Coaching hacks: Climb out of the River

This series explores common issues raised by people looking for coaching. Episodes so far are about dealing with stress😫more specifically techniques to reduce Internal Pressure

Internal Stress Hack #4: Climb out of the river

All of us sometimes get swept away in emotion and especially if the emotion is a strong one like sadness, anger, feeling betrayed or unseen.

The real trouble starts when we believe the thoughts that we are experiencing completely and fuse with them, really believing that they are a true reflection of reality or what we think.

This is sort of like being swept away in a river – it’s hard to notice anything other than the raging water, our feet are not really on solid ground, and we end up wherever the river takes us.

It’s stressful being swept away by anything! The strong emotions and resulting thoughts that come from “being in the river” put a lot of extra strain on our minds and can often leave us feeling stressed, helpless, overwhelmed, or even depressed.

We do have the option of “climbing out of the river”.

What this means is taking a step back from our experience.

In other words, instead of “I am so angry” taking one step back it becomes “I am experiencing feelings of anger”. Suddenly we are out of the river and looking down at it raging by.

Suddenly instead of the anger being something that we are being, it is instead something we are experiencing.

Instead of being locked into a state of anger and believing our thoughts about the absolute wrongness of whatever triggered it, we can see that we ourselves are something outside of the anger and it leaves the door open to see what has triggered it differently.

How? Just like reframing it all starts with noticing our state; to use the analogy, that we have fallen into the river, then deciding we don’t want to be in it and steering ourselves back to solid ground by consciously shifting our perspective to understand that this is an experience not reality.

We are like the sky and our experiences are like the clouds that pass through it.

Episode 5 coming soon!