Psycho Babble
Jun 11th, 2009 by Adam
What Is CBT & How Is It Related To Your Success?
..my foot steps heavily onto a small, crisp, dry leaf. In the silence on the path I’m walking you can hear everything around you. The day is clear, bright and you can see everything well even in the shade of the woods. There’s one thing I keep seeing in the environment around me on my journey here…There are, everywhere, small flowers scattered throughout the woods. Small, brilliant, yellow flowers, much like buttercups, dotting the landscape. My passing eye catches sight of them frequently as I move through my wooded path…
Within all success, personal development or law of attraction literature there is one common theme or underlying principle. That principle dots the pages of self-help books much like that little buttercup dots the surrounding landscape…
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Or more correctly, Cognitive Behavioral principles. CBT is a type of psychology which deals with the relationship between beliefs, thoughts and feelings.
(For a more in depth understanding of CBT read this: http://counsellingresource.com/types/cognitive-therapy/#CBT_theory )
What CBT says is this: What we think, creates our beliefs and what we believe shapes how we feel emotionally. So the idea is simple, to put it into Wayne Dyer’s words “Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life”.As a quick example, if you constantly think you “can’t” do something or you’re “not good enough” to do something then you are going to begin to believe it. That belief, that you’re not good enough, will produce more thoughts to back it up. This creates a sort of downward spiral that can be difficult to get out of. Before we know it, we feel inable to do much of anything well.
How does this make you feel?……
Naturally, beating yourself up irrationally (because it’s REALLY not true that you “can’t” do something) will begin to make you feel bad, sad, mad or any other host of negative emotions. The truth is, there’s nothing wrong with believing you “can” do something. It’s no violation of humility to understand what talents God has given you.
This basic understanding of CBT leads us immediately into the popular subject of positive thinking.
Positive thinking is two things in this context:
1) It’s the way to feel good
2) It’s the method for correcting debilitating beliefs
For more information on positive thinking, this article may help http://www.the-benefits-of-positive-thinking.com/origin-of-positive-thinking.html If we begin to use positive affirmations, begin to re-program our negative, self-defeating thinking with more positive statements about our ability we will immediately start to change the way we feel. We will feel happiness, peace with what happens in our lives, confidence in our ability to do something, etc….
It takes about thirty days to re-program your thinking. At first you’re not going to believe the positive thoughts but as time goes on, they begin to sink in. You really start to believe that you are as good as and as able to do something as everyone else. The incredible thing is that once you start to believe this you begin to notice how you’ve already been achieving things that your negative thinking wouldn’t allow yourself to recognize.
So how does this affect our success in life?…….If we walk around believing we “can’t” do something, and we are constantly feeling inferior, then we will have stopped ourselves before we’ve even started. We will feel like it’s not worth trying to begin to find success, purpose, or our dream life, etc….
The reality is this: You
can live the life you dream about. You can be as _______ as anyone else, whatever _______ may be. I assure you.Good Luck on your path….
To your unconventional success!
Adam Shields
