.
That’s why you also need a strong why; strong emotional reason or life mission, why do you want to become the best version of yourself. You have to act out of a sense of mission and inspiration if you want to constantly improve yourself.
You want to have a mission that is bigger than any life problems and obstacles you will meet on your way to becoming the best version of yourself. Only if you have a strong emotional why, a strong sense of personal mission, can you enjoy the benefits listed below.
Benefits that are a must if you want to achieve your peak performance:
You feel more alive and valuable
You have no problem with prioritizing tasks
You can connect more easily and communicate with people much more passionately
You enjoy the work you do
You can innovate and be creative much more easily
You can really have impact on the world and change it
You can inspire other people to work with you
You are a more charismatic and energetic person and probably happier as well
Personally, I call acting out of a powerful why transcendence. If you want to achieve that kind of a transcendent state, you have to take outstanding care of your emotions.
Your emotions are the ones fulling your motivation and willpower, not logic. So you must employ your emotions as fuel that drives your improvements.
But how do you do that? Here are a few things you can do:
Become aware of your emotions with practicing mindfulness
Employ visual representations (Kanban philosophy)
The “True North” test
The first step you have to make is to pay close attention to your emotions. You can easily do that by introducing the Happiness index into your life.
Every day (or, even better, twice a day) you mark how you feel on a scale from 1 to 10 (1 – negative emotions, 10 – positive emotions), and then analyze exactly what kind of negative or positive feelings you’re experiencing and why you are feeling that way. Try to ask yourself “why” at least 5 times to get to the core of the problem (the 5-whys technique).
By doing such an exercise, you’ll gain much better understanding of your feelings, what motivates you and what takes motivation right out of your heart. Right after taking a note on the Happiness index chart, you can do the true north test.
Simply ask yourself: are you doing all the things you were born to do? Are you fighting for what you want in life or are you just going where life kicks you (usually those aren’t very nice places called average life or even zombie life).
If you want to achieve the best version of yourself, you have to follow your heart and listen to your gut instinct. You have to gather the courage to start following your true north. You have to start doing things you were born to do (work, love, creating, hobbies etc.).
One more thing that helps with emotional empowerment are visual representations. You’ll react a lot differently if I describe a snake to you or if I show you one on a picture or if you actually encounter one in nature.
Visual elements can motivate you extensively. So visualize, have a vision board, have a Kanban board, go for a “test drive” of what you want out of life. That will help you achieve your peak performance.
It also helps a lot to be emotionally motivated if you:
Taking care of your spirit means that you have strong faith in life. There are many different ways of taking care of your spirit and all of them are okay, if they help you become the best version of yourself and if you aren’t hurting others with any radical beliefs.
Here are a few ways of how you can take care of your spirit:
Having extraordinary faith in yourself
Religion
Spirituality
If you aren’t a religious or spiritual person, taking care of your spirit can come only from extraordinary belief in yourself.
If you want to do extraordinary things in life, if you want to become the best version of yourself, you must have extraordinary faith in yourself and life.
There are a few signs that show very well that you have extraordinary faith in yourself:
Putting yourself first (but not in an egocentric way)
Developing high levels of self-confidence and self-worth
Regularly celebrating life and being grateful for every day
Having integrity and making sure you are a good person
Building your success based on prestige, not dominance
The other two ways to take care for your spirit are religion and spirituality. Praying, doing good, having faith in God, being thankful, helping people and the society, these are all things that bring peace, karma points and general good into your life.
This is how you take care of your spirit and it’s a very important part of your personality and becoming the best version of yourself. You can only become the best version of yourself if you also make this place just a little better to live for generations to come.
Remember, legacy is always greater than currency.
5. Take outstanding care of your relationships
It’s impossible to live a quality and happy life without many healthy and deep relationships; and it’s impossible to become the best version of yourself without having outstanding relationships in life and taking good care of them.
People can make you or break you. People can bring out the worst in you, or people can bring out the best in you. In addition to that, nobody can succeed alone. You need a dream team of people in your personal life and you need a dream team of people in your professional life.
You need a dream team of people in your personal life and you need a dream team of people in your professional life.
Therefore, if you want to achieve your peak performance, you have to strategically build relationships. You have to meet many different people and keep the ones that give you the most in your life. Once you’re an adult, the choice of who you’ll spend time with is completely yours, and you must choose wisely.
In your personal relationships, you have three pillars of love, support and empowerment:
Spouse
Family (primary, secondary)
Friends
Who you choose for your spouse is, in many ways, the most important choice in your life. It’s extremely hard to be happy, successful and achieve your peak performance and ideal self if you fight at home all the time and if there is no love, understanding and tolerance.
Besides your spouse, having a happy family also gives strong emotional foundations and feelings of belonging. And strong foundations give you wings to fly high to your peak potential.
If you don’t have a good connection with your primary family (you haven’t chosen it), make sure you build a loving and caring secondary family.
To feel emotionally secure, take risks and be happy in life, you also need friends and the feeling that the people closest to you will help you if and when things go wrong. Without strong emotional support, you can never take risks to really become the best version of yourself.
In your professional life, you also have three important pillars:
Boss / Stakeholders
Coworkers / Cofounders
Mentors / Mastermind group
You spent almost 1/3 of your time at work. Thus professional relationships can either make your life miserable or encourage you to become the best version of yourself in work-, career- and money-related things.
The first rule is to never work for a boss that you don’t respect and can’t learn from. Then you need many coworkers or cofounders if you have your own business and they should always push you towards new challenges and professional personal improvement.
You need to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you, who you can learn from and with whom you can do real team work. Last but not least, having mentors or building a mastermind group can help you a lot in becoming the best version of yourself.
6. Take outstanding care of your assets
The last thing you have to take care of if you want to become the best version of yourself are your assets. Assets are what can leverage and accelerate your success and help you to achieve your peak performance on all levels of life more quickly and efficiently.
Assets are divided into two general categories:
Inner assets
Outer assets
Inner assets are all the assets that are a part of your personality, who you are and what you’re capable of doing. Examples of inner assets are knowledge, skills, experiences, creativity, self-discipline, values, beliefs, intelligence, passion, your life strategy etc.
The good news is that with inner assets, you can always create, better manipulate or acquire more of the outer assets.
You can easily measure progress and acquirement of your inner assets on the road to becoming the best version of yourself. Here are a few core metrics:
Domain knowledge you master (number of areas)
Number of skills you have
Number of tech skills you have
How long you can do focused work etc.
Outer assets are all the things that aren’t a part of your personality, but that you can possess and that bring advantages and material comfort into your life. Examples of outer assets are wealth, power, fame, social network, status, contracts, land, goods, technology etc.
The good news is that unlike inner assets, which are limited with biological bounds, outer assets can grow much faster. You can’t read 100x faster in one year, but you can have 100x more money.
It’s even easier to measure progress and acquirement of your outer assets:
Now, in order to achieve your peak performance you have to constantly be acquiring new inner assets with everything mentioned previously in this post – taking good care of your mind, body, emotions and spirit. The more you take care of these things, the more inner assets you have.
But it’s not only about acquiring inner assets, it’s also about managing them properly. A ton of theory can’t compare with a gram of practice and real life experience.
To manage your inner assets properly, you have to be aware of them (listing your competences, past accomplishments, performing a personal SWOT analysis etc.), and then put them to good use by creating (innovating), delivering (marketing) and capturing value (getting paid).
You have to strategically offer your inner assets on the markets, be it as an employee, self-employed individual or business owner.
The last step to becoming the best version of yourself is to strategically start acquiring and managing outer assets. In other words, you have to start thinking and acting as an investor.
If you want to be really successful in life, get to your peak performance and achieve massive success, you have to employ outer resources as your leverage, because they can grow much faster than your inner assets.
The main problem is, of course, that acquiring inner assets is already damn hard. But acquiring and managing outer assets is even harder. You need to better understand markets, media, people, money management, and you need to know how to create things that people want. And the competition is crazy.
But that’s what you have to do to become the best version of yourself.
Because only by having enough outer resources, you can invest so much more back into yourself and the people around you. And you actually have enough power to change the world and make it a better place and thus leave a visible legacy behind.
It’s not easy to become the best version of yourself, but it’s definitely worth it. And if everything sounds like too much, here’s where you can start easily – start by taking care of your body and the rest will follow.
In this blog post you will learn how to really think positively and how to simply transform negative thoughts into positive ones (or at least neutralize the darkest ones).
As we all know it, positive thinking is a very important part of a happy and successful life, but you can’t just decide to think more positively. If it were that simple, everyone would be happy and optimistic and super positive.
As you can’t just decide to think more positively, you also can’t force yourself into positive thinking. It will only make you miserable. Trust me, I tried that approach.
When you try to force yourself into positive thinking, every time a negative thought crosses your mind, you will only get mad and angry and disappointed, and that means even more negative thoughts.
You accomplish the opposite.
What you need is a simple step-by-step process to gently outsmart your negative thoughts. The solution to more positive thinking lies in the so-called:
Mental biofeedback
Emotional accounting
Thought stopping.
These three exercises are from the cognitive therapy, very well described in the book Feeling Good by David D. Burns. They are by far the best exercises when it comes to mind management and training yourself to think more positive.
They’re so simple mind exercises, yet so powerful.
Where the name comes from and why is emotional accounting so effective
The first step in transforming negative thoughts into positive ones is to systematically observe your thoughts and your feelings.
For example, by counting your negative thoughts, you automatically pay closer attention to what is going on in your mind. You develop special kind of mind awareness. You can finally see how negative thoughts cause negative feelings. In the next step, by categorizing your thoughts, you observe them even more closely and carefully.
In the end, with specifying the type of feeling and its intensity (0 % – 100 %) that comes with different types of thoughts, you become master of emotional and thought accounting. That’s where the origin of the name comes from.
Emotional accounting simply means identifying, recording, measuring, classifying, verifying, interpreting and auditing your thoughts. The same thing as traditional accounting does with numbers and business events. It’s a very efficient self-reflection exercise and a good way of determining how much your feelings actually improve after neutralizing your negative thoughts.
Now that you know where the name comes from, let’s dive deeper into why emotional accounting is so effective. Every toxic thought that appears in your head comes from somewhere. And it comes from your inner critic.
The inner critic is part of your mind that’s dark, negative and evil and only wants to hurt you and others. It’s usually an internalized voice of your overcritical, cold or neglecting parents. An event happens in your life (positive or negative) and your inner critic automatically attacks you with a bunch of negative thoughts. Nothing is ever right for the inner critic.
If you let the inner critic become too strong, it’s like having a negative, unloving, rigorous grumbler in your head, blocking you from being happy, proud, powerful and going forward.
In all of us an “inner critic” resides, making sure you strive for progress and improvements (with encouragements and compassion when things don’t go as planned); but if the inner critic becomes too strong, it has the power to turn your life into a real misery and agony. At least in your own mind.
Your job is to protect yourself from the inner critic. And you do that with emotional accounting.
In practical terms, emotional accounting simply means talking back to your inner critic in a very systematic, structured and analytical way. That’s it. Your mind tries to criticize you to make reality seem darker than it is, but you don’t let your mind do that. You stop your negative mind and stand up for yourself.
Cognitive distortions – the main weapon of your inner critic
With emotional accounting, you protect yourself from your negative mind by talking back to the inner critic. The main weapon of your inner critic (or your negative mind, if you will) are cognitive distortions. Cognitive distortions are an extreme form of negative thoughts.
With cognitive distortions, you see reality much darker than it really is. It’s a trick your mind plays on you. Consequently, that arouses negative feelings in you as well as causes longer periods of depression or severe mood swings. That makes your mind weak, emotions fragile, and the world a miserable place to live.
Your negativity is in many cases not based on accurate perceptions of reality, but is instead the product of mental slippage. Bad things do happen to people, but not as often as your mind would like you to think.
It might seem that thoughts are only thoughts, but the extent of negative thinking is enormous. Your mood slumps, your self-image crumbles, your body doesn’t function properly, your willpower becomes paralyzed and your own actions defeat you. That’s why negative thinking needs to be dealt with once and for all.
There are many different types of cognitive distortions (somewhere between 10 – 20, depending on different definitions). They are your negative mind’s arsenal. Reading about them will immediately help you identify negative thoughts that pop up in your head.
And once you can easily identify them, you also have a good chance of fighting them off. The better you understand how your enemy works (your negative mind), the better chances you have to stop it and win.
Below is the list of the 10 main cognitive distortions:
All-or-nothing thinking: You see your situation as black and white, you want to have everything or nothing. Everything is unreachable perfection, and consequently you feel like you have nothing. But that’s far from the truth.
Overgeneralization: You generalize one bad event that happened to you (rejection, for example) as a never-ending pattern that you can’t do anything about.
Mental filter: You see only negatives and minuses and ignore all the benefits and pluses.
Discounting the positives: You give zero value to your past accomplishments, strengths and positive qualities. They don’t count, because everyone has them.
Jumping to conclusions / Mind reading / Catastrophizing: You predict that things will turn out badly, even if you don’t have any proof for that, or you assume people will react negatively or reject you, again without any proof. Catastrophizing is jumping to negative conclusions on steroids.
Magnification or minimization: You make a big deal out of small, not really important details, or you shrink things that are important to almost nothing.
Emotional reasoning: You draw the conclusion that how you temporarily feel is who you really are. For example: “I feel like I didn’t write this well enough, so I must really be a bad writer”.
“Should statements”: You criticize yourself and others based on what you or they should, must, or have to do. You moralize to others and yourself.
Labeling: You put a negative label on your identity based on perceived shortcomings, even if they’re not real. “I’m a complete loser”, would be a nice example.
Blame and personalization: You blame yourself for things that were not your responsibility or you blame others for things that were your responsibility. Or you assume that no matter what other people do, they do it to block you or harm you personally. You also constantly compare yourself to others.
And a few others very common cognitive distortions that can make your life a real misery:
Always be right: Being wrong is simply unthinkable to you. You try to prove that every one of your actions or thoughts is correct. You try to persuade others to think the same way you do.
Fallacy of fairness: You feel resentful or envious, because you think you know better what would be a fairer situation, than other people do.
Fallacy of change: You expect other people to change or the world to change more to your liking and wants. And your happiness seems to depend on that kind of change.
Fallacy of being a good person: You expect being a good person and sacrificing for others will pay off somehow and when it doesn’t you feel bitter.
Hindsight thinking and what-ifs: You look back at your past decisions and make judgments how you could handle things better. But you handled it according to your knowledge and experience at that time. In the same way, you might constantly ask yourself “what if” about your future, but you’re never satisfied with the answer.
Control error: You either see yourself as a helpless being with no personal power or control. Consequently, you feel stuck and externally controlled. The other extreme is if you feel responsible for everything and want to control everything.
Unrealistic comparison: You compare yourself with other people, viewing them better as you are, not considering different starting points, life circumstances, genetic advantages, random luck events etc.
These are all the different ways how your mind plays tricks on you. Now let’s look at a few ways, how you can fight back, with the emphasis on the emotional accounting.
Exercise 1: Mental biofeedback – a warm up for emotional accounting
The easiest exercise to start dealing with toxic thoughts is the so-called mental biofeedback, which as mentioned comes from cognitive behavioral therapy. The idea of the exercise is to start counting your negative thoughts. Just counting, nothing else. This way, you become more aware of your toxic thoughts.
You simply buy a counter to click or draw a line in a notebook every time you catch yourself with a thought that isn’t part of the rational mindset. After counting your negative thoughts for a few days, you can slowly take a step further as stated below.
Step 1: Only count toxic thoughts for a few days or even weeks
Step 2: Count toxic thoughts, but also write them down
Step 3: Count them, write them down and categorize them (what kind of cognitive distortion it is – have a list of cognitive distortions always with you to refresh your memory)
Soon you will learn to identify any kind of toxic thinking and poor mentality, and categorize thoughts very quickly. If you follow this (empathy) process for a few weeks, you will learn to identify and categorize thoughts in the blink of an eye.
Now it’s time to transform negative thoughts into more positive ones or at least neutralize them.
Exercise 2: Thought accounting or emotional accounting
The more you practice, the easier it will be to recognize negative thoughts. Especially be mindful of your thoughts when you’re in a bad mood or when you have a bad day. After a few months, it will become natural for you to identify and categorize different kinds of toxic thoughts on the fly.
The next important question in the process is what to do with all these toxic thoughts. Well, you neutralize them or even transform them into positive ones with emotional accounting.
The main point of emotional accounting is to practice talking back to your inner critic with the goal of developing a more realistic self-evaluation system or an evaluation of the situation you are in.
Talking back to your inner critic is key, and it’s really easy to do it. To perform emotional accounting, all you need is a simple table. The table has six columns. Here they are:
Event or situation
Toxic thought going through your head (automatic thought, self-criticism)
Type of negative feeling it’s causing and the intensity of it (emotions)
Categorization of the toxic thought
Performing a rational response to the toxic thought(self-defense)
New intensity of the negative feeling (outcome)
You simply go column by column. By far the most important is the column where you perform a rational response to the toxic thought. That’s the part of emotional accounting you need to pay most attention to.
It’s the self-defense against your negative mind. After you perform a rational response, it’s also useful to pay attention to the changes that come up in your feelings. If you perform the exercise correctly, you should immediately feel better. The negativity should be reduced.
Please note that there is always some kind of an event or outer stimulus that leads your mind to an automatic negative thought. Your job is to identify the situation and the automatic response and then perform self-defense.
Yes, you have to defend yourself from your own negative mind. In a way you must gently outsmart your mind to not distort reality in a negative way.
Practical examples
Let’s look at an example of emotional accounting.
Situation: I get an article back from my proofreader.
Automatic negative thought (self-criticism): I’m making so many grammar mistakes, I am a really poor writer.
Type of negative thoughts: Overgeneralization, self-labeling, fixed mindset, reactive thinking, problem-oriented
Rational response (self-defense): Even if I still make quite a lot of grammar mistakes, I have great ideas for articles, my style is improving and so is my grammar, and I get a lot of positive feedback on my articles.
New feelings: Anger, frustration (20%), feeling proud of myself (60%)
Action-oriented mindset: The best way to improve my grammar is to have a great proofreader, read as much as possible, and do a few grammar exercises.
Now it’s time for you to do the exercise. Think of the last thing that made you really mad, frustrated or depressed. Or maybe you are facing such a situation right now. Try to do the exercise for three situations that are currently arousing negative feelings in your life.
Situation
Negative emotions
Automatic thought (Self-criticism)
Type of cognitive distortion
Rational response (self-defense)
New emotions
1
2
Every time you find yourself in a bad mood, frowning or you overreact to a situation, do emotional accounting and see how much better you will instantly feel. Use the template in the beginning to reprogram your mind, but soon you will perform self-defense automatically whenever your negative mind attacks you.
Emotional accounting completely changed my life and how my mind works. The only situation where emotional accounting doesn’t work instantly (at least in my case) are severe emotional flashbacks, where the intensity of emotions is so strong, I can’t even identify negative thoughts.
Below you can download an Excel table that will help you do the emotional accounting:
Exercise 3: Thought stopping – setting boundaries to your inner critic
One more very useful cognitive exercise you can use in the battle with your negative mind is thought stopping. This exercise can be very effective when your negative mind is attacking you with the same negative thought over and over again or when you’re tired and talking back to your inner critic seems like an exercise in futility.
Thought-stopping is a process of interrupting and stopping your inner critic with pure willpower. You can simply say to your inner critic “No!”, “Stop!” or “Shut up!” when cognitive distortions get condensed and the mental process is directed towards drasticising, dramatizing and looking for perfection.
Thought-stopping is about setting boundaries against any anti-self process. It’s about stopping the mental war against yourself. As you will see with time, successfully stopping the inner critic demands practicing thought-stopping thousands upon thousands of times.
Anytime the critic gets too loud, you simply have to stop it, especially if emotional accounting doesn’t work. Thought stopping is so effective because saying “No!” is the backbone of the human instinct of self-protection.
Now you know your weapons that will help you deal with your negative mind. The best way is to start with mental biofeedback to better understand how your negative mind works, and which cognitive distortions are its favorite ones.
Then start practicing emotional accounting with the goal to neutralize the negative thoughts and to see reality as it is and not even one shade darker. And when your inner critic is to persistent, stop it with a firm no. If necessary, do it thousands and thousands of times.
When you learn to stand for yourself against your own negative mind – the stronger bully there is, you automatically feel much better about yourself and the world. Remember, even the worst enemy can’t hurt you as bad as your negative mind can. Don’t let that happen.
Source for emotional accounting: Cognitive behavioral therapy & David Burns: Feeling Good (2008) and Pete Walker: Complex PTSD: From surviving to thriving
