Divesting a Thought of Its Power
When we think about a potential future scenario that makes us uncomfortable, our mind wants to “confront” the thought. It wants us to meet the thought on the thought’s terms and to accept the future scenario as true - even if it has no basis in fact - so that we can come up with a solution, just in case that future scenario actually happens.
When we confront thoughts like this, what we end up doing is breathing life into them and giving them power over us.
So instead of “confronting” a thought, in this episode we talk about a better way to address these thoughts - a way that helps us loosen the grip that a challenging thought has over us.
Episode Transcription
Intro:
When we think about a potential future scenario that makes us uncomfortable, our mind wants to “confront” the thought. It wants us to meet the thought on the thought’s terms and to accept the future scenario as true - even if it has no basis in fact - so that we can come up with a solution, just in case that future scenario actually happens.
And when we confront thoughts like this, the one’s that don’t suit us, what we end up doing is breathing life into them and giving them power over us.
So instead of “confronting” a thought and meeting it on its terms, in this episode we’ll talk about a better way to address these types of thoughts - a way that helps us loosen the grip that a challenging thought has over us.
Here we go.
Main:
There are lots of ways to process challenging thoughts, but one I want to share with you today involves divesting a thought of its power.
And what I mean by that is: how can we take the wind out of the sails of thought that’s not suiting us, how can we deflate it, how can we loosen the grip that this negative or challenging thought has on us.
And in order to explain the idea of divesting a thought of its power, I think it makes sense to actually talk first about the counterpart to that concept which is infusing a thought with power.
So the idea of infusing a thought with power is a concept we’re familiar with, and we’re all probably familiar with ways that we’ve heard or learned about that help us make certain types of thoughts MORE powerful, so things like:
Repetition – so if I repeat a thought over and over again, the repetition of that thought helps me to form new neural pathways that can reroute and change the way I think about a particular situation.
So for example if I want to make more money, every time I have a thought around lack or feeling like I’m not living the kind of lifestyle I want to live, I replace it with a phrase or a mantra or something that repeated over time helps me to infuse a new idea with a certain amount of power. So repetition is one way to infuse an idea with power.
Another practice that helps us infuse thoughts with power would be something like envisioning or manifesting, which is essentially the idea of dreaming about or focusing on a future version of events that we want to come to pass. And with manifesting the belief is that if you consistently envision something you want to experience, you can call things into your life that will bring it to you.
And those are just two ways, but I wanted to start with infusing power because what I want to talk about today are ways to do the opposite - which is to suck power out of an idea.
We know how to build up an idea, but how do we suck the life out of a thought, or process a thought that we don’t want to keep experiencing? And not only process it but process it in a healthy way that doesn’t involve burying it or putting it in a box and leaving it unaddressed.
To start with, I think it’s helpful to point out that when we have thoughts about the future that are uncomfortable, one thing we feel the urge to do is “confront” the thought or figure out a way to “deal with it” by thinking through it.
In other words, when a thought occurs to us that we don’t like or that’s uncomfortable, our mind immediately jumps to trying to think our way to the other side of it. Our mind wants to use our intellect to solve the problem. It wants to use reason and logic and to think through the situation so that we can arrive on the other end with a solution.
Here’s a couple of scenarios that might resonate with you where we do this.
So how often are you thinking something like:
What am I going to do if X happens in the future? OR
What if X person is thinking this about me? OR
What if X thing goes wrong?
And in each of these situations, when we have a thought like this our natural response is to do what I would call “confront the thought.” And what I mean is we almost automatically accept the thought that we’re having as true so that we can come up with a response, just in case that thing actually happens.
In other words, in order to cover our bases – just in case this particular event actually does happen, in the future – we let our mind accept this thing as true so that we can think of a response that will protect us - even if we don’t have a credible reason to think that it will happen.
So our mind will accept as true that something in the future might happen, someone might be thinking something negative about us, or something might go wrong - just so we can think of a solution that will make us feel better about it.
So let me give you an example:
I’ve run my own business for years now, and a thought that always hangs around in the back of my mind is: what if this business fails? Now I’ve been running it for years now, and I have all sorts of indicators in my day to day in terms of the growth the business is experiencing, and the feedback that we’re getting from people, and a whole bunch of other indicators of success - but despite all of those, I’ll have this thought enter my mind every now and then that says: “What’s happened to this point was a farce, and this business is actually going to fail.”
And the reason our mind wants to take us to this place of failure is because it wants us to process a bunch of future scenarios that will keep us on our toes. Your mind’s job for thousands of years has been to keep you thinking about things in the future that might be dangerous around you so that you’ll always be prepared to survive – it’s the prehistoric wiring inside of you that helped your ancestors survive.
And here’s the really sneaky part. Because your mind wants to keep you safe, as soon as you think about a rational response to that thought, your mind will ever so slightly change the hypothetical in a way that will cause you to have to come up with a new solution to the new, changed future version of events.
It’ll change the story on you so many times, and keep giving you so many hypothetical scenarios that it becomes almost IMPOSSIBLE to ever think your way to the other side of that situation.
It’s actually a lot like playing ping pong with your mind – your mind sends over a thought that makes you feel uncomfortable, and you volley back a solution, then your mind sends back a slightly different concern, and that causes you to have to think about how you’d respond to THAT situation, and then you volley back a solution, and so on.
And what happens is we get caught up in these thought loops where our mind is trying to solve for and think through all of these hypothetical scenarios, and it’s a really destructive cycle.
So in my example, when I have a thought like “This is going to fail,” I think “Well, I’ve been doing this for a few years now, and I’ve overcome a lot, so I’m pretty confident that I’ll be able to handle whatever comes next.” And so I volley my response back over.
And then my mind will volley back another thought, like: “But what if whatever happens next is something that you’ve never had to deal with before, what if you run out of money, what if people stop believing in you, what if you make a wrong decision. How will you recover from that?” And so then my mind forces me to try to think of a solution to THOSE questions, and volleys it back into my court.
And so you can see how we end up in a spiral like this, so easily, where even if we have a thought that has no basis in fact, or that is unlikely to happen, our mind will accept that thought as true, and we’ll keep trying to answer these hypothetical questions and we do that just so we that we can try to resolve them.
And I would just call that whole process trying to confront a thought - we meet the thought on the thought’s terms.
But when you attempt to confront a thought like that and try to come up with a rational response to a hypothetical question about the future, one of the byproducts of confronting a thought is that you infuse it with power.
When you accept a thought as true and meet it on the thought’s terms, even for the purposes of coming up with a solution, you end up breathing life into that thought. Even if it had no basis in fact, you legitimize it and you reinforce it by trying to solve it and volley back a response.
And if you keep deciding to confront the thought on the thought’s terms, you end up living inside of the thought, and you continue to keep investing in the hypothetical story around the thought. You keep feeding it and legitimizing it, and it keeps growing.
And pretty soon, because you’ve had this ping pong back and forth for so long, you start to shift from engaging in a hypothetical to try to make yourself feel better, to full out internalizing this thing as something that actually is real.
So you go from answering a hypothetical to believing that this thing will actually come true because you’ve engaged over and over in this thought cycle. And that’s when we find ourselves in this endless spiral that is really hard to break out of.
So how do we break this cycle of confronting thoughts in this way and instead of building them up, how do we divest them of their power.
I want to offer you a two-part process for making this shift. Part 1: Acknowledgment, and Part 2: Letting go.
Part 1 is acknowledgement of a thought that has power over you. And we start with acknowledgment because we have to identify a thought for what it is. We have to acknowledge and give a name to the very specific thing that currently has a hold over us.
If we don’t call that thought out by name, it will lurk under the surface and stay in the background and keep doing damage to us - and we won’t be able to seek it out and identify it. The more specific we get, the harder it is for us to hide from the thought.
So in my example, if I’m trying to break the cycle of this thought I keep having about the future of my business, I need to acknowledge the thought for what it is. I need to get very specific in saying “The thought I keep having is that my business is going to fail.” And I have to acknowledge that there’s a part of me that thinks, regardless of how much success we’ve been having, that there’s a potential that this business could fail.” Despite all the data points to the contrary, and despite everything I’ve learned, in order to divest this thought of its power I have to first acknowledge that that’s a thought I’m having. It’s not a reality, it’s just a thought.
So Part 1 is to give the thought a name and acknowledge it.
Part 2 is letting the thought go.
So once you’ve acknowledged the existence of a thought, we have to practice letting it go. And there’s incredible power behind letting a thought go because if you do it consistently, over time it allows you to see that you don’t need that thought in order to stay safe.
When you let go, you realize that you don’t need to have to ping pong a response back to your mind every time it comes up with a new hypothetical in order to stay safe. You don’t have to solve for every variation your mind comes up with in order to be prepared for whatever might come in the future.
So what you do by letting go is, you essentially untether yourself from the hold that a future thought has on you.
Now I want to make sure that we understand the difference between dismissing or pushing away a thought, and the idea of letting it go.
We’re not trying to dismiss a thought because that would leave it unaddressed. What we’re trying to do by letting a thought go is to actively release it. It goes hand in hand with acknowledgement because it allows you to detach yourself from your clinging to the desire to have the ping pong battle and answer every hypothetical.
Letting go means not judging it or trying to solve for it, but instead just letting it just drift away. I kind of have a visual in my mind every time I let go of a thought where I’m actually cutting a cord that keeps that thought tied to my mind. It’s just a visual that I have that’s helped me to be intentional about letting go. But the point is if you can consistently acknowledge a thought for what it is, and then let it go, you begin to slowly divest that thought of its power.
Over time, you realize you can exist without that thought, you are safe without that thought, you don’t have to solve or “confront” that thought in order to stay safe.
So in my example, if I continually let go of my mind’s desire to engage in trying to solve every question my mind poses, then I realize that no matter what happens in the future, I’ll be ok. I’ll be able to solve problems that come up, I’m resourceful, I have resources I can access, and I don’t need to solve every hypothetical in order for things to work out.
And the really powerful part is, once you do this with one or two or three thoughts, your start to build a new data set that your mind can look to for more proof and evidence that this process works. In other words – if I keep acknowledging and letting go of a thought I keep having, and I repeat that process over time, I realize that thoughts lose their power and shrink away over time.
Now the last thing I want to mention is how to get started. I know just as well as anyone that divesting a thought of its power is a hard thing to start and a hard thing to practice.
But here’s what I’ve found is the most important starting point: and it’s the belief that this repetition will eventually lead to stripping a thought of its power.
You have to give yourself a chance to see that over time, if you 1. Acknowledge a thought for what it is, and 2. Practice actively letting it go, over time the thought will lose its power over you.
Believing in something like this is hard because you’re fighting your instinct to keep engaging in the ping pong battle, and it’s so easy to get drawn into that back and forth.
But you have to maintain that belief so that every time your mind tries to do this to you, you commit to working your process, which is acknowledgement followed by letting go, repeated over and over again.
Go have a great workday.