The structure of the following Model was taken from my Life Coach training with Brooke Castillo, founder of The Life Coach School.
All aspects of our lives are categorized into 5 things
Circumstances
Thoughts
Feelings
Actions
Results
How we think about things determines how we feel about things. How we feel determines what we do. What we do or do not do creates our results.This creates the sum total of our lives.
Your thoughts are important little sentences. I highly encourage you to pay attention to them. This is harder than you may think. Most people don’t even realize or hear them.
Circumstances: Things that happen in the world we cannot control- more on that later.
Thoughts: Sentences that happen in your mind.
Feelings: One word description of the vibrations in your body, caused by your thoughts, not the circumstances.
Action: Behaviors, what we do or don’t do in response to our thoughts.
Result: what we see as an effect of how we act.
The result will always evoke the original thought.
Doing this work is the best way of getting out of your socially programmed through patterns. As you become more aware of this, you really become someone who is not at the mercy of unconscious thinking. You begin to realize the results of your life are caused by your own thoughts which you do have control over.
All circumstances are neutral. In order for circumstances to be true, everyone would need to agree. For example: It’s raining outside. Circumstances are subjective depending on who is viewing them.
Where do you start your model? Let’s set it up like this:
C- Circumstance
T- Thought
F- Feeling
A- Action
R- Result
The first thing we do is a thought download.
Write down anything about the problem that comes to mind. It’s really important to understand that things happen in the world and in our lives that we have no control over. The way other people treat us, things that may have happened to us are more about what we think they mean.
The reason you feel out of control over things is because you aren’t aware of your thinking. The first step is to become aware of what you're thinking about in your life.
I’m talking about really thinking about whether you want to keep thinking the things you are thinking. This is a very deep question. Why do you want to keep thinking this way?
Read that again…Slowly
The cause of the problem is not the unwanted results, but the thought that led to unwanted results.
Differentiating thoughts from circumstances is an important first step.
Remembering circumstances are outside our control and must be factual as distinguished by truth just like in a court of law.
Subjective truth varies from person to person and cannot be considered real truth.
Feelings are vibrations in the body often caused by a cortisol spike. Examples: anger, excitement and sadness.
Don’t confuse feelings with involuntary physical sensations such as hunger, reflexes, cold and physical pain.
Emotions are voluntary because we can change what we feel with our thoughts.
Actions refer to our behavior. Reaction or inaction. This is directly related to our feelings.
Example: eating when we’re not hungry because we feel lonely. Withdrawing from relationships because we’re sad.
If we want different actions we have to choose different thoughts to produce different feelings.
A change in voice can be subtle and is considered an action.
When we manage our thinking with intentional thoughts, we can change our feelings to the ones we want. In the long run when we change our behaviors we can have an amazing life.
Results are the effects of our actions. Over-eating when we are not hungry and not focussing on the effects of our dysfunctional relationship for example, will only lead to more problems. Choosing different actions will lead to different results.
Most of the time we think our results are our circumstances. The truth is we are entirely responsible for our results. The great news is because our thoughts are in our control you can examine your mind and choose thoughts which will produce a different result.
The mind is very efficient. It has been thinking the same thoughts in the same patterns over and over again. If you're trying to change your thought patterns, it's a skill that requires patience. You are in a battle with your own mind which wants to think the same old way. By applying this model to problem solving you will train your mind to replace unwanted thoughts with intentional more positive thoughts and slowly you will see you are in control.
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