Policing your thoughts I Martina Witter

Rivers to Resilience

On this episode of Rivers to Resilience, Martina speaks to us about policing our thoughts and how beneficial that can be on our road to becoming more resilient. Martina gives us some fantastic coping methods for unwanted thoughts and how to uncover and understand the three levels of thought

0:00 – Intro

2:11 – What are our thoughts?

3:36 – Sometimes we don’t realise the power of our thoughts, they have an impact on our emotions and actions

4:35 – If you think you can do a thing, or, you think you can’t do a thing, you’re right (Henry Ford)

5:26 – Henry Ford went broke 5 times before he founded the Ford Motor Company

6:22 – Resilience can be built

8:33 – There are three different levels of thought, the first level being automatic thought, meaning they are thoughts that tend to be situation specific, which pop into your head when experiencing stress or distress

10:14 – Ask yourself what was going through your mind when you were experiencing these thoughts

10:27 – Automatic thoughts could be triggered by internal or external events

11:43 – The reason why it’s so critical to understand yourself and to police your thoughts is because we talk more about our emotions than our thoughts

13:00 – The second level of thought is underlying assumptions or rules for living, which are rules which guide your behaviour and set standards for your life

15:37– Rules for living are often viewed as should or must statements

16:13 – These underlying assumptions can be developed early in life and they’re rigid and inflexible

18:29 – The third level of thought is core beliefs and these are the deepest level of thought, which are over-generalised and unconditional

19:14 – When the core beliefs are activated, that can lead to a distortion of information

21:08 – Journaling is a powerful way of policing your thoughts, because it helps you to process those thoughts

23:16 – Journaling can facilitate a cathartic experience as you let go of negative thoughts and there are many different ways to do it

24:00 – Daylio is an app which can be used which allows you to rate thoughts which is very important

25:28 – Quantifying goals is very useful for monitoring how people are doing

26:10 – The first way to police thoughts is to acknowledge the thoughts

27:43 – Using the downward arrow technique can help uncover unwanted thoughts

28:51 – Some questions to ask while using the downward arrow technique are “what was going through your mind?”, “were there any pictures or thoughts going through your mind?”, “I wonder what seems so bad about that?” and “can you describe the worst thing that could happen, and "if that were true, then what?”

31:09 – You wouldn’t expect the beliefs some CEO’s have

31:47 – Set time aside, just to

32:32 – Mindfulness is another way to become aware of your thoughts

33:06 – Martina takes you through a mindfulness exercise

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