Know How Your Mind Works and Master Your Life

It’s true that your mind can be your greatest friend or your worst enemy. This is determined by your inner conversation that results in your mind-body-emotional states and your responses. For further reading, download the eBook How to Love Your Life.

Getting back to your mind-body-state and inner conversation, your overall state, how you feel most of the time is also your primary disposition – your Attitude towards your life.

Do a quick check of your mind-body-emotional states: How do you feel most of the time? Are these states enhancing and empowering or paralyzing and limiting? Do the states of consciousness you live in make your life a party or a misery?

Your attitude consists of your values, beliefs, meanings, intentions. It determines and is determined by your inner conversation. Your values, beliefs, meanings and intentions all are what we refer to as frames by which we frame all information.

Your frames determine the games you play, meaning that the frame results in a state and you respond from state. This sounds very technical, so let me give you an example.

Say you meet your friend for coffee and she’s late. Now if she is always late, the frame or meaning you may give this is that she is wasting your time and you may get angry (state) and when she arrives you may shout at her (response or game) and the coffee date is a real disaster (outcome).

After losing your temper you feel guilty about your anger. This is a state (guilt) about a state (anger) that is called a meta-state. You say to yourself, “Why do I always do this?” Then you feel contempt (state) at feeling guilty (say) and say to yourself, “I am so stupid!” (frame and inner conversation) and burst into tears (response and game).

What is important to know is that your higher frames, states and games govern the lower frames, states and games. In this case the highest frame is “I’m so stupid”, feeling contempt about yourself and the game you play is beating yourself up.

The next important thing to know is that changing any frame or state will change the game.

So, say after you feel angry when your friend is late, you access a state of calmness and apply that to your anger, your state changes to calm anger (meta-state) and you say to yourself, “She is probably stuck in traffic, I’ll catch up on calls while I wait” (frame and inner conversation). When she arrives you are happy to see her and say to yourself, “I’m blessed to have great friends!” The coffee date is bliss (outcome).

Accessing the state of calmness, confidence, excitement, focus, curiosity, etc. and applying it to another state is like slipping on a jacket that changes your state, posture, facial expression and response accordingly. Associating and linking or anchoring a state and all the sensory qualities with a specific jacket (style, colour, texture, etc.) gives you the opportunity to recall and stay in a resourceful state, no matter what the situation.

On My.CoachingSelf.com you have the opportunity to create a whole Wardrobe of Jackets.

This has been reposted from CoachingSelf.com