Stop Self-Sabotage: Six Steps to Unlock Your True Motivation, Harness Your Willpower, and Get Out of Your Own Way

Exercise: Thought Record A Thought Record is a visual way to represent your thinking as it occurs in specific situations and events to allow you to see in real time how your thinking affects your feelings and behaviors. It is a classic Cognitive Behavior Therapy tool first created by Dr. Aaron Beck,

Exercise: Physicalize the Emotion Intense negative feelings can make you feel out of control, and this is one of my favorite exercises to help regain control and feel mastery over circumstances and environment. We all need that feeling to some degree in order to feel safe, which is the basis for any type of self-actualizing pursuits and allows us t

For example, Black-and-White Thinking might be more of a struggle for you in romantic relationships but not for work or family relationships.

First, do a quick check-in with your current emotional state. If you notice you are feeling sadness, disappointment, anger, frustration, or other negative emotions, name the Emotions to yourself out loud or in your head (and write them down in your journal). Then do a mental rewind to see if you can identify the Thought(s) that preceded the emotion

here Low or Shaky Self-Concept, Fear of Change or the Unknown

If someone close to you is upset, you become upset too, and think that they might be distressed because of something that you did; therefore, it’s up to you to “fix” their negative state. If you are unable to, you take it hard, dragging yourself down further into blame and upset.

one helpful definition describes emotions as mood or feeling states that are in response to significant internal and external events that result in physical or psychological changes which influence our behavior.

Mind Reading arises from a misguided attempt at self-protection. You believe that if you know what others are thinking, then you can predict and be prepared for how they will act toward you.

and dizziness. Not fun at all! Like emotions, physiological reactions can have a very sudden onset, but a very specific and quickly occurring series of events is happening at the biological level. When we see or hear something stressful, the information is transferred to the brain and processed in the amygdala, often referred to as the brain’s emot