“Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to change a moment of difficulty into a less difficult moment? If you could take a stressful situation and de-stress it would you like to be able to do that? There are ways to alter what is happening so that the outcome you get is positive instead of negative.
In this follow up blog post I’ll share with you a method. If you haven’t read the previous blog post go back and read that first. IF YOU HAVEN’T practiced what I shared with you last time spend some time doing that prior to adding in these steps. You want to build a house on a strong foundation so that it stands.
You want to build your abilities the same way. Before, anything else get used to looking for positive past experiences and re-living them. Hopefully, you have started building a library of positive resources. You have also practiced creating the future by imagining that resourceful you in times when you want to be more resourceful.
If you are a regular reader of my blog you know only a day has gone by. Keep in mind there is no rush. Practice the first part until you are facile with it. Then you can add this in. This information you read now can wait while you gain experience in the other first, but you will know the direction we are headed.
As I mentioned in the previous blog, read through this a number of times to familiarize yourself with the process. Once you get the idea of it you can do it while reading through it, or better, as I suggested you can record parts of the process and play them back slowly while you go though it. You will lead yourself through it so be sure to give yourself enough time to do everything thoroughly if you record it.
Build Skills Bit By Bit. Only Move From One Skill On After Getting Good At It
Practice what I share with you in this blog. You can do it easily in the privacy of your own home. In a short while you will notice yourself responding even more productively and positively and your life changing for the better.
Continue to make the positive changes utilizing your Inner Mental Movie Theater. Are you ready and eager to learn more? I’m going to give you some today and then more in subsequent blogs.
Determine How You’d Like To Be And Feel And Behave (Respond) In Difficult Or Less Than Glorious Situations
AT FIRST, pick a mild situation to begin. You can get to the tougher ones later. Start with easier ones while you learn the to go through this process. I mean this! Work your way up from easiest to the toughest in time. Over a period of days or weeks. Get good at the process before trying it on tougher times. Crawl before you walk!
Pick A Mild Situation To Begin With
There are times when you are simply less than glorious. Sometimes you aren’t thinking positively, you’re feeling down or upset, just not optimal.
Choose one to work with. Just one experience at a time. Be specific. Think, ‘I have difficulty when…’ and pick one. It may be in a particular situation, or with a particular person or there is some activity that gives you difficulty.
Find a time and or place where you could use a resource. Said differently, find a time in real life when you could use thinking and behaving more resourcefully.
There are moments in life when things can go any which way but instead of going how we want them to go they end up less than glorious. We loose our cool, we get frustrated or angry, we give in or give up, we cry, we shout, we say things we didn’t mean.
Instead of keeping our cool and being calm or confident we get stressed, harried, fearful or worried.
You most probably have had moments like that in the past. Pick a specific one. Chose a milder one to begin with, remember. Choose an easy one! I mean this! Crawl before you walk! Keep this in mind.
Then go back to my statement above, determine how you’d like to be and feel and behave in this situation instead of how you did in the situation. Consider what would be a more productive, positive way to behave instead of how you used to behave.
Any Resource Is Better Than No Resource
You can pick a specific resource for the situation because you think it would be better. For example, you weren’t confident and you wished you had confidence. That can make it better, yes.
That could be a good resource to have in that situation. Perhaps. A sense of humor might be a good resource to have as well. Perhaps, having the ability to laugh or be silly at that moment would have made it better. Anything is possible. Any resources can transform.
Maybe being patience, or happy or calm or curious would have been better. Curiosity, can be a great resource! The point is there is the resource we THINK would make it better when, in fact, almost any resource would have made it better. This is what is so cool!
It would not have been the difficulty it was and you would have gotten a different outcome if you’d had any number of resources available. Do you get that? There are numerous possibilities! The only limitations we have are the ones we allow. We are really only limited by what we can’t yet consider an asset or opportunity.
Had you moved into ANY other positive state than the less than glorious one you ended up with, it would led to a different outcome. Right? You understand that, don’t you? If not think about it a bit. However the situation played out, any positive resource would have made it different and somewhat better. Maybe completely better!
If it is somewhat better, that is better! So any positive new resource is better than no resource. It is NOT a matter of trying to find the ultimate, perfect resource it is a matter of choosing any resource that will lead you to a more productive outcome and get you more positive results. Do you understand this? Again, if not think about it.
Find A Positive Resource
Be free with your thinking in choosing new opportunities. Don’t be rigid, be relaxed. Open yourself up to infinite possibilities. You are still only going to choose one, or in time, a few, but you have a wide variety to choose from that will make a difference for you. At first, choose ONE to work with.
Learn and practice being more resourceful in a variety of ways. There isn’t a perfect way. There is not only one way. There are a variety of positive possibilities and you can learn and benefit from. Any one of them can lead to more glorious possibilities.
If you want to feel better you want to get feedback on how you can continue to transform your experiences for your benefit. So stay open minded and be willing to playfully explore.
Keep Light And Have Fun With This
Take it slowly and have fun. Be gentle and have fun. Be deliberate and thorough and have fun. Choose mild difficulties at first and have fun. Later move on to more difficult situations and have fun.
When you have learned and practiced and gotten good with the process you move onto larger issues in time. You still have fun because that is what you build into the process. Take it lightly even when dealing with more difficult issues.
There are those times that present us with difficulty. We didn’t behave as we knew we could, or wished we would. We want to take those less than glorious moments and transform them by adding in resources we didn’t utilize or were aware we had at the time.
We want to re-code our memories of the past to be more resourceful so we can choose to use them as resources in the present and future. That is why we spend time building and continuing to build our library of resourcefulness.
A Most Important Benefit Is You Become What You Think About
The reason why I want you to go and find all your positive times and relive those and catalog those and have experience recreating those is for you to have them available as choices whenever you may need to.
If you spend a large portion of your time devoted to finding resources and living them and creating them it makes you more resourceful. Your life will change for the better.
Utilize Any Of These Resources When Times Get Tough
A second benefit is you can utilize any of these resources more readily when times get rough if you have wired them in and made them automatic and available. What you think about you become. When you become more resourceful you can handle future difficult times better. Do you get how this works? It builds on itself.
There are times when everything goes your way. Maybe you feel on top of the world, or extra joyful. These are resources!
You got some news and you feel very happy. There are times when you simply feel fine, but more than fine. Super fine. YOU feel GOOD but not like a superhero. There are times when you feel confident, capable, certain you can do anything. Other times you feel silly or you have a sense of humor.
Still, at other times you feel relaxed, calm, peaceful or at ease. Sometimes you are concentrated and focused, sometimes playful. At times you are focused on your needs at other times you are attentive and helpful to others. All these constitute useful resources.
Re-live It: Feel Now What You Felt Then
Go back inside your mental movie theater and re-live some of these one at a time. Notice what you saw at the time, what you heard and felt that made you feel that way.
Get a sense of it as much as possible ! You can even imagine feeling it at 2, or 3 or even 5 times the intensity. You can ramp it up. Re-live it from your point of view.
Build them one by one by revisiting these memories again and again.
Watch It: Feel How Good It Feels To Be This Way (Selfie)
Imagine the other way too. See yourself in the situation (selfie) looking the way you do when you are resourceful in this fashion. How do you look, how do you use your body and move. What does your voice sound like. You can see that you (in the movie) feels great.
Feel how incredible you would feel to be this way. If everything for your future you was going right, and you were everything you wanted to be, doing what you wanted to be doing and having what you wanted to have. How would you feel? Feel that!
Enjoy these. Do this each day. Build a library of incredible feelings, talents, abilities, and resources. Let’s call them resources states.
Practice each day. Realize that whenever you remember these positive times you can feel the wonderful feelings again and again even stronger if you’d like. Strong or not isn’t the point. The point is taking time to live and feel these resources.
You Can Access or Build Past, Present And Future Resources
In order to change your response in the future you want to have one or more of these resources available when you need it. You are going to use your mental movie theater to imagine when and where and with whom you may need one or more of them.
Pay attention to what and how you behave and feel differently when you add the new resources in. First we will change the past.
Go to your mental movie theater and take up a comfortable seat. Watch this experience on your movie screen in your mind.
You are sitting in a movie theater and the screen is over there. The movie begins and you watch yourself go through the experience over there UP UNTIL the point, but not beyond, when it became a difficult situation.
You Are The Director And Editor Of Your Inner Movies
You chose a mild one because you want to be able to STOP IT from being a difficulty. You want to change the difficult moment so it no longer affects you. You want to be free so you want to stop it easily from being an issue. You are going to work as a movie editor.
Watch yourself over there on your mental movie screen in a situation leading to a less than glorious outcome. One you actually experienced in your real life past. Watch it up to, but not beyond, when it started going awry. STOP IT prior to when you behaved as you DO NOT WANT to. As it approaches slow it down and stop it.
Cut the film right there! Edit! You snip away the less than glorious reactions you had. As an editor you would throw them in a bin on the computer or let them drop on the cutting room floor. Then insert the new resourceful behavior. Paste it in at the precise point.
Paste it in so that from the critical point on you now watch yourself behaving in the situation the way you WANT TO behave. Watch the movie continue. Look at yourself, listen and notice how you feel differently.
Now you run it again from start to finish making sure you behave as you want to until the end. It begins, you watch. Watch the situation begin to turn sour but instead of succumbing to what was used to be YOU NOW think, feel and behave in the new positive way? Watch it again and again over and over. Re-live it and love it!
Notice how you look, what you sound like, what and how you say things to yourself in your head, under your breath or out loud. Notice how you move. Imagine it with as much detail as possible.
Adjust As Necessary
Do you like what you see? Do you like how you feel watching this new you? If it isn’t as good as you’d like it improve it. Add in another resource. Change it in positive direction until it is too your liking. Keep it realistic as you do. Intensify the positive feelings.
Adjust it. You want to behave more positively in the future make your inner mental movie a compelling example of you behaving that way. Tweak it. See how wonderful you look. Notice how you positively interact. Listen to the kind things you say to yourself (or others).
When it is how you like it – spend time reviewing it this way. Notice how it is different and more positive. Then realize that is how it can be in the future.
Whenever you watch your inner movie in this way you want to end it completely before you do it over again. So watch it to the end and then when it finishes shake it off (literally shake yourself a bit) or get up, move around, do a jumping jack. Anything that creates a shift.
Go inside and change a few other mildly difficult times this way. Pick 3, 6, 10 however many you wish. Practice recoding them. Review them with the new behaviors and how do you feel? Are you moving in the direction you want to move in? Is feeling good? Feeling great?
You are building and practicing a skill. If you keep at it you will build the habit of looking for resources whenever you encounter the trigger points in less than glorious situations. This is an incredible skill to have. So you want to practice a lot. Don’t believe me build it for yourself!
There is more to this process and we will add on to it. It gives you another powerful alternative way to accomplish the same end. It is a useful approach for you to learn. Practice and practice. You will be amazed at how easily you can make changes. More Next Time!” Rex Sikes
Have a majestic day!
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