Change your thoughts, change your life.
Developing your inner authority, part three of seven
For part one of this series, “Your own personal wilderness survival map,” click here.
For part two of this series, “Changing the way you THINK,” click here.
Hello + happy Tuesday!
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Group Call #2 is CANCELED this week because 3/13 is my 40th birthday and I’m spending some solo time in nature.
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**This call features structured breakout groups of 3-4 people.This week’s inspiration:
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“That’s why I like to listen to Schubert while I’m driving. As I said, it’s because all the performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I’m driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D Major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of—that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally, I find that energizing.”
Haruki Murakami, from Kafka on the Shore
Most of you here are on a sincere pursuit to transform your habits and patterns so you can create lives you are actively designing rather than only tolerating. I bear witness to your quests every single day: In 1:1 client sessions; in group calls; in emails, and in my own lived experience as someone inside of my own inquiry alongside you. You are here because you want to do better, to recover who you were before life did its life thing to you, to heal and evolve and become, and to hopefully make some dear friends along the way.
But what is the point of “doing better”—of checking boxes, hitting goals, and so on—if you don’t also start to feel better?
Every single one of you have brains that are quick to point out all the ways you fall short and don’t measure up. This is a normal functioning of a human brain: looking for what is wrong, scanning for potential pitfalls—or even actual danger—is how you keep yourself safe. In addition, you have all been socialized to understand the world through extremes, rather than relationships: this vs that, good vs bad, up vs. down, etc. You are literally programmed to see the world in black-and-white, which in turn has you moving through your life oblivious to the vast spectrum of color—which is to stay, oblivious to infinite possibilities—available at any given moment.
There are occasions when your inherent negative bias is valuable—moments when you might actually be in danger, and you need that “scanning for bad” part of your brain to guide you. It’s also true that while these thoughts can have value, they are unhelpful when it comes to, oh, basically every thing else.
Por ejemplo:
You are kind and forgiving to the people you love, and terrible at extending yourself the same slack.
You look at things as binary, foregoing the “messy middle” to be at the mercy of extremes, forgetting that it’s between these extremes where *real life* actually happens.
You hold yourself to impossible standards, and when you inevitably fail, you stay mired in self-loathing and persistent lack.
The problem with most attempts at self-development is that it has you focus solely on changing your actions. When you change your actions but don’t change the thoughts and feelings behind those actions, a gap opens between any success you might be reaching, and an inner experience that despite all evidence to the contrary has you continuing to feel shitty. It becomes difficult, if not impossible, to see real change.
🤷🏽♀️ What’s the point of any of this if I still hate myself?
As mentioned in last week’s essay, in the upcoming weeks, I’ll be sharing three different approaches toward how you might shift your inner experience so that the voice in your head becomes more helpful than harmful.
My aim is to explore how we might create conditions inside of which transformation and evolution can occur, in a way that not only causes the least amount of harm, but also actively has us feeling as good as possible as we go.
This week, we start with a concept in the coaching world known—fittingly—as “thoughtwork" 1 (emphasis mine):
Thoughtwork refers to managing your mind, with the aim of feeling more empowered and in control of thoughts and feelings.
Thoughtwork involves raising awareness of limiting beliefs, [automatic negative thoughts] and understanding thought patterns, both detrimental and beneficial. This consciousness about the thoughts allows you to have more agency over your thinking, rather than allowing your mind to create anxiety loops, rumination cycles or unproductive overthinking.
Doing thoughtwork prevents reactivity and promotes intentional, confident responses. By understanding what goes on inside your own brain, you have better control over how you react to people and events. This will impact your further thinking and feelings.
There’s an Ask Polly I like that dips into this but it’s behind a paywall so I can’t link the whole thing, but here’s a nice gem that hits the “why practice thoughtwork” nail on the head (again, emphasis mine):
Instead of scrutinizing your shortcomings the way you always have, pick up the very good habit of saying, “Everyone is fucked up and so am I.” Then shift your focus from self-scrutiny to belief. Remind yourself what you value, what you want to create, how you want to live, what connections you want to celebrate. Move away from your relentless intellectual search for answers and solutions (which can so easily become neurotic and self-hating) into a space of feeling more, of asking better questions, of cultivating your curiosity, of moving toward the deep connections that teach you more than that dark space inside your skull ever will.
Without further ado, I offer three concepts to help you begin to practice changing your thoughts:
🪜 1. Climb a THOUGHT LADDER
I’m going to go ahead and assume that every single one of you is familiar with the experience of knowing something but still not believing it.
For example: you understand intellectually that shame is not a sustainable motivator, and that if shame worked, you’d the healthiest most happiest person on the planet.
You know this, and yet. Knowing that shame doesn’t work doesn’t mean you stop feeling shame (alas!).
Understanding something does not automatically translate to believing it.
Which leads me to the first tool: the Thought Ladder.2
The Thought Ladder is an exercise to help you shift a negative thought to a more neutral—and eventually positive—one.
Changing your thoughts takes time and happens incrementally. You have to change your thoughts in stages. Think about how long you’ve held certain thoughts: Decades? Generations? Millennia? To think you’ll shift a shit thought to a positive one overnight is ridiculous. Instead, employ a Thought Ladder to move yourself mindfully up the rungs from negative, to neutral, to positive.
Here’s a personal example: Post lightbulb shower moment, I got (even more) present to a profound self-loathing. I wanted to love myself, and intellectually understood that I was worthy of that. However, despite this understanding, when I said “I love myself,” it felt stupid and false, and my system rejected the suggestion entirely. Working with a Thought Ladder had me practice trying on new beliefs that actually rang true, rather than having me parrot back to myself an affirmation that just left me feeling as bad as before, because there was such a chasm between knowing and believing. Thinking I could go from “I hate myself” to “I love myself” was another way I might gaslight myself. The new thought had to feel authentic, to ring true, in order for me to begin practicing it.
So: My initial thought was “I hate myself.” My goal thought was, “I love myself.” I used the Thought Ladder to brainstorm incremental shifts in thinking that might take me up the ladder to the goal.
The first new thought I practiced that rang true was “I believe it’s possible that one day I like myself.” This was enough of a shift that the window of possibility and curiosity cracked open in my brain, but neutral enough that the inner voice who would be waiting to roll her eyes and declare bitch, please stayed quiet instead.
A revelation!
Here’s an example of a few different ladders:3
This week, you are encouraged to create a Thought Ladder. Start with one thought. To try on some sample intermediate thoughts, you might start with the following openers:
I’m open to the idea of…
It’s possible that…
I can learn to…
I don’t yet know how to, but I can…
The most important part of this exercise is landing on an intermediate thought that you actually believe. This will not work if you fake it. So: when you try on an intermediate belief, check in with your body’s response. You are going for a sense of slightly positive; neutral; or even still bad, but slightly less bad than the starting thought. Try to get a felt sense of this in your body, rather than trying to *think* or *figure out* your way to the “right” answer with your brain.
Once you’ve landed on genuine intermediate thought…yeah, you guessed it. Next step is to practice. Just like with everything else (I know, I know. Would that this were sexy). Write it on a Post-it and put it somewhere visible; have it pop up as a reminder on your phone a couple times/day; say it aloud to a trusted pal; have it tattooed behind your eyelids. Do whatever you can to reinforce it, to make it alive and present in your day-to-day.
👏🏽 Make a WHAT WENT WELL list
At the end of your day, write down a list of, well, what went well that day. Write as much as you want, aiming for at least 3-5 things.
What I adore about this practice is that it presences you to what is already good in your life. Your negative bias will never go away—as I mentioned before, there’s a biological function to this. And, you can expand our capacities. You can develop your ability to witness when your negative biases are intruding unnecessarily, and counter them by practicing noticing the positive that already exists.
There will be days when what went well will be obvious—you did something fun, got some good news, ate a pizza:) But most days, what went well will be of a more humble variety: giggling at the dog when he does something playful and silly; a moment out on a walk when a hummingbird drops down to hover in front of your face for a moment or two, pink throat flashing iridescent and enchanting; eye contact and a smile with a stranger on the sidewalk.
You practice presencing yourself to—and letting in—the good, so you can more readily notice it when it shows up. You become less quick to rush through these good moments, more able to be inside of and savor them. You remember that even when things are awful and hard, there are always glimmers of good, fleeting and small as they may be. You inhabit your life instead of your head.
When you recognize what went well, what feels good, you can more intentionally move toward those things. When this is where you place our attention, it follows that it will expand and grow and one day you’ll look around and yep, look at that, the scales have tipped: Life feels more good than bad, which is, I’d say, the point.
🔄 Consider THE SECOND ARROW
Some of you might be familiar with the Buddhist teaching known as “the second arrow.”
From a VOX article on “pandemic guilt”:
The Buddha taught that when we experience something painful — a physical illness, or the news that someone we love has died, or witnessing suffering all around us — it’s as if the world has shot an arrow into us. It hurts! That pain is totally normal, and it’s fine to acknowledge it. In fact, it’s good to acknowledge it, to let ourselves simply be with the experience of pain.
But often, what we then do is shoot a second arrow into ourselves. That second arrow is any thought we use to spin up a “story” around our pain, as a way of resisting simply being with the experience of pain. This can manifest in many different ways.
It can take the form of shame: “I’m such a weak person, to be crying out like this!” Or anger: “How dare the doctors not save my loved one’s life! They’re so incompetent!” Or ruminating: “If only I’d nudged my loved one to take this or that extra precaution, maybe they wouldn’t have died.” Or catastrophizing: “I’m going to die, too!” Or guilt: “I don’t deserve to live while other people are dying.”
We’ve all got our second arrow of choice. Whichever one you incline toward, the key thing to bear in mind is that it’s self-inflicted, which is to say, it’s optional. It might not seem that way, because it comes upon you so quickly that it seems automatic, but the Buddhist teaching insists this is a second arrow we shoot into ourselves. And doing so is what causes us suffering. As many Buddhist mindfulness teachers like to say: Suffering = Pain x Resistance.
Consider this third concept as an invitation to practice sitting with the discomfort of pain without assigning additional meaning to it. I know this is easier said than done. But consider giving it a try. I think about this as creating a bit of a cushion around my difficult thoughts. A little bit of space between having the thought, and immediately identifying with it.
Anything you can do to disrupt the autopilot nature of your brain is a worthy undertaking. Because here’s the thing—even though noticing when you’re piercing yourself with the second arrow isn’t going to make a difference overnight (sorry), practice has a cumulative effect. I return to that moment running up the hill where I shocked myself by calling myself “mi amor” instead of the other, ahem, choice names I was used to calling myself while exercising. That surprise, magical, stop-in-my-tracks moment wouldn’t have been possible if I hadn’t tried these practices on. You can’t intellectualize your way through any of this, you see. You have to take action. You have to practice. Even when the practices fall flat, or seem silly—especially then.
But don’t take ANY of this from me. Get out there and try it on for yourselves. Collect your own data. Open a lab, experiment. And then report back: I’ll be dying to hear.
What do y’all make of this? Would love to hear your thoughts/feelings/opinions/ideas/questions/comments and if this generated anything for you <3
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SELF MADE is a call to deeply connect with the self—self-knowledge, self-trust, self-development—and then to make, small step by step, a life that you savor. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Certified Integral Coach, and Holistic Recovery Guide, based in San Francisco, CA.
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Thank you.
Kara Lowentheil’s work was fundamental to any success I’ve had with shifting my thoughts. She developed the Thought Ladder, and I can’t recommend her podcast, Unfuck Your Brain, more highly.
I stumbled upon this person’s website and holy hell, she is a wealth of information.
Happy birthday, Dani!