An Easy Self-Coaching Model to Help You Control Your Thoughts
The five steps that will help you re-ignite your happiness
What if there was a way to solve any problem, ease any pain, and feel happy even during our darkest moments? If we let our less-than-ideal reality dampen our thoughts and cloud our dreams, we’re closing ourselves off from the endless possibilities of finding joy, happiness, and success right where we’re standing.
All the responsibilities, expectations and hard work we face can feel like a wrecking ball crashing towards the tower of goals and dreams we spent years building up and perfecting. We take what job we can get to pay the bills and put food on the table, and if we don’t have a degree or previous experience — the options become limited.
Pair the need for a job with the expectations of our loved ones, and we can end up feeling disappointed in ourselves and our progress towards our dreams. Chasing our goals and finding our dream job feels more distant with each passing day, and so does our happiness.
But using the self-coaching model below, we can design our ideal future and look forward to achieving our goals, no matter how far away they might seem from where we’re standing.
Feeling Stuck in the Wrong Mindset
If we’re stuck with the mindset that our circumstances make us feel sad rather than understanding the power of our thoughts, then we will always chase happiness. By acknowledging that all circumstances are neutral, we’re giving ourselves the power to decide how we want to feel, regardless of our situation.
It’s not our circumstance nor shattered expectations that determine our happiness — it’s how we view our situation. Until we realize that we can feel happy right now, we’ll keep searching for happiness in short-term satisfaction rather than long-term fulfillment.
We need to understand how the different components to our lives work together if we want to find solutions to our problems, new insights, and better results.
Shifting Our Mindset
If we feel like our life is crumbling at our feet along with our hopes and dreams, we might feel hopeless for a better future. But finding happiness has nothing to do with what we’re doing or where we are, and everything to do with what we’re thinking and feeling.
If we choose the thought that feels most real to our situation instead of the thought that reflects where we want to be, we’re stuck in an endless loop of hoping for more.
Facts, past events, and other people’s actions are all circumstances. There’s nothing we can do to change them, which makes them neutral. If we want to feel better about something, that isn’t what we have to change.
The Self-Coaching Model
Brooke Castillo, the founder of The Life Coach School, created a tool that allows us to rethink and rebuild our thoughts. She didn’t invent the theory, but she found a way to apply it to everyday life.
It’s a powerful technique that helps us shift our mindset, thoughts, and emotions surrounding our circumstances to become a healthier, happier and more content version of ourselves. The theory comprises five parts:
- Circumstances
- Thoughts
- Feelings
- Actions
- Results
It’s basically a way for us to understand how our thoughts affect our reality. They are what determines our quality of life, and no person, event, or tragedy can change how we feel unless we let them. Here is a more detailed description of the five parts.
1. Circumstances
Circumstances are neutral. They are facts that are provable and not debatable. Whether we think our circumstances make us feel worthless, unhappy, or depressed, it all lies in our thoughts regarding the situation, and not the situation itself. Because there are no emotions linked to circumstances. Here are a few examples:
- His hourly rate is $15.
- She is the owner of the company.
- The house went up in flames.
- Their mother came to visit at 9 AM.
- The child is crying.
These are all facts, and we get to decide what we feel regarding them. But it can be difficult to tell circumstances and thoughts apart, so it’s good to remember that there are three components to circumstances. Facts, our past, and other people’s actions.
For example, if our boss left a stack of paperwork on our desk before we arrived to work, that’s a circumstance. It can make us feel frustrated, but the circumstance itself is completely neutral.
When we realize that we can change our perspective to relieve ourselves of the emotional pain that links our reality to our expectations, there are no limits. That is also when we can scale back our thoughts to become neutral and then rebuild them with a more positive perspective. Here is an example:
- I feel frustrated because my boss didn’t let me take the weekend off.
- My boss didn’t let me take the weekend off.
- I couldn’t take the weekend off, so I made the most of it and decided to appreciate the extra money.
It’s important to remember that circumstances are neither good nor bad. They can trigger certain emotions, and in most cases, those emotions are completely valid. But it’s our thoughts that create our emotions.
2. Thoughts
Thoughts are sentences in our heads. They define our opinions and they are optional. Even if 1000/1000 people agreed that our thought is valid, it’s still just a thought unless we can prove it as a fact.
Experiences, situations, and circumstances trigger thoughts, and they often come to mind with no effort as we have unsupervised minds. Most of the time, we can’t help what thoughts come to mind. A study conducted at Queen’s University shows that the average human has around 6,200 thoughts per day. So, of course, we can’t control what we think about every second of our life.
As Brooke Castillo said in her Self-Coaching Model guide, “Nothing that happens in your life is amazing or horrible until you decide to have a thought about it to make it that way. Everything is a circumstance until you put a thought to it”
We can use the model to shift our thoughts to a place where they actually benefit us. The key is to catch ourselves whenever we notice a negative thought is dragging our mood, confidence, or motivation down and force ourselves to think about something else or change our perspective.
A study published in Nature Communications in 2020 shows that there are three ways to remove thoughts from our mind. Suppress, replace, and clear. The most effective way to empty our minds quickly is to replace and clear, and the easiest way to do so is through meditation, exercise, reading a book, or taking a walk.
In addition to replacing our thoughts, asking ourselves supportive questions such as what we can gain from a situation, what we can learn, and how we can benefit from it is a very powerful way to steer our mind to a more useful direction.
3. Feelings
How we react to a situation and what it makes us feel directly results from our thoughts. Feelings are just vibrations in our bodies. And because our brains are developed to avoid pain, we often react negatively towards circumstances that make us acknowledge all the possible bad outcomes to the situation.
It’s good to name and acknowledge our emotions with one word, such as happy, sad, dreadful, delighted, or relaxed. If we explain why we feel a certain way, it’s a thought. For example, “I feel terrible that I forgot to get her a gift” is a thought, and regret is the name of the emotion.
When we leave the circumstances out and name our feeling with one word, we can learn to feel better without changing the circumstance as long as we remember that we are always 100% in charge of how we feel. We need nothing to feel better other than shifting our focus to a more pleasant thought.
That doesn’t mean that we will feel great all the time. A study where 11,572 participants completed 65,721 emotion reports over the course of 35 days, the results show that on average, people experiences one or several emotions 90% of the time. And 41% of the time, the emotions were negative, with the most frequent ones being anxiety, sadness, and disgust with 29%, 20%, and 11% of the time.
However, what most of us don’t realize is that we can’t blame anyone or their actions for making us feel a certain way. Blaming our emotions on something outside of ourselves means we’re giving our power away. We believe that we can’t change how we feel, hence why we often subconsciously choose the thought that makes us feel worse.
But it’s also important to remember that it’s normal to be sad in specific situations — it’s what makes us human. We might feel heartbroken after a breakup, disappointed when our best friend doesn’t show up, or sad when our pet dies. We shouldn’t try to push those emotions aside.
4. Actions
We act based on how we feel. If our friend says something painful, we might react from anger and give them the silent treatment, which becomes our action. It might cause our relationship to suffer, which becomes the result.
What we do or don’t do manifests from how we’re feeling. Our emotions cause our actions, inactions, and reactions, which is why it’s so important to acknowledge our emotions and try to focus on better thoughts.
Understanding this chain of thoughts, emotions, and reactions allows us to work backward to find a solution to our problems. For example, if we feel unmotivated to work and wonder why — we can ask ourselves how we feel right before we set out to work and figure out what thought drives the emotion.
5. Results
The results are the consequence of our actions; how we reacted to a situation leads to the outcome. It’s these results that can have a lasting impact on our life, relationships, and situation.
For example, if we cheat on our partner and they find out, it probably will ruin our relationship resulting in a painful heartbreak.
Normally, when we try to change our behavior and actions, we start with the consequences of our actions. We don’t take into consideration the thoughts and feelings behind our actions, and therefore we don’t get to the root of the problem. So when we attempt to change our actions rather than our thoughts, there’s resistance that makes it almost impossible to see genuine change.
Changing Our Perspective is Key
We can use this model in two ways. Either to solve a problem we’re having or to design our future. There is no limit to what we can be, do, or have in the future, since our present doesn’t represent our entire life.
When we believe we can’t be or live a certain way, we’re creating a negative mindset surrounding our current, neutral circumstances. The best way to turn our beliefs around is to separate our thoughts and emotions and ask ourselves these questions?
- What am I thinking?
- Why am I thinking about this?
- How am I feeling?
- What thought caused this feeling?
Here is an example:
- My boss doesn’t think I’m good enough.
- He told me, “I don’t think you’re the best person for this job”.
- I feel frustrated and disappointed.
- I’m frustrated and disappointed because he doesn’t think I’m good enough.
When we lay our thoughts out this way, we change the narrative and separate the thoughts, facts, and feelings. The thought “My boss doesn’t think I’m good enough” is our opinion, while “He told me “I don’t think you’re the best person for this job” is the circumstance. We created a feeling of frustration and disappointment for ourselves because of our own thought and opinion.
We don’t feel frustrated because of the circumstance; we feel frustrated because we believe we’re not good enough. Making this distinction allows us to change our view of life. Using the example above, we can change our feeling from frustration to motivation by aiming to become the best person for the job.
How we feel always comes down to our thoughts, no matter how valid we believe they are, we can always adjust how we feel by changing the perspective.
Final Thoughts
The Self-Coaching Model is an easy way for us to understand how our brains work and to help us take control of our reality. It was created to help people find the root cause of a problem and solve it, rather than finding a temporary fix by focusing on the actions and results.
Almost all issues go deeper than we initially believe, which is why it’s so crucial to acknowledge our thoughts and emotions before we move on to our actions. The model comprises these five parts that need to be evaluated to find the solution to our problem:
- Circumstances are neutral, provable, non-debatable facts.
- The sentences in our minds create thoughts that cause our feelings.
- Our feelings are vibrations in our body that cause our actions.
- How we feel leads to our actions, which create our results.
- The results are the consequences of our actions and can have a lasting impact.
When we acknowledge this chain reaction of thoughts, emotions, actions, and results, we’re giving ourselves power. We are in complete control of how we want to live our life.
The fact that circumstances are neutral is such a powerful acknowledgment that helps us realize that we are in charge. There’s no situation where we aren’t in complete control of how we feel. No matter what is happening around us, we are the only ones in control of our minds. We can feel however we want, whenever we want, wherever we are.
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