From Surviving to Thriving: A No Tools, No Techniques Shift from Stress and Overwhelm to Fulfilment

What do you think is happening when you are not feeling okay? Do you think it is because the outside world is not okay, because other people are behaving badly or that there is something wrong with you? Looking for the source of your feelings can be a never ending search. I was seeking in that way for a long time and I looked in all those places. It was fruitless, exhausting and led to burnout! You see, your feelings have one piece of information in them. That suffering you are experiencing is only telling you one thing. It's telling you that you are believing something that isn't true!  That your thinking is off. Every time you see this, something falls away; a bit of conditioned thought, some old learned stuff or some lie you were told. Then there is relief and less suffering.

Have you noticed where your thoughts tend to flow? Probably down the same tracks they have always flowed down a bit like the way streams flow down a mountain to a river. The water goes where it has always gone. We have furrows like that in our old, habitual, conditioned thoughts but what is useful to know is that THEY ARE NOT TRUE! Just because they turn up in your head, they are not valid. It's just that they are used to flowing there. It helps to just notice and bring awareness but stay away from judgement. Those thoughts can still show up, flowing in the same direction but you don't have to take them seriously or believe them. There's freedom in knowing that's what is going on!

I know that might sometimes seem hard to believe that you are okay but I guess it depends what you view as being okay. It is okay to cry, to have negative thoughts and to feel anxious. I could go on and on and on. When I talk to clients, I see this all the time. They often have an unreasonable expectation of themselves, an idea that they are different to everyone else and the concept that they should be in control. Once a client said to me that they wanted their life to be like a straight line with no more ups and downs. I said I couldn't help them with that because life is a contact sport. It is supposed to go up and down both in the world outside and within us. You cannot stop this but if you are trying to, that's really hard work. It is possible to experience the whole of life and still know you are okay (and you don't need endless tools and techniques to do that).

Are you in touch with your internal weather system right now? Is it stormy, sunny or maybe a little cloudy? It is good to be aware because there is information in that weather. It's an update to let you know how your thinking is. But this metaphor goes on. It is a beautiful description of human experience. Just like countries of the world we all have our own unique weather system and just like the weather, that system is variable. Just like the sun, our innate wellbeing is always hidden behind the clouds and just like the weather thinking can change naturally without intervention. And once we know this, we can make better decisions, just like choosing to carry an umbrella when the weather is wet. 

But confusion is never more than a thought away. In those moments when we think that weather is coming from somewhere other than our weather front, it looks like there are things to do to correct it. So, just pause and breathe and notice the feeling in your body, the time zone of your thoughts and where you think that weather system is coming from. Because that is all you need to allow the weather front to pass so you can naturally fall back into calm and clarity.

Have you noticed what happens when you stop blowing air into a balloon? Silly question I know but bear with me. Let's imagine a scenario! You have a number of balloons you are trying to blow up at once with a canister of helium. You start blowing up balloon #1 so it starts to inflate and rise but then you move on to balloon #2 and start pumping the helium into it. Balloon #1 goes down and sinks and balloon #2 rises. But then you go on to balloon #3 and it rises. I don't need to continue as I am sure you have got the picture. The balloon you are giving attention to is the one which rises. Your thoughts are the same because you always feel the one you are paying attention to. It's your awareness or consciousness which gives the thought it's energy otherwise thoughts are neutral like flaccid balloons. 

Knowing this is how your system works can help you stop endless self-development, feel calm and think clearly more of the time, connect to you innate confidence and resilience and fall into a place of natural self-acceptance.

I remember the first time I became aware of being afraid of being afraid. It was many years ago when I first started helping people with fear. A woman I was working with was afraid of flying. She spoke of the fear of the fear arriving. That when it came she wouldn't be able to handle it would look stupid and wouldn't be able to go on holiday. So over the weeks running up to any holiday, the pressure built and built. I helped her feel better but I see something different about this now.

It's the misunderstanding we have about what fear actually is that is the problem. We think we are afraid of something and we don't know that we have fearful thinking. It's a subtle but profound difference which once understood changes everything. Fear is a thought, an actual sign you are working perfectly and it will always pass. Imagine experiencing fear and not being afraid of it.

Can life work within more than one paradigm? In other words, can there be more than one model of how something works that is true? The set of psychological principles I share is often called the Inside Out paradigm. It says that our experience is created from the inside out. That when we feel something, the feeling is coming from how we think about something not from the thing itself. This applies to people, circumstances, behaviour and even how we experience ourselves. When I work with clients, they see it quickly in some areas of life. They might notice that they feel less upset about their boss, less stressed about the things happening in their lives or they notice they respond more than react. But then they get stuck. There is something in life which appears to work outside in. It might be money, their partner or just about anything. 

But the thing with a paradigm is that it works all the time. Like gravity! Working all the time, all day, every day! If you forget about gravity, you might throw stone in the air and get a sharp pain on the top of your head and If you try to live your life across 2 paradigms, confusion ensues. Your experience of life is created one way, 100% of the time and when you realise this, unpleasant feelings bring about curiosity rather than a need to fix the outside world or yourself. Much simpler than the alternative.

Have you ever contemplated how much you have learned in life? When I think about that, it feels like thinking about the size of the universe; impossible to conceive of the size of it. You definitely learnt some things which have served you well through life. Some practical things like gravity always makes things fall, things to keep you safe like fire burns and useful things like how to walk and talk. 

But what about the less useful things you learnt?  Have you considered them much? Like the time you learnt you were stupid because someone was angry with you, that money causes problems because you overheard an argument and that you are unlovable because of how someone treated you. Right from the moment of our birth, we are learning these things about ourselves and every thought which passes through your head is a consequence of that learning. It might seem like a lot of work to change all that but I see it more as quality control. Those awful thoughts you have about yourself have literally nothing to do with you because they were unknowingly learnt from the conditioned thinking of the people around you. 

As we start to see the quality of what passes thought our heads, we can gently start to take it less seriously and we just become more discerning and the unlearning happens naturally. The result of this is self-acceptance, calm, confidence and clarity.

How much time do you spend thinking about your thinking was a question I asked recently on social media. The result showed that 67% of respondents spend more than 50% of their time think about their thinking. I can so relate to this because I spent a lot of time doing this. It seems that it is encouraged by self-development, therapy and even by coaches. Perhaps the idea is that once we have thought long and hard about our thinking that we will then be able to change it. But have you noticed how flipping hard that it? It might seem like you have cracked it for a while but then those same old thoughts come in again. Because while ever you are focusing on a particular type of thinking you would like to see less of, you are more likely to notice that thinking. Because thoughts are actually neutral until we give them meaning. 

When we start to see our psychological system in this way, we can be kinder to ourselves, let thoughts go more easily, not judge ourselves so much and spend less time trying to change our thoughts. From that place there is more confidence, clarity and calm. Imagine that?

Are you perfect? I know I am not! I make mistakes and mess up because I am human. My mistakes might look different to yours and my judgement might make yours look worse than mine in my head. But sometimes my judgement makes my mistakes looks worse than yours. Either way in our heads is the only place they are worse. In reality they are all the same because they are all human. Human beings doing the best they can in the moment based on the thinking which looks real to them. It's easy to judge when we see behaviour we don't like and it's harder to look at it with compassion. But guess which feels calmer. And from that calm place you are more likely to do something to improve things. Turns out we don't need to get angry to make a change. Perhaps you would like to experience more compassion and therefore feel calmer.