Main Topic: Listen to Your Body and Control Your Inner Dialogue
From the Book, “Do Hard Things” by Steve Magness (an affiliate link through Amazon.)
Second Pillar: Listen to your body
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- Pillar 2: Listen to your body
- Name it.
- Doing this gives us a better shot upstream in our evaluation because there is not often much time between the arrival of a feeling and our reaction.
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- Technique- Use “you, she/her, or your own name” instead of speaking to yourself in first person language.
- Another technique- say the voice you want to listen outloud to give it more power.
- Using second or third person language creates distance between the experience and our emotional response.
- Alain de Botton (author and philosopher), “A good internal voice is rather like (and just as important as) a genuinely decent judge: someone who can separate good from bad but who will always be merciful, fair, accurate in understanding what’s going on, and interested in helping us deal with our problems.”
Third Pillar: Respond instead of react
- Signals like pain, discomfort, and threats/challenges
- Often we go from experiencing pain, adversity, or discomfort straight to a freak out.
- We want to train to be like the meditators and sit in the sensation, and evaluate before a response.
- The counterbalance to the amygdala’s pain button is the prefrontal cortex. While the amygdala might trigger anxiety that wrecks our capacity to execute a task, the PFC acts to regulate emotional responses and maintain our performance on the task at hand.
- Burnout- overactive amygdala.
- Often we are not only reacting to the initial stressor (reality) but also the anticipation and lingering reverberations of it. Worse, we then we learn to do this same overactive response the next time we are in a similar situation.
- Creating space
- Creating space between the stressor and our reaction “is a way to disrupt the pattern, to slow down the jump from feeling to freak out.”
- According to Magness, you need two things for a calm conversation:
- #1 Time alone in your head
- #2 Keep your mind steady: Develop the ability to respond instead of react.
- Utilize and practice multiple strategies
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