The way you think about something affects the way you feel about that thing. Your thoughts and feelings subsequently influence your choices, and ultimately determine your actions and your results. This determines how you show up in the world, which in turn creates your reality.
Whether you like it or not, your progress (or lack of progress) is closely linked to your beliefs, thoughts and feelings. In the ICM programme, we take a deep dive to create your new reality, you will come to realise that you have to power to change to this new reality.
How you create your reality
Your thoughts create feelings; your feelings create your behaviour (actions or inactions); your behaviour creates results; your results are evidence for our beliefs; and your beliefs drive further thoughts.
Before looking further into this complex interaction, let’s first get to know what these terms are:
Your thoughts are ideas or opinions produced by thinking or that occur in your mind. They are the things you tell yourself about what is going on around you. You could have many different thoughts about a single situation.
Your feeling is your emotional states or emotional reaction to a circumstance. Everyone has these feelings from time-to-time. Your feelings come and go as different things happen to you. You might feel happy, angry, and sad, all in one day. Some feelings are uncomfortable, but they are not bad.
Your behaviour is the way in which you act or conduct yourself, especially towards others. Your behaviours are observable through your actions or your lack of actions. If you feel happy, you are likely to do nice things (for others or for yourself). But if you feel angry, you might want to act mean.
Your result is the evidence of your thoughts, feelings and behaviours.
Your belief is what you consider to be true or accept or hold as an opinion.
Your belief system is the set of beliefs that you have about what is right and wrong and what is true and false.
Given exactly the same situation at the same time, people build their own reality based on their thoughts, feelings, actions, results and beliefs, and that’s why coaching is highly subjective and more efficient at deeper levels than non-personalised training or workshops.
Understanding your thoughts and feelings
Thoughts and feelings help you make sense of your surroundings and connect you with the world; they therefore have a tremendous influence on your daily lives. Thus, it is crucial to recognise the differences between your thoughts and feelings, as these can help you process them better.
Thoughts and feelings can be difficult to deal with, While it might be tempting to ignore your thoughts or push away feelings, you risk making decisions that lead to unhealthy or undesirable results, and these choices can lead to more painful thoughts and/or feelings.
Your thoughts and feelings can lead to actions that perpetuate that thought which reinforces those feelings causing you to repeat those actions in a cyclic way, which further reinforces your belief system.
When you decide to push down your feelings, this may lead to the emotion building up. This may subsequently lead to a burst out of anger at the wrong time or even sometimes towards the wrong person.
Most importantly, when feelings are bottled up, they can block your self-awareness and understanding. It is therefore crucial to learn to understand the difference between thoughts and feelings and how they work together.
Example of scenario : Let’s consider an example where John and Tom are internal candidates for a promotion; the promotion interview is due in two weeks with a panel of three members. During those two weeks, John sees Tom chat with every single one of those three panel members in the corridor.
Let’s go through the cycle for this scenario with the following thought:
- 💭 John thinks Tom is sweet talking the promotion panel members for favours.
- ❤️The feeling arising from the thought is anger and disgust from Tom ‘s behaviour.
- 🎬 John acts by retracting from the promotion interview.
- ⚡As a consequence, John does not get considered for any promotion.
- 🪐John ‘s new belief is that sweet talkers will secure opportunities, John does not not know how to pull favours, and John can never get promoted.
Working on your thoughts and feelings
While reading the given example, few things might come to your mind, including advice for John . This is easier to do when you are an external observer, but may not be so easy if you were John .
In your coaching sessions, various techniques will be used to dissect such scenarios and to help you build a new reality.
Impact Coaching & Mentoring (ICM) for Leaders 