In everyone’s life there are challenges, some big, some small. When faced with adversity, hope can help us weather our storms. What exactly is hope? There’s no doubt that hope involves our emotions, but did you know that hope itself is not an emotion? Hope is a way of thinking. This means that hope—OR HAVING a hopeful attitude-- can be learned or coached.

It’s true that hope may not mitigate the inevitable challenges we must face, but hope isn’t about what’s coming around the corner, it’s about releasing ourselves from the despair of hopelessness in our present. Allowing us to live more courageously and unencumbered by pessimistic projections.

In this Self-Coaching podcast, I’m introducing a new format: weekly Self-Coaching challenges. My intention is to provide bite-sized, motivational instructions that can be practiced each week to enhance your Self-Coaching efforts. Today’s challenge is an exercise in ‘creating a bubble’ of separation from your world of “have-tos.” By practicing being more responsive to your ‘whims,’ you open yourself up to glimpse the life that awaits you.

Today’s Self-Coaching episode addresses the crucial role that optimism and pessimism have on your liberation from emotional struggle. Although I’ll be talking about optimism in next week’s podcast, I felt it was crucial to first address what happens when we identify with pessimism, “I’ll never get better,” “life’s too hard, I just can’t handle it.” This is the voice of pessimism, which has become an entrenched habit of ego identification—in a very real sense, you become your pessimism. And when this happens, you begin what we call a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the neurotic thinking associated with insecurity begins to feel like it’s your voice—It’s not!

Perhaps the best way to describe Responsive Living would be the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) phrase Let go, let god. The simplicity of this adage may escape you,// but trust me, it’s quite profound. In AA parlance, it has to do with letting go of compulsive, destructive thinking and handing yourself over to a higher power. From a secularized, Self-Coaching standpoint, Responsive Living is learning to let go, let life. Translation: letting go of trying to over-control life, and instead learning to risk letting life unfold spontaneously without anticipation, worry, or fear.

Join me in this Self-Coaching episode to explore this extremely important Mind-Talk step of learning to use Responsive Living to liberate yourself from a life of emotional struggle.

Releasing yourself from struggle

You’ve heard it said that a picture is worth a thousand words. When you get caught up in the incessant chatter of insecurity-driven thinking, having a simple picture in your mind can be far more useful than a thousand words of analyzing or trying to understand the “whys” of your suffering. In this Self-Coaching episode, I provide two compelling, fail-safe visualizations that you will want to use over and over again whenever your mind feels hijacked by insecurity-driven ruminations of emotional struggle.  

Why are visualizations so powerful? Simply because the brain likes, even craves, visual images. You can tell yourself to stop worrying, which, more often than not, requires a tedious effort, but if you create a visual image in your mind, you will be short-circuiting the neurotic ruminations that cripple you, allowing you to turn away from the toxic chatter of insecurity and reconnect with a more relaxed, empowered perspective—one that will enable you to proceed to next week’s critically important step 3, Reactive Living.

How exactly do you stop allowing yourself to be manipulated by neurotic thinking? The simple answer to this question is best summed up by something my grandmother was fond of saying: You can’t stop a bird from flying into your hair, but you don’t have to help it build a nest. You may not be able to stop neurotic thoughts from percolating up into consciousness, but you don’t have to passively allow your conscious mind to become part of the “nest-building” problem. This is the essence of Mind-Talk’s Step Two, stopping the progression of insecurity-driven thinking.

In this Self-Coaching podcast, I introduce two techniques for stopping this progression (a.k.a., nest building):

• Engaging—focusing your conscious mind to actively stop the progression of insecurity-driven thinking.

• Active Ignoring—asserting your conscious mind to ignore and disengage from insecurity-driven thinking.

If you do nothing about your thinking, nothing will change. If you do something about your thinking, you will change.

In this Self-Coaching podcast, I will introduce you to the first of four steps involved in Mind-Talk. Mind-Talk is my unique technique for ensuring liberation from anxiety, depression, and all emotional struggles. Today's episode with teach you two critical exercises: Detached Mind-Checking and Critically Observing. Once you learn these simple techniques, you will no longer feel victimized by the inexplicable, habituated, neurotic thoughts that have prevented you from the solace that you long for.

It’s critical for you to understand that when it comes to your awareness, your conscious thoughts are not alone. With conscious awareness, you can, for example, be totally conscious and aware of your compulsive, worrisome ruminations: What if I get sick? What will happen to my job? What if I lose my job? What if...? but equally unconscious of the reflexive insecurity that spawns these neurotically laden thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. So, the question is this: with all the cross-fertilization—conscious-unconscious melding—how in the world do we separate truth from untruth, facts from emotionally driven fiction? In this Self-Coaching podcast, join me as I help you prepare for the specific Mind-Talk steps that will enable you to make these critical distinctions.

Today, we’ll discuss three types of thinking:1.) Spontaneous thoughts. Unprovoked thoughts that erupt spontaneously into consciousness, Oops, I forgot to make that call. These are thoughts triggered by the unconscious that emerge into consciousness from the unconscious.2.) Conscious, intentional thinking.3.) Insecurity-Driven thoughts. These are reflexive thoughts that evoke doubt, fear, or negativity. These thoughts are not consciously driven (you may, for example, become aware of your fearful thoughts after you feel them).

In today’s Self-Coaching podcast I want to introduce you to my technique of Mind Talk. Mind Talk is a four-step program that will allow you to assert the full power of your conscious mind in order to neutralize the distorted, neurotic thinking that sustains anxiety, depression, and all emotional struggle. This technique is the core of my philosophy of Self-Coaching and will require a series of podcasts to fully equip you with the foundation necessary to succeed in liberating yourself from your struggles.

Today’s episode is the first of the series.

I begin by laying the preliminary groundwork for the steps ahead. We begin with a more through understanding, a demystifying, of how we think. Our conscious thoughts need to be seen in a different light. You need to understand that you are not your neurotic thoughts, these are interlopers, perpetrated by insecurity. Today’s podcast will help you recognize the importance of separating your true self from the neurotic entanglements of habituated, insecurity-driven thinking. Next week we’ll explore the role that the unconscious plays and following next week’s episode, we’ll begin a discussion of the four steps involved in applying Mind Talk.

If you’ve been listening to my recent podcasts, you would have heard me say that the reason you struggle emotionally is that you have become a passive victim of old, insecurity-driven habits. And make no mistake, a passive mind will always be susceptible to manipulation by insecurity. Essentially, a passive mind, one that capitulates to the doubts, fears, and negativity of insecurity, insists that neurotic struggle is….well, just the way it is.

Bull!

Once you awaken your sleeping giant of consciousness (active-mind) you can learn to overcome neurotic passivity and begin the important process of neutralizing reflexive, anxious thinking. Join me in this Self-Coaching podcast to see how a traumatic experience from my past led to my understanding of the absolute power your conscious mind has over that in you, which seems powerless.