Need Help Filling Out Your Model?
9 Tips for Working with the Life Coach Model
In my first article about the Model, we went over the basics. I explained what each letter in the acronym CTFAR means (Circumstance, Thought, Feeling, Action, Result), and I described how the circumstance of a situation is always neutral. In a subsequent article, I elaborated on how to separate out the circumstance from your thoughts about the incident. This is one of the trickiest parts of filling out a Model.
The Model is a tool that seems simple but has endless applications. It will show you that all problems are thought problems and that your brain works to make your beliefs become reality (even when they are painful beliefs). When you’re new to mind management, it’s helpful to have a coach (trained at the Life Coach School) guide you through your Model and suggest new thought ideas.
But after you’ve been working with this material for a while, you are able to self-coach. If you’re in this category and you’re trying to fill out your Model on your own, I have a few tips for you. The concepts I present here will help anyone who is attempting to work with the Model as a self-help tool.
- You can start anywhere
As a reminder, the Model looks like this.
Circumstance
Thought
Feeling
Action
Result
It’s natural to think you have to fill out your Model starting at the top. But this is false. You can begin anywhere you want. Maybe you are having a strong feeling and identifying that is easier than anything else. In that case, write the emotion on the F line and work from there. Ask “What thought fuels that feeling?” and “What do I do (action) when I feel that?”
You can also start by filling in the result line with whatever result you desire. Then you ask, “What actions will create that result?” and work backward from there. There’s no wrong order. Whatever seems best and most prevalent in your mind, begin there.
2. Be specific in the C line
When you want to work on a problem, review one particular time when that situation came up. The more specific you are, the more powerfully your Model will uncover the true nature of your dilemma (which is that your thoughts are the obstacle).
For example, you wouldn’t put “My child is a picky eater” in the C line for two reasons. First, ‘picky’ is an adjective, and adjectives never belong in the circumstance line. Circumstances have to be exceedingly factual — something everyone agrees on. We all have different definitions of ‘picky.’
Secondly, when you generalize an experience, it seems larger and more overwhelming. Zoom in on one incident, and the challenge suddenly shrinks in size. Instead of “My child is a picky eater,” you might write, “Last night at dinner my child ate goldfish crackers while the rest of the family ate spaghetti.”
Being specific changes your perspective, bringing the difficulty down to size. When you do this and then work with the rest of the Model, your brain lowers its barriers to embracing a new story.
3. You can change the circumstance if you want to
Altering the events in your life is a viable problem-solving strategy. Move to a different neighborhood, get a different job, or stop being friends with someone. But there are many circumstances you can’t change. You can’t make your neighbor move; you can’t change the fact that you have a child.
When people come to coaching or use mind management strategies, it is usually because they don’t want to drastically change their situation, anyway. They like some parts and don’t like others, and that’s the dilemma.
Also, the old saying is true: “Wherever you go, there you are.” You might change your circumstances, but you bring your brain with you. If you know how to manage your mind, then you won’t need to change circumstances to feel better. (But change things up if you want to!)
4. We usually focus on the circumstance and the feeling
When your child has a tantrum in the middle of the store, you feel anger rise up quickly. It seems like the outburst caused your emotion. These two parts of the Model are the easiest for us to identify: what happened and how we felt. We are not as aware of the thoughts that passed in between the two. For this reason, we often attribute our emotions to the circumstance. This leads to a belief that if we could change our circumstance, we would be happier.
The Model helps us slow this down. Filling out a Model requires some self-reflection. We have to put ourselves back in that moment and find out what thought we had right after the event occurred. And then to fill out the rest of the lines, we have to assess what actions we take when we experience that emotion, and what result these actions generate. If we do it right, the Model will reveal how our brain made our thought become reality.
It’s natural for the circumstance and the emotion to be the most noticeable factors in the incident. But to manage our mind, we have to realize the fallacy in that and take the time to go deeper.
5. Draw a line under the circumstance
As a reminder of how irrelevant the circumstance is we sometimes draw a line under it after filling out the Model. This is a visual cue that what is above that line (the circumstance) is not in our control, and what is below that line (the thought, feeling, actions, and result) is always in our control. Our human brain wants to focus on the circumstance and ruminate about how we could alter it or how great it would be if it somehow magically transformed. This is not a good use of our mental energy.
Manage your mind and redirect your brain to the lower parts of the Model. This circumstance is probably going to continue as it has in the past. What now? What do I want to do and who do I want to be?
6. What we really want is a different result
Because we are wired to focus on the external event, our brain thinks that what we want is a different circumstance. But what we really want is a different result. This is great news because the result line is something we have control over. We believe we want a different job, but what we truly want is to be fulfilled at our job. We think we want our mother-in-law to change, but what we actually want is to be content with our relationship with her. It’s a subtle but important shift.
We believe we want a different job, but what we truly want is to be fulfilled at our job.
When you identify what result you want, fill in the R line of the Model and work upward from there. The Model will uncover what actions, feeling and thought you could possibly have to produce that result.
7. Pick any thought
The first step to analyzing a challenge you’re experiencing is to write out your thoughts about the situation. We sometimes call this a thought download. While listing the thoughts, don’t censor and judge them. Gently remind yourself that these are ideas the mind came up with, none are true, and they don’t reflect anything about you or your value.
It’s necessary to allow every belief to come up and permit your humanness to be aired out. We all have thoughts we don’t love, there’s nothing wrong with us, and by pulling them all up, we can deliberately decide which ones serve us and which ones don’t.
After the thought download, we use one of the ideas to fill out the Model. Some people wonder which thought they should use: the strongest one? The worst one? The most common one? The answer is it doesn’t matter. Whichever notion you choose will work, and you can always do more than one Model if you can’t decide.
Our minds have thought patterns — we tend to perceive different circumstances in our lives in similar ways and create analogous results in disparate areas. Any belief we pick to examine will have an effect on the whole problem we are dealing with and will spill over into other areas of our lives, also.
8. The unintentional vs the intentional Model
When we review a painful event and analyze it using the Model, we first write out what we call the unintentional Model. This is the thought, feeling, and actions that came about spontaneously. Our default brain initiated this reaction, and we take time later to break it down.
At other times we use an intentional Model to try out some alternate beliefs. The intentional Model is one that hasn’t happened yet, but we aspire to it. Thoughts are like clothes: we need to try them on to see if they’re a good fit. If they don’t work for us, it’s not that there’s something wrong with the idea, it simply doesn’t fit us or our situation.
We take various thought suggestions and put them into a Model to see what result would arise. Using the Model, we can look deeper into how each thought (or feeling or action) will affect us and whether we want to adopt that belief or not.
Writing out an intentional Model helps our brain see new possibilities.
9. How does a thought create your result?
I’ve written about how our thoughts create our feelings, but we haven’t delved deep into the fact that our thoughts actually produce our reality. The Model is the perfect tool to elucidate and explore this concept. The Model reveals how when our brain holds a belief, it will work to make that story true in some way.
Sometimes our mind makes the notion true simply by looking for more evidence of it and filtering out any proof to the contrary. (This is known as the confirmation bias.) Other times, we become some version of what we are annoyed about in another person.
Our brain makes the thought come true because it would rather be right than help us feel good. When we realize that, we see that we have to supervise our mind and not let it run away on its own. It gets confused about what will serve us in the end.
Let’s look at 3 examples to see how this plays out.
Melanie has a special needs son and three other children. Her husband works long hours and is not able to help care for the kids very often. Her main notion about her life is “My life is challenging.” She has lots of examples of why and how things are demanding. What result does she get from this thought?
C: special needs son
T: “My life is challenging”
F: overwhelmed
A: give up, withdraw, avoid the situation
R: life continues to be challenging
When Melanie has these thoughts, feelings, and actions, she can’t access the creative side of her brain to find solutions, and she remains overwhelmed. This is how we create evidence for the ideas we believe. When we have a thought, our brain goes to work generating that result.
Jim and his wife and kids often go over to his brother’s house for Sunday dinner. They enjoy being together and he has a close bond with his brother, but he gets easily annoyed with his sister-in-law. In his view, she monitors what everyone eats and makes a big deal if they “waste” any food. She comments on how Jim or one of his kids cuts the brownies wrong or takes too many olives. Jim finds himself frustrated on the drive home and has the thought “She has so many rules for how we eat!”
How does this thought play out in his Model?
C: Jim’s sister-in-law says, “Everyone can only have 4 olives.”
T: “She has so many rules for how we eat!”
F: irritated
A: act snippy, cut the visit short, avoid his sister-in-law
R: Jim has a lot of rules for how other people behave
Jim is essentially saying, “I can like you and relate to you if you act a certain way, but if you don’t, then I will be irritated and avoid you.” This is a perfectly natural way for Jim to respond, but it is not very pleasant for him.
What if he were to allow his sister-in-law to be however she wanted to be? What if he directed his mind more toward something like, “That’s just how she manages in this difficult experience we call life. Who do I want to be?” He wishes she were more easy-going, but he can go first.
One more example. Cynthia complains to her husband that her boss won’t let her grow and expand into her potential. She says that when they’re on a conference call with the rest of the team, he cuts her off or explains away her ideas. She loves her job and wants to stay there, but she’d like a bigger role eventually, and she doesn’t think her boss will let that happen. Here’s her Model:
C: Her boss says, “Let me explain this one, Cynthia.”
T: “He diminishes me”
F: discouraged
A: pull back, don’t talk as much, don’t try as hard
R: Cynthia diminishes herself.
This is not to say that Cynthia should feel happy about her boss’s behavior. But focusing on his actions and feeling frustrated about them does not solve the problem. She is empowered when she realizes that he is going to keep doing that (and he’s just a human doing his best), so what does she need to do to grow in the company? Or maybe this isn’t the company for her. Moving her attention to those aspects of her struggle is more productive.
The Model can appear to be a simple concept but in reality, it is a complex and layered self-exploration tool. The principles presented here will help you get more out of it as you attempt to improve your mind management skills.
Try this on: “That’s just how she manages in this difficult experience we call life. Who do I want to be?”
Want more about Mind Management? Clap and Follow!
Find an LCS-trained coach here.
“Disappointment comes in the gap between expectation and reality.”
