As humans, we often feel as though we are at the mercy of our thoughts and emotions – and that there is no way to intervene and change course when needed. But that isn’t true. Learning to regulate your thoughts is a skill that can grow with intentional practice. This article will walk you through three key concepts needed to manage your thoughts effectively and provide self-coaching guidance on how to start that process.
Concept #1: Self-Awareness Unlocks Opportunities for Change
Self-awareness helps us see ourselves clearly and notice how other people perceive us. It is the ability to observe your thoughts, emotions, values, and beliefs, and understand how they contribute to your personality and behavior.
Self-awareness has many life-enhancing benefits. Research demonstrates that people who are self-aware are happier and more confident. Self-aware people communicate more effectively, make better decisions, build strong relationships, and lead in the workplace.
Self-awareness can be broken into three components: interoception, introspection, and metacognition.
Self-Coaching Tips for Concept #1:
Concept #2: Intentional Self-Management Drives Change
Self-management is the act of regulating thinking, emotional, and behavioral processes to create favorable or productive outcomes.
Self-management requires interrupting what is normally an automatic response pattern. That pattern unfolds like this: a situation triggers thoughts or physical sensations, which trigger emotions. Emotions then trigger motivation and behavior, and behavior contributes to the outcome.
Self-management allows us to catch this automatic process at any point in the chain. With consistent practice, we can catch hiccups in our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors and address them; this helps us respond in ways that create desirable outcomes instead of expressing unfiltered reactions.
Self-Coaching Tips for Concept #2:
Use inquiry to explore thoughts and learn to notice them when they occur. Gain distance from them, check them for accuracy and helpfulness, and shift them where appropriate.
Prompts for Self-Managing Thoughts
Concept #3: Take Advantage of the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
You’ve probably heard of a “self-fulfilling prophecy.” It’s when a person’s belief or expectation about a future event comes true due to changes in their behavior. Usually, the context of a self-fulfilling prophecy is negative. For example: a student believes that they are going to fail an exam because they are not capable of understanding the material. As a result, the student puts less effort into studying, experiences confusion and anxiety during the exam, and ends up failing as they predicted.
However, self-fulfilling prophecies can also work in positive ways. It requires holding a positive, aspirational belief instead of a negative one and demands intentional action to reinforce the positive belief. Let’s reframe the previous example: a student believes that, with hard work, they can pass the exam. As a result, the student studies diligently and seeks help from their teacher. The student takes the exam feeling confident and ends up passing.
Self-Coaching Tips for Concept #3:
Below are prompts to help create a self-fulfilling prophecy that works in your favor.
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