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If it wasn’t for bad luck I’d have no luck at all with my teeth. After having a root canal a couple of weeks ago, this morning I managed to break a tooth on a rather large piece of glass.

You may be wondering what I was doing with glass in my mouth, but not as much as I was, seeing I was eating toast at the time. As I bit down I felt the tooth go and gingerly spat the unattractive contents of my mouth into my hand to see the cause of my pain

To cut a long story short, the glass had been part of the jar that I had just spread strawberry jam onto my toast from. I peered into the empty jar to see a hole in the bottom that definitely shouldn’t have been there.

For a moment I was severely pissed off. Another trip to the dentist, another $100 minimum charge, more time off work and no doubt some pain, was not the great start to the week I had anticipated.

As I pondered a law suit with Bonne Maman and taking them for every penny they’re worth, or at least a couple of free cases of their finest preserves, I started to change my thinking.

I studied the glass and realized how lucky I’d really been by biting square down on it. I must have done that, because any other way and the thing would have been still embedded in my cheek. Worse still, it could have got stuck in my throat and caused a major bleed.

I wasn’t unlucky at all, I was really lucky!

That as you may well know, is a reframe.

All that you need (other than the willingness) to construct a reframe is to ask yourself questions like, “what else could this mean?” or “how could this benefit me?”

Unfortunately though, to ask such a question you have to be conscious of your thought processes at the time, something that it’s not always easy to do. Otherwise it’s a bit like thinking of a devastatingly witty put down you could have used in an argument 10 minutes after the situation has passed.

One of the reasons I differ from a lot of Life Coaches is because I can often spend longer working on clients thinking than I do on action plans (you can read more here). CBT encourages people to be more aware of their thinking and it’s one of the reasons that I’m interested in it and asked Eduard to write a guest post on the topic.

So if you’ve ever wondered if it’s possible to go through psychotherapy without undergoing a “Rorschach Test” and talking about your underwear obsession, here is your answer.

What Is CBT?

If you’re into personal development in general, and emotional mastery in particular, if you care about getting results in these areas more then anything else, then read on. CBT is definitely a self-improvement tool you will want to have in your toolbox.

Let’s start with the basics: CBT is an acronym for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. It’s not actually one form of therapy, but a group of therapies, all of which have one essential trait in common: they aim to help the client by changing his thinking patterns (or cognitions) and his behaviors.

Life Coaches and personal development gurus alike have made a lot of fun over the years of psychotherapy as a whole, arguing that it lacks pragmatism, it takes too long and it focuses excessively on a person’s past. The classic image of the client lying on a couch and babbling on about his mom, each week for 5 years in a row is often associated with therapy. And often for good reasons.

With CBT though, these arguments against psychotherapy get thrown out the window. CBT is brief therapy which creates fast results. It usually lasts between 10 and 15 sessions, and then lets the client spread his wings on his own. CBT acknowledges the role that past experiences have in creating a person’s negative thinking, emotions and behaviors, but it focuses on the here and now in addressing them, as they have a life of their own in the present moment.

Albert Ellis and his discovery

One very interesting story in the history of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy comes from one of the pioneers of CBT, Albert Ellis, who created a form of cognitive behavioral therapy called REBT (Rational Emotional Behavior Therapy).

As a teenager, Ellis was shy and had a phobia of approaching women. So, at the age of 19, he gave himself as homework to go to the Bronx Botanical Garden, where he would approach women sitting alone on benches, and start talking to them. He did this every day until he had talked to 100 women, which he considered a good sample.

By the time this homework was done, he had fully interiorized the idea that approaching women he did not know was not dangerous and had cured himself of his phobia.

He went on to developed an entire form of psychotherapy based on the idea of eliminating irrational thinking and irrational beliefs, and thus the emotional reactions which are triggered by them and prevent us from living our lives fully.

We think ourselves into suffering

The basic premise of CBT is that our unwanted feelings and behaviors are generated by the way we think and we interpret the events which happen to us, based on our personal beliefs system. For example, if an employee feels bad because his boss didn’t like his recent proposal, it’s not the not-liking that makes him feel bad, but his interpretation which states: “This is terrible! He has a problem with me. He should like my proposal!”

Negative, unrealistic thinking is considered in CBT to be learned, and it can be unlearned. The idea itself is not new or uncommon. It can be found in ancient Greek philosophy like that of Epictetus, who said:

“Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.”

It can be found in eastern philosophy like that of Buddha, who said:

“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.”

And it can also be found in various modern disciplines and personal development methods.

Here’s one important aspect with CBT though: the concepts, methods and techniques created and employed in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy are supported by a vast amount of scientific research. Worldwide, there are now over 2000 studies on various aspects of CBT. And it is shown to be effective in dealing with all sorts of aspects, including phobias, depression, anxiety, bulimia, low-self esteem and stress related problems.

Arguing with yourself

The main techniques in CBT center around arguing with yourself. This implies listening to your automatic self-talk, identifying generalizations, dramatizations, unreasonable thinking and consciously combating these thoughts, replacing them with more reasonable and rational ones. This may sound easy in principle, but in practice it can be quite challenging in the beginning.

By repeating this process of combating your self-talk, over time, it creates changes in your mental associations and the very circuitry of your brain, as the new thinking style takes over the old one. What this means is that after a while, your natural thinking style and emotional reactions in a certain area change, so conscious effort to manage them is no longer required.

CBT does not promise miracle cures. The techniques it provides require time, repetition and reinforcement. The change process is not necessarily fascinating or esoteric; it’s rather straightforward and pragmatic. Using CBT, you will see small, gradual results, which in a certain period of time will sum up to one big change.

In CBT, a good relation between the client and the therapist is considered important, but not the main thing. The core of the method is the process of changing your thinking and behaviors, as well as the persistence in sticking with it until you get the desired results. The idea is for the therapist to give the client some tools and help him learn how to use them, so that from a certain point, he can use them on his own.

The exercises used in CBT include writing down your own thoughts and analyzing them, visualization, relaxation exercises, role-plays and confronting situations in real life. This form of therapy includes homework assignments the client does on his one, which make the process more intense and gap the distance between sessions.

Cognitive Behavioral Coaching

Because CBT proves itself to be a very practical and effective method for personal change, a coaching type approach has developed from the therapy. Cognitive Behavioral Coaching (CBC) focuses more on helping a person grow and fulfill her potential, rather then solving problems, by developing empowering ways of thinking, feeling and behaving.

CBC is used as a more business and non-clinical approach, combining the effectiveness of CBT with the principles of coaching, to create powerful results. As people and companies are looking for provable results and for a return on investment for their money, CBC is becoming more popular as an answer to the need for growth and for change.

About the author: Eduard Ezeanu coaches people to take their communication skills to the next level. In his work, he uses a lot of CBT principles to help create the attitudes for effective communication. Eduard also writes on his personal development blog, People Skills Decoded and you can find him on Twitter here.