Tool 3/10 Work your thoughts

How to not believe everything your minds tell you

When going through exhaustion and stress, our minds get into this fight or flight mode where they start to become more sensitive to threats and to perceived danger.

That is where negative thinking happens: we start to have negative thoughts, sometimes rigid, illogical, and certainly unhelpful about ourselves or our work. 

For this tool, you can use the thoughts that you monitored for Tool no. 1, or think about the last time that you felt stress, exhaustion, or loss of interest and try to remember any negative thinking that you had. 

Some of the most common thoughts that pop into our minds in these situations are:

My worth as a professional or as a person comes from how well I do my job, tasks or

I identify with my work, with the way that people at work see me & how well I do my job. If I do well, then I feel good, if I fail, then I am not as good. 

I cannot stand to be criticized. If this happens then everybody will see that I am no good and they will change their opinion of me. 

If you recognize these thoughts, all you have to do is:

1. Recognize that they appear

2. Make a conscious effort to challenge them with more helpful thoughts. Try to find in your experience examples that are logical, rational, that fit your experience with which you can replace the negative unhelpful thoughts.

3. Helpful thinking doesn’t need to be positive. Although positive thinking can help, most often you are aiming for rational helpful thinking that will help you go further. 

Unhelpful thought: My worth as a professional comes from how well I do my job. (all-or-nothing thinking)

Helpful though: My worth as a person or a professional cannot be linked only to how well I do my job. There are plenty of tasks or situations where I can perform well, even though it is sometimes difficult. I am passionate about my work, but this doesn’t mean that I must always perform well. Nobody does that all the time. It’s ok to sometimes fail, and to sometimes have a hard time doing a task. 

Unhelpful thought: I cannot stand to be criticized. If people criticize me they will change their opinion of me. (catastrophizing, mind reading)

Helpful thought: It is very hard for me to be criticized. As it probably is for most people. But if people criticize me that doesn’t mean that their opinion of me changes for good. They might see a negative behavior that I did, but that doesn’t mean that they see me as an incompetent person overall. 

Based on these examples, can you create a helpful response for other negative thoughts?

That’s all for now.

See you next time for Tool no 4/10 - How to use what matters to manage stress.