Changing Your Thoughts

I was talking to a client last week that was getting a little bit frustrated by slow progress in taking back control of his negative thought patterns.  He understood on an intellectual level that he controlled his own thoughts, but felt he was struggling to establish that into an unconscious, deep-seated belief.

About three or four years ago I decided I wanted to change my breathing. I’d been reading some research conducted with heart attack patients. The sample group was relatively small, about 57 people if my memory serves me right, or 4 if it doesn’t. Anyway, the net result from the study group was that every single one of the patients, that’s 100% to you academic types out there, breathed incorrectly. At first I was stunned, then I moved into a state of shock, closely followed by brief denial and ended up at fascination. I think about 8 years ago I would have stayed stuck in stunnedness in perpetuity, but after taking up Yoga around that time I soon understood that this breathing malarkey was trickier than I once thought.

It’s weird that as kids we never get shown how to breathe or even for that matter, think correctly. Consequently, we take it for granted that we know how to do it, because let’s face it, we do it all the time and seem to get by ok. You don’t see many kids rolling around on the floor clutching their throats and whispering through blue lips that they’re forgotten how to breathe. Not round here anyway.

The aspect that most people get wrong is that they breathe from the upper chest rather than the diaphragm. They often then compound the issue by breathing too quickly. High rapid breathing can be associated with stress, anxiety and panic attacks. It is almost impossible to generate any of those feelings and still have control of your breath. Next time you have to get up and speak in public remember, if you retain control of your breathing you gain control of your nerves. Yes, you can still imagine the audience naked if you really want to, although that in and of itself may play havoc with your breathing for different reasons.

When I decided to change my breathing I put aside 3 or 4 times per day when I could practice slow, deep, diaphragmatic breathing for about 5 minutes. Absolutely nothing happened. Whenever I would cunningly check in on my breathing later without giving it advance warning it would have snuck back to normal. This was exasperating to say the least. I happened to mention this to my coach at the time and he replied with something I wish I’d said. “If you spend less than 30 minutes per day practicing breathing properly then by default and presuming you’re not dead, that means you spend more than 23 hours 30 minutes practicing the wrong way. Which is most likely to stick?” Smart ass coach.

Some people have a tendency to think Life Coach’s have boxes of magic bullets or secret formulas to help people change. Sorry, we don’t. All change comes from the individual wanting, believing and committing to change, the coach is simply a facilitator, albeit sometimes a necessary part of the equation.

The client I made mention of at the beginning was frustrated because he didn’t think he was making progress as he was still finding himself slipping back into negative loops from time to time. The reality was that he was making great progress. The patterns were getting further apart and he was also more adept at spotting and thus changing them, before they went on too long.

If you want to change yourself for the better you are going to need some commitment because you’re going to have to work on it between round about now, until you die. That may seem like a long time and a lot of hard work, but here’s the rub. It is no more difficult to think positive empowering thoughts than it is negative disempowering thoughts. In fact it takes exactly the same amount of energy. If you have learned to be negative over the years you can now unlearn that and start to reap the undoubted rewards. Go on, give it a go. It’s never too late to change, and anyway, you have to do something whilst you’re hanging around waiting to die so it may as well be this.

Enjoyed this post? Please share it!

Digg it | Stumble it |

 

Post a Comment

Name

Mail (will not be published)

Website

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail