THE LONG READ - Flip the Script: Mindset Reframing to Power Up Your Life!

Oct 28, 2024

We all have that voice of doom — our own personal Eeyore, who seems determined to look on the opposite of the bright side of every situation. But what if I told you that it’s possible to silence this voice? In this post, we’ll dive into cognitive reframing, a powerful technique that transforms those limiting responses and brings fresh perspective to old ways of processing events. Let’s explore how a slight mental shift can be the catalyst for real, lasting change in your life.

A cartoon of a rocket taking off, surrounded by clouds of smoke — Created with Bing’s Copilot

I’ve done a heck of a lot of thinking about this topic, and I’m increasingly sure that I’m right, that this one skill or tactic, this way of thinking is the biggest factor when it comes to predicting whether people will make a success of their lives (whatever that means to each person, of course) and whether they’ll be happy, in general.

Don’t get me wrong, this won’t protect you from things ever going wrong. It won’t stop any of us from going through breakups, from losing people we love, from becoming ill and of course eventually from dying. Sorry.

But it will help you to weather all of those storms in a much healthier and more productive way, I promise.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been reading self help and psychology books for almost half of my life. I’m 49 now, and I know that by the year 2000, when I was driving up and down the country every week for my job, I was already listening to Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway by Dr. Susan Jeffers on audio CD multiple times a week, and I’d read How To Stop Worrying And Start Living by Dale Carnegie. Those books were my gateway, if you like, into the wonderful world of self help.

If you’ve read more than a small handful of self help books, or indeed if you’ve been through any kind of psychology course or most business-related training, you’ll have come across Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:

The thing I’m talking about today is linked to an item in the top triangle - self-actualisation.

While I fully agree with Maslow that the physiological needs of every human being come first, that it’s foundational to have food and water and somewhere safe to sleep, I tend to disagree about what should come next in the pyramid.

If you’ve read more than a couple of my articles, or indeed my book The Bad Habit Kicker, then you might see a pattern emerging. Without consciously realising it, ever since 2018, when I had the idea for the book, I’ve been searching for the most fundamentally life-changing tactic that all of us can implement in order to improve our lives. And as you’ll see, it’s been elusive, and I had a lot of work to do on myself in order to get there.

After my last romantic relationship hit the skids almost exactly two years ago, I resolved to spend at least 2023 alone, just me and my not-so-little dog, holed up in my new home, really working through my grief and my other personal issues, so that I could emerge from the chrysalis as the most healthy, happy version of myself to take into the future.

Why bother? After all, on the surface I was moderately successful.

Because I could clearly see that there were issues circling about in my brain which were holding me back. I desperately wanted to be working in the self-help arena, I wanted to become financially independent and I knew that this was the third long-term relationship I’d had where, looking back with the benefit of some time and hindsight, I should have called time on the relationship long before it actually came to an end.

2023 was very much spent working through the emotional fallout of the breakup. I allowed myself the time and space to process it all, and I promised myself that if meditation, exercise and journaling didn’t continue to help me, if I found myself stuck on any one of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s 5 stages of grief, then I’d seek professional help.

By late 2023, I’d successfully worked through a lot of that, and I moved onto analysing the next big issue.

To be honest, I didn’t even realise I was doing that, at first. I’d been using my Bad Habit Kicker technique to work on some apparently surface-level issues.

First, I was frustrated by how much time I was spending playing mindless iOS games (match-3 kind of things, you know the sort of games I mean). So, I used the BHK to work through that, and I was surprised to find that the behaviour I was looking to get rid of was merely masking something else, a deeper issue lodged in my psyche. So I turned my attention to the next issue, and so on. It took me a few months, and six attempts, but I finally came to what I still believe was at the core of my problems.

A combination of issues from my childhood and the emotional fallout from my last relationship had left me with a sense of self-worth which was absolutely in tatters.

It took a heck of a lot of reading, journaling and meditation but I gradually rebuilt my self-worth, and my personal boundaries, brick by brick.

This freed me up enormously and my newfound sense of self esteem allowed me to start taking risks - to start offering out BHK coaching, to start working through a diploma in life/career coaching with a focus on helping people to become alcohol-free. I also started publishing articles on Substack, 2-3 times a week. I was suddenly doing all of the things I’d so desperately wanted to do for years, but that my low self-worth (manifesting in my crushing fear of failure as well as of what people might think) had been holding me back from actually doing.

For a while, I truly believed that the most important thing anyone could do to help them to build the life of their dreams was to work on their self-worth or self-esteem issues. I even started writing a book on the subject, I felt it that strongly.

And yet, my brain was still noodling around with the subject and something was holding me back from finishing and publishing the book. I found myself wondering if that actually was the truth of the matter.

Surely it should. I was even increasingly certain that self-worth should sit on the hierarchy of needs above physiological needs, before safety.

Why? Because it seem to me that a lot of the things in the second slice of the pyramid which Maslow called ‘safety’ are to do with things that can be very much positively impacted by a high sense of self-worth or self regard. If you value yourself and set appropriate boundaries with other people, then the choices that you make on a day-to-day level will be very different than if you don't.

Trust me, I have plenty of lived experience of this.

Think of it this way, if you value yourself and think that you’re worthy, then almost everything about your life will be different. You’ll be far more likely to choose healthy foods as often as you can, with occasional treats, you’re unlikely to smoke or drink, and you are more likely to engage in hobbies and interests which are personally uplifting. If you believe in yourself, you’re more likely to strike out against the crowd, so you’re less likely to be influenced by the five people around you (as Jim Rohn would say).

This changed behaviour extends into the TV you watch, the books you read and every facet of the way that you choose to spend your time. It even affects whether you decide to do hard things, or to follow the path of least resistance. If you feel like you’re worthy, then you're more prepared to do difficult things, so you're more likely to stay in education, to take courses, and to push yourself out of your comfort zone when it comes to your career.

All of which has a huge impact on your day-to-day life as well as your earning potential.

If your sense of self-worth is high, then you’re also likely to maintain extremely good boundaries, and that will impact the kind of personal relationships that you have. It will change the behaviour that you accept from both your friends and those who choose to get into romantic relationships with, not to mention how you interact with your family.

You are probably less likely to end up in a romantic relationship with someone who is fundamentally unsuitable for you.

With all of this in mind, you can probably see why I spent quite a lot of time thinking that self-worth was the be-all and end-all, and probably the thing that most people would be well-served to work on before they work on any of the surface level issues that might be plaguing them.

Reading this back, I think I’ve made a pretty compelling point. So what changed my mind?

I spend quite a lot of time every day—as much time as I can anyway—just thinking about things.

Whether that's when I'm sitting on my sofa as I am now with my dog snuggled up against me under a heated throw as the October weather starts to close in, thinking about writing articles like this, or whether it’s sitting with a set of headphones on and Brain.fm playing in my ears and just staring at a blank sheet of paper with a pen in my hand and letting my mind wander.

And I've come to realise over the last few weeks that there's something else that sits between the physiological and safety sections of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and it isn't just building a healthy sense of self-worth. I now believe that there's something that comes before that, something that’ll help you to build that self-worth in the first place.

Here we go then, back to the point of this article (finally!)

I’ve loved this quote for a heck of a long time:

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”― John Milton, Paradise Lost

And no, I’ve never read Paradise Lost. I think I might have tried to, once. But I don’t think I got very far with it…

I've come to believe that the fundamental marker for whether or not we will all be successful, on our own terms, and whether we will be happy or not, is to do with how we choose to analyse and process the events that we experience in our lives.

Think of it this way, we all know people who have been through similar life changing experiences don't we? And, some people seem to weather those storms very differently than others do.

Consider the wonderful Dame Deborah James, a journalist, educator, podcast host and charity campaigner, and also sadly a stage four bowel cancer patient, who passed away a couple of years ago.

Her experience in being diagnosed in her mid 30s with an aggressive form of cancer is not unheard of.

But what makes her stand out from the crowd is how she chose to deal with that situation.

Sure, I don't doubt that she had many moments of terror and grief, pain and fear, but she decided that she was going to capitalise on the situation and do her utmost to help others—while she underwent treatment and did everything she could to survive of course—by using Instagram and other social media platforms as a means of raising awareness (and funding), in the hopes that discussing the symptoms that she’d been going through before she was diagnosed would help other people to realise that they might also have a problem and perhaps get diagnosed sooner, thereby increasing their own chances of survival.

Or take Candy Lightner, an American woman whose daughter was knocked down by a hit-and-run drunk driver and killed in 1980. She used that terrible experience to set up MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), an organisation that seeks to stop people from driving with any amount of alcohol in their bloodstream, supports people affected by drunk driving, campaigns to prevent underage drinking, and strives for changes to impaired driving policies, whether that’s caused by alcohol or any other drug.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that all of us have to take the experiences that we go through in our lives and metabolise them into some kind of campaign or organisation. But that doesn't mean that we can't all work to process the things that do happen to us — those things which are largely out of our control — in a way that supports us and helps us, rather than descending into coping strategies which hurt us and hold us back.

What I’m essentially talking about how these people have used cognitive reframing.

It comes down to committing to taking a breath when something happens, and being able to decide what your response will be.

I’m not suggesting that this is easy. And I’m certainly not saying that we shouldn’t give ourselves some grace and take some time to regroup when something shocking or awful happens.

When my relationship ended, I was heartbroken. I needed time to work through that. I didn’t need anyone telling me ‘there’s plenty more fish in the sea’ (to my friends and family’s credit, no one actually did say this to me!) - which is a phrase that other people use in an attempt to get people to cognitively reframe the situation they’ve found themselves in. It rarely works.

We all need time to work through stuff on our own terms, but the danger lies in allowing ourselves to get stuck, to dwell on the past and the things it’s impossible to change - for too long.

I wrote about this idea in an article entitled Challenges Can Be A Good Thing - telling the story of when I went through a mildly disappointing experience as a teenager and I took comfort in the lyrics from the Rolling Stones song You Can’t Always Get What You Want.

You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometime you'll find
You get what you need

In that instance, I absolutely did not get what I wanted, but I managed to reframe it so I could process the experience in a healthy and productive way.

This is easier said than done, we’re all awash with the programming and conditioning of our childhoods, after all. But fear not, there are some things you can do to hone this skill! Read on…

Meditation

Yep, I mention this an awful lot. And I fully understand why many people are resistant to the idea. I think it still has connotations with Eastern mysticism for a lot of people. And the people who don’t think that might have tried it once and been just about swept away on a tidal wave of thoughts that suddenly appeared out of nowhere and threatened to wash them away. Which is an understandably uncomfortable experience.

Let’s get this straight: there’s no such thing as a perfect meditation session. Our brains are designed to create thoughts. That’s what they’re here for.

But that’s fine, because you’re not trying to sit in lotus position on a cushion and to completely empty your mind of thoughts. I’m pretty sure there are monks who’ve been meditating for hours every single day for most of their lives who only manage to do that for mere fleeting moments.

What we’re really trying to do is to quieten (not silence) the mind. We’re trying to show ourselves that we are not our thoughts, that there’s someone else in this silly human brain with us, someone who can observe the thoughts and see them for what they really are - fleeting - and to not allow ourselves to get caught up in them.

In the Indian classic The Bhagavad Gita, this is called ‘the inner witness’.

And in that space is where you have the opportunity to decide how you’re going to process this experience, what lessons you’ll choose to learn or how you’ll change this to benefit you, if at all possible.

Trust me, at first, a regular meditation practice won’t feel like it’s doing much for you. It’s all too easy to give up at that point, but if you stick with it, I assure you that there’ll come a day when you suddenly realise that some situation - one which would absolutely have triggered you at one time - didn’t bother you at all. Not only that, you’ve chosen a healthier response, almost without realising what you’re doing.

Why? Because meditation has allowed you to widen that gap between an emotion and your response. Which allows you to choose an action and to come to a different, less programmed-in conclusion, rather than merely reacting in a knee-jerk manner.

Journaling

There’s a very different part of our minds which gets accessed when we write things down, as opposed to when we merely think about them, or even if we talk to other people about them.

Now, I’m not suggesting that talking through your problems isn’t a good idea. The problem is, a heck of a lot of people - because they care about you - will want to help you to find a solution to your issues, possibly even going so far as to outright tell you what to do.

This isn’t going to help when you’ve got something in your life you want to reframe in your own way, and it could well be harmful to your relationship if you end up butting heads and falling out about it.

Instead, sit down with a pad and a pen (for me, writing by hand is again a different experience than typing) and ask yourself the following questions:

What’s the issue that I’m facing right now?
How do I feel about it?
Is that helpful? If not, why not?
How could I take something different, another learning, out of the experience?

Talking to yourself

I do this all the time. Fortunately, these days I live on my own.

When a thought occurs about some issue that I’m facing, I’m on the lookout for anything which makes me feel uncomfortable or that doesn’t feel like it fits with who I now believe I truly am.

If I sense a thought like that, then I’ll stop what I’m doing and I’ll ask myself:

“Come on now, Lou. Is that true? Is it helpful? How can I turn it on its head?”

Does this always work? Of course not, nothing will work for every situation. But it’s often enough of a pattern interrupt to help me to draw a different, healthier conclusion than I’d originally landed on.

Changing the state of your mind

If you’ve read a few of my articles, you might be forgiven for assuming that I’m relentlessly positive, that my life is perfectly organised and I never, ever, have a bad day.

Guess again. I’m as subject to the vagaries of my hormones as the next person, I get ill, and sometimes I get in a low mood or an unhelpful state of mind for no apparent reason. I still struggle daily with my fear and anxiety.

In fact, the reason I write and publish these articles, and continue to do so, is because I’m frequently coming up with new ways to motivate myself, to change my mindset and to keep myself on the path I want to walk, no matter what’s going on in my life.

This happened a few days ago. I woke up in a strange mood, opted to take a rest day from working out as I had feeling creaky after doing some pretty intense strength training sessions during the week, and then realised at about 5pm that I’d essentially just spent most of the day slumped on the sofa, feeling dejected and aimless.

Which is why I immediately (using Mel Robbins’ amazing 5-Second Rule to just get up and do it) went and got changed into some gym clothes and got on my exercise bike.

While cycling away, just doing an easy-ish ride as I knew I shouldn’t do anything too strenuous, I found myself with my iPhone in my hand, a Notes app open, and before I knew what I was doing, I’d come up with a list of ideas for what I should do to keep moving the needle on my coaching business.

Nothing had changed in my life. I hadn’t suddenly won the lottery. But I’d used the boost of endorphins to change my mind.

Now, you don’t have to buy an exercise bike in order to be able to do this yourself. There are free ways of doing this, and also ways which are accessible if you’re not able to work out, such as:

Go outside. Change the environment around you. Get some fresh air, notice the birds and the trees and the richness of the community where you live. Let your mind wander as you go, and see what conclusions your subconscious mind comes up with when there’s no pressure on it to do so. I recommend The Art of Noticing for ideas about cool things you can do on a walk to take your mind off things.
Watch something inspirational. Don’t just slump on the sofa in front of some throwaway show. Find a documentary or a series about something which you’re fascinated by or which will teach you something.
Read an inspirational book, I often find that if I do that when I’m facing a challenge, something I read will often give me an idea of how to proceed/what I can take from the experience.
Put on your favourite music! I felt like I needed a mood boost this morning, so I put on a greatest hits album by Queen, and sang along as I got on with things!
Do something else. This is why waterproof notepads exist - often when you put an issue aside and go and do something else, your brain will be mulling it over, and the answer can come to you seemingly out of nowhere. This is because of the fact you’ve allowed your brain an incubation period, and also the dopamine we get when we’re in the shower.

Reboot & Rise

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