An Introduction to Mind Management
I learned the skills and strategies for mind management from my life coach, Jody Moore. Life coaching is not a regulated industry, and therefore the quality and helpfulness of life coaches can vary greatly. I feel fortunate that I found Jody and her particular method of life coaching. The knowledge and skills I learned from her have changed my life. This amazing and mind-expanding work is incredibly valuable.
Jody was trained at The Life Coach School (LCS), a prosaically named program started by Brooke Castillo. After studying human behavior and learning from other self-help leaders, Brooke synthesized a system for managing emotions and increasing life enjoyment through “thoughtwork.” She formulated The Model, a tremendously useful tool for illuminating how our thoughts create the results in our lives. As she and her coaches are fond of saying, “All problems are thought problems.”
I will write more about The Model in future posts, but today I want to give a brief overview of the two central concepts of mind management. The first is to allow and accept all emotions. Coaches from LCS teach that the presence of difficult feelings is not an indication that something is wrong with you or with your life. It simply means you are human. It is okay to feel all emotions, the whole range. Humans will always create negative feelings for themselves, no matter how wonderful their lives might seem from the outside.
It is okay to feel all emotions, the whole range.
Other coaches might focus directly on reducing their clients’ distressing emotions. But LCS-trained coaches explain that instead of striving to get rid of undesired moods, we can learn how to admit them into our lives and process them through our bodies. It is important to not resist reality. We can take measures to change things in our lives, but we must understand that life will always include difficult emotions. So, the first step is to stop battling negative feelings and learn how to allow and process them. I will elaborate on how to do this in future posts.
The second concept of mind management is that our thoughts create our feelings, whether they are negative or positive. Your brain offers you thoughts all day long. There are very few true facts in our lives, much of what we think and believe are optional thoughts or stories that our minds constructed around the facts. Most of these serve us well, but some cause problems. And interestingly, our minds want to hold on to the painful stories they come up with.
Life coaches from LCS help you identify your problematic beliefs and unravel the story your brain created. They introduce new ways of thinking about your challenging situations and teach you how to direct your mind, gently and slowly, toward an alternate narrative to generate more useful emotions. Subsequently, you can achieve a different result in your life. The more you listen to or engage in coaching, the more your mind sees that there are many more thought options than you originally believed. It’s fascinating!
These two concepts work in tandem. Knowing our thoughts create our reality is empowering and gives us more control over our experience. But we there is no such thing as a human life without negative emotion. It’s part of the deal. We all build stories about our lives; there’s nothing wrong with us for doing that. When we can allow and accept all emotions, we don’t need to be in a rush to change how we feel.
Why learn to manage your minds then? The answer is twofold: to get some relief from your psychic pain and to learn more about yourself. You will not be a better or more worthy person if you change your thinking, but you might get a different result in your life. Examining your thoughts can help you understand where your pain is coming from, and being willing to feel all your emotions can actually take away one layer of the pain.
Mind management is an ongoing endeavor, analogous to exercising. We don’t say, “I worked out last year, so I don’t need to this year.” We know that keeping our body healthy and fit is an unending process. We aren’t surprised when our bodies weaken if we don’t workout. This is the same with our minds. We need to continuously work on our mental and emotional health, learn how the brain works, and get help from a coach to make necessary changes. Some people think they can read a self-help book or go through one program and be good. But our minds continuously come up with crazy stories that don’t serve us. To create the life that we want, we need to be consistently interrogating the default thoughts our mind offers us.
I’ll give an example of how to put these two principles to work. I listened to Jody coach a woman whose husband had died six months ago. Her children were mostly grown, and the last one living at home had recently gotten married. The woman feared she’d be alone and lonely the rest of her life.
Jody first encouraged her to allow her feelings of sadness and not push them away. These sensations are not pleasant or comfortable, but it’s important to let them pass through you. Here is a situation where we want to have negative emotion. We want to feel sad when someone close to us dies or moves away. That is a normal and healthy response. But when those difficult feelings get stuck, it can cause unnecessary challenges.
This woman’s sadness had extended into a story about being alone the rest of her life. The real obstacle wasn’t her grief over her husband’s death but her hopelessness about her future. To her, it was a fact that she would be alone forever. This idea or thought resulted in discouragement and desperation, and her actions were fueled by those responses.
Jody reminded the woman that her brain wants to be right. If she holds on to the belief that she will always be alone, she will make that true. The feelings and actions that come from that thought create that reality for her. When Jody brought this to her awareness, she could see the helpfulness of the concept. That understanding alone nudged the woman’s story out of its place, just a little bit.
After she recognized that what she held as truth was only a made-up narrative, the woman was more willing to consider alternatives. Jody told her, “Did you know that you can believe whatever you want about your future? You’re allowed to imagine that it’s going to be everything you want it to be, and you don’t have to know how it’s all going to happen. You can simply choose to believe that it will.”
You’re allowed to imagine that your life is going to be everything you want it to be, and you don’t have to know how it’s going to happen.
Jody explained that our minds hold tightly to their stories, so we have to move slowly in trying to modify them. We don’t need to be in a hurry to feel better; we know how to process and allow negative emotion. In order to gently dislodge her story, Jody suggested that when the thought “I will always be alone” comes up, respond to it with “Maybe, or maybe not. We don’t really know.” This is how we manage our minds. We don’t just listen to whatever subconscious, automatic thought they present, but we answer back with something we have chosen purposefully. Another suggestion Jody gave was to follow “I will always be alone” with “is a thought my brain offers me. But my brain is often misinformed.” She could also remind herself in that moment: “I’m allowed to believe anything I want about my future.”
Starting with these subtle changes to her thinking patterns, the woman’s mind opened itself to new ideas. The thought “I will always be alone” and the accompanying distressing feelings had blocked solutions and stymied her creative problem solving. Softening that thought generated more positive emotion and permitted new ideas to come to her. That’s all she had to do. She didn’t need to push away or be angry at the thoughts her brain proffered. She didn’t have to put enormous effort into solving to her problem. She simply needed to stop blocking the answers.
There are of course other thoughts that this woman had that may not have been serving her. She can become aware of them and respond to them one by one through this same process. It’s possible to do this mind management on your own, once you have learned how, but it’s helpful to have a coach guide you through the process and suggest new thoughts to try out.
Life coaches trained at LCS help you become cognizant of your thoughts and recognize how they create your feelings and your ultimate results in life. The coaches will remind you that it’s okay to have negative emotions, that we will never get rid of them completely, but we can take a look at the thoughts and try to dislodge some of them to feel better and get a different result. The process is remarkable to watch in others and even more miraculous to use in your own life.
I hope you are intrigued by this article and want to learn more about mind management. I will be posting 1–2 articles a week on this topic, including how I found out about it, how I have used it to solve my own frustrations, and many practical, easy-to-implement, and life-changing principles and ideas.
Try this on: “I’m allowed to believe anything I want about my future.”
Want more about Mind Management? Clap and Follow!
Read the next article: How I Found Mind Management.
Find an LCS-trained coach here.
“Disappointment comes in the gap between expectation and reality.”
