All right, welcome back to the Daily Mastermind. George Wright III here with your daily dose of inspiration, motivation, and education. I hope your day has started out in an amazing way. I want to get you going with the Daily Mastermind quote of the day. It's from Nelson Boswell, and the quote is, The first and most important step towards success is feeling that we can succeed. The first and most important step towards success is feeling that we can succeed. And I think that that quote has a lot of insight in it, and so I encourage you to kind of think about that a little bit, because it is important to get your thoughts in line, like we talk about all the time, but having that feeling and that emotion and that confidence and self-esteem towards being able to succeed is also very, very important. So today I want to share with you a great blog article from my business partner, Robert at Stuberg. We own the personal development company together and Robert writes a blog once a month. And the blog entry this month is called Thought Distortions. And this blog is just packed with content and ideas on how to really start changing your thoughts, especially the ones that you don't want to have in your life. So I'm going to go through this with you, but you can feel free to head over to Stuberg.com to get tons of additional blog articles and ideas and things that can really help you to unleash your potential. So without any further ado, let's jump right into it. One of the questions clients frequently ask me is what is the best way to change your thoughts? In other words, how do you get rid of the thoughts you don't want running around in your mind? If you take the time to analyze your unwanted thoughts, you'll often discover that they're just based on distortions of reality. So finding ways to eliminate these thought distortions can take many forms. And this is something I've gone to Robert for many, many times over the years, and so I really love what he has to say about this. He goes on to say, over the years, I've used several methods, but some of the ones I've found most effective have been self-hypnosis, sleep programming, meditation, or even something that he calls hypnology, which you may find fun to investigate and experience for yourself. There's an actual free product on his website called Provocative Destiny, and on our site, you can explore the concept of hypnology with this, which involves using musical intelligence to reprogram your subconscious mind. It's a pretty powerful way to change your thinking. So just go over to stuburg.com and you can get a copy of that for free. Now, the challenge to eliminating your unwanted thoughts, however, is that you first have to figure out what thoughts you need to eliminate So let me start by telling you about cognitive behavioral therapy CBT which was developed by an American psychiatrist Aaron Beck in the 1960s See Beck originally used Freudian psychoanalysis with his patients but as a researcher and scientist, he decided to put the psychoanalysis to the test. Unfortunately, those tests he conducted did not produce the results he was expecting, which is what led him to start developing and testing other methods. And as you might imagine, Beck was not originally applauded for challenging any accepted beliefs and practices. But as other colleagues began to try his methods, Beck was vindicated and eventually regarded as an important pioneer in the field of psychiatry. So the essence of what Beck discovered is that negative thoughts fall into basically three categories. Negative ideas about yourself, negative ideas about the world, and negative ideas about the future. And for many people, these negative thoughts become automatic over time, so they're no longer even questioning that they're having these thoughts. But when Beck began questioning patients about their thoughts and pointing out various inaccuracies or distortions, patients would recognize their faulty thinking and choose the new thoughts. As a result, as it sounds, it was revolutionary at the time. I'm sorry, as simple as it sounds, it was pretty revolutionary at the time, and it still remains a major part of psychiatry today. It's especially significant in the treatment of depression, for example. I find it one of the best tools available to clarify when it's thinking about just about anything. So read the next section on thought distortion on this blog and see if you can uncover any in your own thinking. I think it's safe to say that we all have thought distortions, but we can eliminate them by recognizing and acknowledging them and by beginning to ask better questions to get to the truth. The key is to learn to rise above thought distortions, which always fall into three main categories. Negative thoughts about yourself or personal thoughts, pervasive, and permanent. So negative thoughts about personal, pervasive, and permanent. The good news is that with clear, kind of rational thinking, you can spot these thoughts. However, it's always recommended to brainstorm what you're thinking about with someone else, like a coach, mentor, counselor, doctor, to really get unbiased feedback because we obviously are pretty biased with our thoughts already. So here's the cognitive triad. This is these three things that we tend to have negative thoughts about. The first is the self. Is the self worthless or valuable This is a personal area Number two the world or environment Is the world unfair is it fair is it neutral This is pervasive This is a pervasive category And the third category is the future Negative thoughts about the future. Is the future hopeless or hopeful? Do you feel that you have something to look forward to or something to fear? And this is a permanent category. Again, the most challenging problems are the ones that we convince ourselves are personal, pervasive, or permanent. But those on your list can be eliminated. So put those on your list. And let me go through for you real quick just some different types of thought distortions. And the reason I want to go through these, this is in the blog as well, is it's going to help you to identify if maybe you are in some of these patterns. If you've seen in your own life some of these negative thinkings. Do you have all or nothing thinking? You know, engaging in kind of black and white thinking, thinking in extremes such as it's all good or it's all bad with nothing in the middle. If you have this all or nothing thinking, then you have a thought distortion. How about if you have selective abstraction? This is selecting one idea or fact from an event while ignoring all the other facts in order to support your negative thinking. In other words, you look at a situation and you see one bad thing and you don't bother to look at the rest. That's selective abstraction. That's a thought distortion that you need to be aware of. How about mind reading? Meaning believing that we know the thoughts of other person's minds, right? All of us have gotten those texts and we've interpreted them to be what we think they mean to say rather than what they say. And that's a mind reading thought distortion. Another one is negative predictions. Negative predictions are believing that something bad is going to happen. even though there's really no evidence to support that prediction. Some of us get in this pattern where we believe something negative is going to happen, and we literally have no reason to believe that. We just have this negative thought distortion that we're dealing with. Another one is catastrophizing. And I know that's a big word. That's a big word for me too. But it's exaggerating the potential or real consequences of an event and becoming fearful of the consequences. You know how sometimes we fear something's going to happen, so we really start to exaggerate how it's going to affect us, when really in the end, you know, we're going to survive it. We've survived worse, right? So this is also a thought distortion, negative thought distortion. How about an overgeneralization? Do you ever do this where you're making a rule based on a few negatives or isolated events and then applying it to everything? You know they always they never you know this is overgeneralization generalization and this can lead to some real negative thoughts You have to analyze if that something that you having happen Another one is labeling Creating a negative view of oneself because of errors or mistakes that you made This type of overgeneralizing, it affects a view of yourself. So you had a bad experience in the past, and now you feel that you're that kind of person. I'm doing quotes, quote unquote, right? Labeling or labeling someone else. They made a mistake in the past, and so you're labeling them as this particular way, right? That's a negative thought distortion. I'll give you a couple more. Magnification, exaggerating an imperfection in something greater than it is. You know, I find myself sometimes doing this about myself. You know, if you have some kind of a negative thing, do you exaggerate that it's this big imperfection rather than dealing with it and recognizing that that thought doesn't serve you And that thought is an exaggeration. It's a magnification. Or maybe you do the opposite. You minimize things. You take a positive event and you make it kind of really less important. You know, that was okay. If you don't learn to celebrate your successes or your positives, it's going to keep you in that negative thought distortion. So, you know, these are all examples of thought distortions. And the reason I wanted to go through that with you and with that blog article that my business partner Robert Stuber wrote is that you have to, as much as you want to grow and learn and get better and be more productive in your communication, your business, your relationships, you have to start by identifying the areas that you may not recognize. See, it's easy to recognize when we're doing something wrong. It's not easy to recognize thoughts that we may not identify as wrong thoughts. These are thought distortions. So I hope that's something that will get you thinking and questioning where you're at, what you're doing, why you're thinking a certain way. Because remember, I've mentioned it many, many times, the minute you go take a step back and you enter that third-party mode where you're analyzing your thoughts, you are no longer your thoughts. You are no longer the emotions, and you can take control and move forward. Anyway, that's my message for today. I hope you have an amazing day. Work on those thoughts. Identify those bad thought patterns, and I'll look forward to talking with you more tomorrow. And also, by the way, share this episode. I guarantee you there's a lot of people out there that really kind of suffer and are dealing with this. And it would make a huge difference and mean the world to me if you'll share this episode with someone that you know. And hit me up on The Daily Mastermind on Facebook or Instagram. I'd love to get some of your feedback. Anyway, that's the message for today. My name is George Wright III, and this has been The Daily Mastermind. Have an amazing day.
