Throughout the day your state of being will change, how you feel about yourself and the situation you are in. This state will determine your ability to respond to situations and the outcome / results you will achieve. Some states are useful and empowering, whilst other states limit our ability to act or respond in an effective way.
Factors that affect and alter our state.
Our state is affected by the things that are happening around us on the outside, and the things that are going on inside (our thoughts). Actually it’s more to do with what’s going on inside our mind, it’s not what happens to us but how we think about what happens to us that will ultimately determine our state. For example two people could experience being told that they don’t have the capability to achieve a goal. One of them may feel demotivated by this and not put much effort into achieving this goal, whereas the other person may feel a positive challenge and be driven to prove that they can do it. Because thoughts are not constant things will affect us differently on different days.
So what’s really going on? What we describe as our thoughts are a stream of ‘pictures’ and ‘sounds’ that lead to feelings of some kind. The pictures have qualities such as a movie or a still image, colour or black and white, life size or larger, sometimes we will see ourselves in the picture and sometimes it will be like seeing it through our own eyes. The pictures may be things we remember, that we have actually experienced, or they may be imagined experiences we have made up. The ‘sounds’ are not actually sounds they are a construct of our imagination, for example we could be remembering what someone said to us or what we said to someone else. We could also be talking to ourselves – ‘internal dialogue’. For example as I am writing this I am constructing the sentences and ‘hearing’ myself saying it as I type. As you are reading this you may also be doing something similar. The important thing here is that it is all in our mind – we are making it up. Now sometimes this can be useful, for solving problems, for thinking things through, and sometimes this is a pain in the arse! especially when we verbally beat ourselves up and generally give ourselves a hard time and making ourselves feel bad.
There are some situations where our state can change almost immediately when something happens to trigger a particular response.
Developing your awareness.
- Notice how your state changes and when your state changes throughout the day.
- Become more aware of what affects you and how you are affected, by this I mean what happens e.g: I notice this, this image comes up, I hear this, I say this to my self, etc… find out the strategy your mind is using.
- Notice what the patterns are, e.g. When [x] I imagine [y] and this leads to the state of [z]. There may be several patterns you can follow.
Practice and play with this for a few days, be easy on yourself, be curious when you are thinking about it. Do each step thoroughly before moving on. Keep your curiosity going for as long as you can rather than drawing up any conclusions too quickly. The more you are able to notice, the more control you will have later. In the next article I will give you some ways of taking control of your state so you can feel good more of the time.
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