“There’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (HAMLET)

Our thoughts, by which I mean our conscious thoughts, are the key to the way we experience life. Our thoughts, with the help of our unconscious programming, generate most of our feelings and actions. Our thoughts are the main determinant of our happiness or unhappiness. By and large we’re happy if we’re thinking happy thoughts and unhappy if we’re thinking unhappy thoughts.

This book is largely about thoughts. Everything we’ve talked about concerns the way we think. Paccepting what is, accepting our feelings, paccepting ourselves, understanding we and others were doing our best, choosing powerful actions, owning our reactions and choosing productive responses are all ways of thinking.

We don’t generally choose our thoughts and nor would we want to. Most of the time our thoughts arise spontaneously, or as a result of our circumstances and the ways we’ve learned to think, and there’s usually no need to consciously intervene in this process.

But when we’re facing difficult or challenging situations, it may pay us to look at the way we’re thinking. There’s nothing exceptional about this. We’ve all observed or been aware of our thoughts at times, just as we can observe or be aware of our feelings.

If we see that the way we’re thinking isn’t working in our own or other people’s best interests, and we’re aware of an alternative, we can choose to change our thinking in the ways we’ve discussed.

CHALLENGING OUR THOUGHTS

This book is mainly about challenging unproductive thinking. The basic pacceptance technique we introduced in the first chapter challenged our irrational habit of wishing things were already different. Later we applied this to worrying thoughts and to our uncomfortable feelings.

We’ve challenged our tendency to think we or others should have acted differently when in fact we were doing our best (the only thing we could have done) at the time. We also applied this to the way we think about who we are right now.

We’ve challenged our limiting beliefs using the power tools and we’ve challenged our urge to blame our reactions on whatever or whoever triggered them, by suggesting we own our reactions and take responsibility for them.

The full adage to live our lives by is: accept the feeling, choose the action, challenge the thought.

Here’s one more technique for challenging negative thoughts that’s used extensively in a therapy called Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT for short).

THOUGHT RECORDS

This tool can be used alongside pacceptance, if pacceptance alone isn’t enough. It’s a structured way of:

If you can identify the thought behind any uncomfortable feeling, and that thought isn’t resolved through pacceptance, try following the steps below. Initially it’s best to write them down. With a bit of practice you can do the whole exercise quickly in your head.

• Make five columns on a piece of paper. Head the columns: 1. Thought; 2. Evidence; 3. Alternative rational thought (ART); 4. Evidence; 5. Percentage belief in the ART.
• Write the negative thought in the first column, e.g. ‘I’m never going to find a job’.
• In the second column write down any evidence you can think of to support the negative thought, e.g. ‘I haven’t found a job yet’; ‘it’s hard to find a job at my age’; ‘there are lots of unemployed people’.
• In the third column, write down an equivalent positive thought. We call this an alternative rational thought (ART). You don’t have to believe it right now. The thought should be whatever you think a rational positive person might think in this situation. Usually it’s simply the opposite of the negative thought, e.g. ‘I will find a job’. Make sure it’s realistic, e.g. (at the risk of sounding ageist) if you’re 80 years old, perhaps it could be ‘I will find a job, even if it has to be voluntary’.
• In the fourth column, write any evidence you can think of to support the alternative rational thought, e.g. I haven’t been looking for long; others struggle to find a job and eventually succeed; it’s a numbers game so I just need to apply for lots of jobs; I could try changing my strategy such as writing directly to employers; if I consult a careers counsellor I might get more ideas or find a different direction.
• In the final column write down your percentage belief (0 to 100) in the ART. This should be your belief now while you’re doing this exercise, not how you felt before.
• Review the thought record at least once a day, add to the ‘evidence for the ART’ and revise the percentage belief if it changes.
• Create more thought records for other negative thoughts.

Your belief in the alternative rational thought may initially be quite low. However, as you review the thought record repeatedly and think it through each time, your belief is likely to rise. Record your new percentage belief each time it rises.

DEALING WITH STRESS

You’ll sometimes hear people suggest that a certain amount of stress is useful as it fires us up and motivates us. That really depends on our definition of stress. Stress management psychologists like myself generally define stress as a sense, belief or fear that we cannot cope. By that definition, stress is never useful and is always debilitating.

Thoughts that we cannot cope most commonly lead to feelings of anxiety, but can sometimes lead to feeling low or angry. Stress is generally debilitating while we’re experiencing it, but can easily be resolved if we:

• Accept our feelings
• Paccept our circumstances
• Choose whatever actions need to be taken to deal with the sources of stress

In a work context, stress can result in ineffectiveness and even absence from work. Whenever this happens the most immediate cause is usually resisting feelings that have been triggered by stressful thoughts.

The anxiety symptoms that often result from stressful thoughts can initially seem frightening. We may think there’s something wrong with us. We may fear that the anxiety might grow. Generally this adds to our anxiety, which in turn compounds our stressful thoughts.

The truth is that feelings are never dangerous. They’re just feelings. If we can understand this, we can accept any feelings and then paccept the circumstances that have triggered them (or, if pacceptance alone isn’t enough, use a thought record) and refocus on whatever needs to be done to deal with the circumstances as best we can.

The ideas, tools and techniques outlined in this book all build stress resilience. When you’ve practised them consistently for a while, you can reasonably expect to never be stressed again. If you’d like me to, I’m happy to make that another promise.

ACCEPTING OUR THOUGHTS

In Chapter 2 I suggested you many need to be tough with yourself by refusing to maintain a worrying thought. Similarly, it’s helpful if you refuse to maintain a thought that involves ‘resisting what is’ by applying pacceptance. But in the early days of practising pacceptance, there may be some occasions or some area of our lives where it’s difficult to change our thoughts right away, even if we want to. Our thoughts may for the moment seem dominated by our feelings. Or our unconscious programming, or conditioned ways of thinking, may be too strong for us to be able to change the way we’re thinking right now.

If this is so, we shouldn’t make ourselves wrong or blame ourselves, even when we recognise our current ways of thinking are unproductive. We are who we are right now. Our current ways of thinking are a product of our life history. With increased awareness, we can begin to change them, but there’s no point wishing they were already different.

It’s OK to have unhappy thoughts for now. There’s no rule of life that says we must be happy all the time. We’d probably prefer to be most of the time, and the ideas discussed in this book will help us achieve that. But when we’re unhappy or dissatisfied and we can’t, or don’t want to, change the way we’re thinking for the time being, we can paccept that too.

If we’re worried about something then, if we can accept that whatever happens will be OK, or if we can see that it probably won’t happen anyway, we can stop worrying. But if we can’t do this right now, we can observe ourselves worrying and know that it’s OK to worry for now.

When we’re experiencing unhappy thoughts that we can’t seem to resolve right away through pacceptance or using a thought record, it’s worth remembering something else about our thoughts:

A fear of mice doesn’t mean mice are frightening. Worrying about something that may happen doesn’t mean it will happen. Viewing something as a failure doesn’t mean it is a failure, it just means that’s the way we’re viewing it.

PROFESSIONAL HELP

This book presents the most valuable ways of thinking and acting I know of that I can share with you in this way. There are other tools I use as a therapist for helping my clients deal with specific problems, which it wouldn’t be appropriate to outline here.

THE STORY SO FAR

You now have a number of tools that will allow you to live your life according to the principles of acceptance-action living. If we consistently:

• Own our reactions
• Accept our feelings
• Paccept what is
• Recognise we and others were doing our best (the only thing we could have done)
• Paccept ourselves
• Choose a productive response
• Take total responsibility for our interactions
• Use the principle of pacceptance to stop worrying about the future
• ‘Accept the feeling, choose the action’ to resolve recurring feelings, unproductive habits and self-limitations
• Use the other power tools (see Chapter 7) to change or achieve whatever we want to change or achieve
• Use thought records where necessary to challenge our thoughts where pacceptance alone isn’t enough

Then we can take complete control of our lives and our experience of life.

I meet hundreds of people through my work as a therapist, coach, consultant and trainer and in my day-to-day interactions beyond my work, who clearly don’t have control over some aspect of their lives, whether it’s emotional or behavioural problems, weight issues, relationships, becoming more confident, achieving more or anything else that’s important to them.

They have of course always been doing their best (the only thing they could have done) with the awareness they had at the time. With the awareness you now have, you can start taking control of every aspect of your life and your experience of life. Why wait?

Action summary

This chapter:

• If pacceptance is not enough, challenge negative thoughts using a thought record
• Live by the adage: ‘accept the feeling, choose the action, challenge the thought’
• If challenging a thought isn’t feasible for now, paccept the thought:
  • Acknowledge it’s OK to have unhappy thoughts for now
  • Recognise thoughts are just thoughts, not reality

Prior chapters:

• Own our reactions
• Accept for now any uncomfortable feelings (fully experience and accept them)
• Paccept what is (our circumstances) at every opportunity
• Recognise we and others were doing our best (the only thing we could have done) given our awareness at the time, so paccept it
• Understand we/they are still responsible for our actions, but that only impacts what happens now and in the future
• Paccept ourselves totally as we are, at the same time as seeking to develop
• Try to understand the other person’s perspective
• Take responsibility for the way we experience every moment and choose our experience using pacceptance
• Take total responsibility for our interactions
• Paccept/forgive others
• Reconcile with significant others
• ‘Accept the feeling, choose the action’ to resolve recurring feelings, unproductive habits and self-limitations
• Commit; stop playing the when-then game; act as if; take bold action; focus on contribution; set goals where needed to make changes, address goals and challenge ourselves
• Stop worrying
• If an uncomfortable feeling keeps recurring when you’ve fully accepted it, try letting it go
• Observe non-pacceptance in others (TV, etc.) and consider how you’d now think and act in their circumstances

Note that ‘owning our reactions’ is now at the top of the list as it’s often the first thing we need to do.