How to Separate Thoughts from Circumstances
We lived in Rochester, Minnesota for fourteen years. If you asked me how we liked it there, I might have one of two answers.
1. Rochester is a wonderful city. It is the home of the world-famous Mayo Clinic, and my husband, Bryan, trained and worked as a physician there. We had access to excellent health care, and the buildings and facilities were beautiful and modern. Bryan loved his job. He worked with brilliant colleagues, he had amazing benefits, and his job was always interesting because the most challenging cases came to Mayo. Rochester is big enough to have all the stores and restaurants you could want, but small enough that there was never any traffic. We met wonderful people and made friends easily.
2. Rochester is a hard city to live in. You meet the most wonderful people, but so many of them move away. They come to Mayo for their medical training, and most move the summer after they’re done. Even people who stay on staff or hold a permanent position at Mayo eventually move. It got so that we dreaded summer and the heartbreak that would come with saying goodbye. And I’m sure you’ve heard about the weather in Minnesota! Long, dark, freezing winters. The snow and ice get packed down on the neighborhood roads and you don’t see the asphalt until April. The temperatures stay below zero for weeks on end. School was canceled more often because of freezing than because of snowfall.
Which story is true? Neither one, of course. These are two different ways of looking at the same city, and there are countless other perspectives. However, we often believe that our thoughts are observations of truth. That is why one of the core principles of life coaching as taught at the Life Coach School (LCS) is separating thoughts from circumstances. As we attempt to solve a problem, an essential first step is to unravel what is actually true and which parts we made up.
In the Model, a self-awareness tool developed by Brooke Castillo (the founder of LCS), circumstances are defined as a statement that we all agree is factual. Circumstances are the things that happen outside of us and our outside of our control, such as the temperature, someone’s words or actions, or the number of emails in your inbox. Separating circumstances from thoughts is the first step of filling out a Model, and one of the most crucial. Recognizing the distinction opens your mind to the true nature of the problem and quickly empowers you. Because of the importance of this skill, I wanted to delve deeper into the process.
As explained in my article about the Model, circumstances should be so objective and accurate that they could be proved in a court of law. They are therefore different from thoughts, which are opinions or overall evaluations of the problem. The difference may seem clear, but when you are emotional about a subject, it gets tricky.
Adjectives should not be in the circumstance line. “My child is difficult,” “I’m not good with money,” “My mother is inconsiderate,” “My job is boring.” All these statements contain adjectives that can mean different things to different people. Your brain may believe these viewpoints are the truth, but they are simply thoughts, not circumstances as we use the term here. We don’t all have the same conception of difficult, inconsiderate, or boring, and no one can definitively prove a person is “not good with money.”
Circumstances are the boring facts. From the examples above, the circumstances might be “My child cried for 13 minutes today,” “I spent $200 at Target today,” or “My mother said, ‘I can’t watch your kids tonight.’” Even though your mind most likely has lots of evidence for its beliefs, it’s powerful to focus in on one incident. If I asked you to tell me about your difficult child, I’m sure you could provide numerous illustrations of his misbehavior and irritability. But pinpointing detailed circumstances in the Model is more effective. It helps your mind see the relative triviality of the occurrence compared to the story your mind had fashioned around it.
Because circumstances are boring and dry, they can be hard to identify. Our mind prefers to emphasize the drama. It rapidly constructs a story about any experience, and this is where our attention stays. The more intense and gripping the narrative, the better, even if that depiction causes us pain. Once it has its story, the brain seeks evidence for that version of the event and filters out anything that doesn’t reinforce it. The mind is efficient in forming its opinions and determined to hold on to them. It would rather be right than help us find peace. We have to wade through that fiction to find the morsel of fact.
Our mind prefers to emphasize the drama.
I want to make clear that by separating thoughts from circumstances we’re not trying to vilify any of the thoughts or say that we should only focus on the circumstances. You can keep any thought you want. We don’t judge any of the thoughts or try to push them away. Most of our thoughts are neutral or helpful, and even ideas that bring negative feelings can serve us. We’re simply gaining awareness of the hidden processes of the brain. We can’t address our thoughts if we think they are circumstances. Shining a light on the thoughts gives us leverage over them. Understanding that our thoughts are what bother us means we don’t have to change our circumstances to feel better.
Let’s get some practice. Go through the following list and decide whether each statement is a thought or a circumstance. Remember, a circumstance is a statement everyone would agree on. If you see a word like traffic or tantrum, consider whether two different people would define that in exactly the same way.
Label each statement as a Thought or Circumstance:
It’s cold outside.
Vacations are fun.
My brother filed for divorce last Tuesday.
I need to lose weight.
I received a two-weeks’ notice today.
My house is too small for my family.
I am on vacation in Yellowstone.
Divorce is hard.
I weigh 155 pounds.
I have to find a new job.
It’s 22 degrees outside.
My 13-year-old child is mad at me.
Julia is my friend.
Maps says it will take ten minutes longer to get to work today.
People usually like me.
My life is overwhelming.
My house is 3500 square feet.
My boss is difficult to work for.
My child said, “I don’t care!”
He left me.
My husband doesn’t live here anymore.
My life is exactly what it’s supposed to be.
There’s a lot of traffic today.
How did you do? Did you sometimes have trouble deciding? “I received a two-weeks’ notice today” is a circumstance, but how about “I have to find a new job”? It seems like that is the truth since you won’t have a job in two weeks. But it’s not a circumstance. That part is a thought. It’s probably a useful idea for most people, one that motivates feelings and actions that will create a result they want (having a job), but that doesn’t change the fact that it is a thought, not a circumstance. I’m sure you can think of times where a person gets notice of a job ending and doesn’t need to get a new job. So “I have to find a new job” is not something everyone would agree upon. Knowing which notions are thoughts (made-up ideas) and which are facts creates distance from what our default brain offers and allows us to assess whether or not we want to subscribe to those ideas.
What about the statement “He left me”? Did you mark that as a circumstance or a thought? It could be argued that it’s a circumstance; if he is not with me or in the relationship anymore, then he left me. But I label it a thought because the word “left” has emotional baggage. There’s a story, a drama, behind “he left me,” and circumstances should be as dispassionate as possible. When expressing the circumstance of an event, use very neutral language such as, “He moved out last Wednesday” or “He said, ‘I want a divorce.’”
Here are the sentences from above that are circumstances, just boring facts. The rest are thoughts.
My brother filed for divorce last Tuesday. * I received a two-weeks’ notice today. * I am on vacation in Yellowstone. * I weigh 155 pounds. * It’s 22 degrees outside. * Maps says it will take ten minutes longer to get to work today. * My house is 3500 square feet. * My child said, “I don’t care!” * My husband doesn’t live here anymore.
Let’s return to the two stories about living in Rochester, Minnesota. Almost all the sentences in those examples were thoughts. Example circumstances are written below each paragraph.
1. Rochester is a wonderful city. It is the home of the world-famous Mayo Clinic, and my husband, Bryan, trained and worked as a physician there. We had access to excellent health care, and the buildings and facilities were beautiful and modern. Bryan loved his job. He worked with brilliant colleagues, he had amazing benefits, and his job was always interesting because the most challenging cases came to Mayo. Rochester is big enough to have all the stores and restaurants you could want, but small enough that there was never any traffic. We met wonderful people and made friends easily.
Examples of Facts (Circumstances)
• The Mayo Clinic is in Rochester, Minnesota.
• Bryan worked at Mayo for ten years.
• Mayo Clinic Hospital — Rochester was named the №1 hospital in the nation, according to U.S. News & World Report’s 2022–23 “Best Hospitals Honor Roll.”
• Four of Bryan’s colleagues trained at top-ten medical schools.
• The population of Rochester is 120,000.
• Rochester has a Target and a Costco.
2. Rochester is a hard city to live in. You meet the most wonderful people, but so many of them move away. They come to Mayo for their medical training, and most move the summer after they’re done. Even people who stay on staff or hold a permanent position at Mayo eventually move. It got so that we dreaded summer and the heartbreak that would come with saying goodbye. And I’m sure you’ve heard about the weather in Minnesota! Long, dark, freezing winters. The snow and ice get packed down on the neighborhood roads and you don’t see the asphalt until April. The temperatures stay below zero for weeks on end. School was canceled more often because of freezing than because of snowfall.
Examples of Facts (Circumstances)
• Three families I knew moved away in 2015.
• The average temperature in Rochester in January is 22 degrees.
• There were three days of canceled school because of cold temperatures in 2016.
It’s easy to tell that the circumstances are less interesting than the thoughts, and they bring up less emotion when you read or think them. Pinpointing them sweeps away the brain’s drama and thought errors and brings clarity to what’s really going on. That is why it’s such a critical and useful skill.
The next time a challenging incident comes up, try to separate the factual circumstance from the notions you’ve generated. Take time to write down all your thoughts about the situation. Don’t monitor or judge the thoughts and don’t try to change them. When you’re done, pick out circumstances and write them at the top. Sometimes awareness of the difference is all it takes for your brain to loosen its story. Your mind will see that the event wasn’t as dramatic as it wants to make it and that the story it created is not serving you.
What comes after separating thoughts from circumstances? Find out in the next article.
Try this on: “Maybe ‘I have to find a job’* is not true. Maybe it’s just an idea my brain came up with.” (*insert your painful thought here)
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“Disappointment comes in the gap between expectation and reality.”
