What is the Effect of Your Thinking?
Posted on May 11, 2012 by Denise Michelle Starrett, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
What we experience is the effect of our thinking.
What if you acted as if the following were true?
“What you experience is the effect of your thinking.”
How well do you relate to any of these scenarios?
•You don’t want to work long hours on the job and you’re feeling resentful. The next project you are assigned looks like it will require extra hours at the office to complete it on time.
•While driving into work in the morning, you’re thinking how your customers have been so difficult lately and you’re feeling frustrated. You get a number of the more difficult personalities calling you during the day.
•Ever think, “I don’t want to run into Susie today, she is always dressed so nicely,” only to have her see you at the grocery store dressed in your best just out of bed look?
Here is the energetic makeover opportunity that can change the effects of your thinking. The same cause-effect process works with positive thinking as well!
I’ll share an example of a coaching client to illustrate this.
Most of the time, Marlene was feeling confident and competent on the job, but when she would be teamed up on a project with one colleague in particular, she would get flustered, second guess her decisions, and not perform to her best.
After one especially frustrating experience, Marlene shared with me what she was thinking. “I can never get the numbers right the first time, no wonder Jennifer doesn’t like to work with me.”
I asked Marlene to keep a small notebook with her for a week and to write down what she was doing, thinking, feeling, and noticing in her experiences. I asked her to look for the effects of her thinking. It didn’t take her long to start to see the relationship between what she was thinking and feeling and what she was experiencing.
In our coaching, Marlene learned how to shift her thinking in the moment, which shifted her to a higher emotional state, which inspired her to take more empowering actions. She learned to think more along the lines of “I really want to work on projects with Jennifer because I am happy, I like to be challenged, and I do really enjoy collaboration.”
Marlene’s experience on the very next project with Jennifer turned out just like she thought it would. Proving our experience is the effect of our thinking.
