Cultivating Hope In Uncertainty

Cultivating Hope In Uncertainty

How self-awareness matters

Self-awareness if the foundation of a solid mental health strategy. Taking care of your brain.  Your mental health really matters.  So taking care of your brain is so important.  When I think of the opposite of mental health, it’s mental illness.  Mental health can affect every part of a persons life and the lives of those around them.  Mental health can get in the way of peoples abilities to connect with other people.  Most of us go through life unaware of how to heal those parts of us that need some care and loving attention.  I’m here to help you heal yourself.  I’ve devoted most of my own adult life to my own healing journey and I love sharing what I’ve learned.  

Anxiety amongst the circumstances of 2020

It’s fall of 2020 and we are still dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic.  I’m seeing a lot of anxiety. I’m seeing a Hyperawareness of how the world has changed.  We are micromanaging our physical health and then on top of that we dealing with anxiety collectively as we watch the riots and so on.  Anxiety thrives on uncertainty and there is a lot of uncertainty in the world right now.  All of those things are spinning in peoples minds and can reek havoc on our mental health.

The emotion of HOPE

What emotion would you choose to be if you could be any emotion on a big silver platter full of emotions?  Many people have recently said that they wish that they could feel hope instead of anxiety. 

Hope feels incredible.  We want to feel hope when in the midst of uncertainty.  We can’t control other people or things outside of us in order to feel better.  It just doesn’t work that way. Hope is a beautiful thing, but it isn’t the whole picture.  Leaving hope in the hands of other people to create for us is not an effective strategy.  So often we go into anxiety by default.  We want to protect ourselves from being let down.  We think that worry and anxiety help us problem solve.  But this is never true.  Anxiety keeps us stuck. 

Feeling hope is an option even when there are difficult circumstances to face.  We have to decide what we put our hope into.  When we put hope into managing ourselves and our capacity to handle life, whatever it throws our way.  That is where true power lies. 

Anxiety wants to control what is not ours to control.  That’s just not how the world works.  We simply cannot control circumstances outside of us.  The world, the economy, other people, a global pandemic, etc…  We can try, but it usually backfires and has terrible consequences. 

How I define Mental illness:

 Arguing with reality. Arguing with what is. Wanting to shut it all out or manipulate people or situations.  Going into a fantasy land of the mind, because you don’t like reality.  All of us do this to a certain degree.  When this is taken to extremes is where mental illness resides. 

 The self-coaching model

I learned this from my mentor and it is life changing.  The self-coaching model is a way of looking at the world.  It’s a formula to organize your brain around.  The self-coaching model has five main components and they are:  CTFAR

Circumstances:  The facts of your story.  Your world.  No drama or opinions.  When we write down our circumstance we write down a sentence about a neutral representation about what is going on in the world.

EX: The weather is 32 degrees today.

Thoughts:  The thoughts that you have about circumstances.  Here there will be lots of opinions and lots of subjectivity.

 EX: If you live in Palm Springs you may think that 32 degrees is too cold to go outdoors and go into town for supplies. 

If you live in Alaska during the winter months you might think that 32 degrees is warm and wonderful and a great time to go into town for supplies.

These are two different thoughts attached to the same circumstance. 

Feelings: The emotions which are vibrations that we experience in our bodies.  Start with Happy, mad, sad, anxious.  Then get to a richer vocabulary of emotions and feelings.  Feelings can be the most important part of the model and the least understood.

EX: Person in Alaska might feel excited about a 32 degree day in Alaska in the middle winter.

A person in Palm Springs might feel annoyed about a 32 degree day in the middle of winter.

Same circumstance. Two totally different thoughts creating two totally different feelings. 

Actions:  All of the behaviors we do or don’t do.  Actions are driven by our feelings.  Feelings are the fuel or the juice for everything that we do or don’t do. 

EX:  A person feeling excited might make big plans for their day and get a lot accomplished. 

A person feeling annoyed might cancel their tennis plans with their friends and choose to stay in and watch Netflix instead. 

These are different actions fueled by different feelings.  Actions lead us to our results.

Results:  Results that we are creating in our lives. 

This equation is an elegant way to gain awareness of our thinking and how our thinking is showing us our results.  The self-coaching model is really easy, but also takes a lot of time and practice. 

 Short version of the self-coaching model

I like to call this the think, feel, act loop. Anxiety has its own version of this.  The think, feel, act loop creates tremendous awareness of what is going on in our brains.  With this awareness we start to see decisions and thinking create how results are showing up in our lives.  

We are responsible for all of it based on what we are choosing to think. 

This is what I teach my teenagers… We never stop growing unless we shut down the awareness. Unless we decide that it’s too painful to see what we don’t want to see. 

When we are aware of being healthy and how our nutrition choices effect our bodies then we realize that we can help our body feel good.  On the other hand we can hurt our bodies and our mental health on our journey to try and be “perfectly” healthy.  Which can lead to Orthorexia.  We choose our thoughts which will determine a positive or negative reality.  

Mental Health 

This can happen with mental illness as well. When we are aware of our thoughts we can see that certain thoughts can be limiting to certain things we want to do with our lives.  So we want to change those thoughts to a more positive mindset for our own good.  Move to growth and positive change. On the other hand we can move to a debilitating extreme of anxiety.  Being hyper attentive to our thoughts.  Doing more harm in our pursuit to be less anxious. 

When I start working with people, in the beginning, I teach them how to notice their thoughts. They want to change all of the negative ones.  I really try to help them slow down and be with the awareness without judging it.  Awareness can bring a lot of discomfort and restlessness that can be difficult to sit with.  Most of us are just doing everything that we can to feel better.  We have to be careful though, because if we rush the process of feeling restless and uncomfortable then we run the risk of shutting down our ability to problem solve. 

When we start to do this then we start to see that the problem isn’t always what we think that it is. We think that our problems come from the circumstances in our lives.  Such as a pandemic, our boss, other people… But none of that is really the problem.  Because all of that is outside of our control.  Once we discover that it is our thoughts that we have control over about our circumstances.  Our thoughts are causing our emotion and our discomfort. 

We have power

When we do a CTFAR model we are willing to open ourselves up to the awareness rather than shutting it down.  If I put in my circumstance line of the model, “there is a pandemic” and one of my thoughts about it is, “I just wish that everything would get back to normal.” Then I’m going to feel anxious.  From the feeling of anxious I’ll do things or not do things that will stop me from showing up and doing things that would help me get through the pandemic in a more useful way.

If I watch the news a lot. Or I engage in a lot of wishful thinking.  And I catch myself scrolling social media a lot. What I would write in my R line is that I am not creating any normalcy for my own life.  I am creating less normalcy for myself because of what I am thinking.  Anxiety is fueling what I am doing and what I am not doing.  We have to train our brains to interrupt the fight or flight response, so anxiety is not our default mode.  Our true power comes into play when we let anxiety in and process it.  The beauty of awareness is that we can start to see our thinking as a choice. 

I am here for you!

Pay attention to your mental health, put these tools into practice, and learn how to apply what you have learned here.   All of the things that I teach here will support you in your mental health journey.  This is the time to get that kind of support.  I want you to have access to these amazing resources! Come and check out the Dare Greatly Society.  If you are already a member make use of the resources.  Prioritize mental health and take good care of yourself.  You can be a place of calm in the world amidst the storms of the world spinning in uncertainty.   You are amazing!  Mental health matters. You’ve got this.  And I’ve got you.