Circumstances vs. Thoughts
One of the most powerful lessons I have learned through both counseling and coaching is understanding the difference between circumstances and thoughts. This differentiation has helped me reduce a huge amount of stress in my life, my work, and my relationships. What you are about to read may land on some of you in a way that can cause you to bristle a bit at first, but keep reading and bear with me.
Circumstances are the NEUTRAL facts of our lives. Something that if you brought to a courtroom everyone in the room would agree to it as factual. Ex: ‘The door is open.’ or ‘This patient is late for their appointment.’
A thought, in this context, is a sentence that includes an opinion or adjective. When you attach some kind of subjective term to a circumstance it goes from being a circumstance to a thought. Ex: ‘The door is barely open.’ or ‘This patient is SO late for their appointment.’ “Barely open” and “SO late” are subjective and not universally agreed upon definitions.
The moment you choose to have a thought about a circumstance is when you choose to make it mean something. Why is this important? It’s because once you have a thought about a circumstance, it generates a feeling, which drives your actions (or inactions, or reactions), that leads to a certain result. So the thoughts that you have are going to be the driver of how you feel and show up in the world.
Now for the part that people tend to bristle at…
You are responsible for your thoughts and feelings. No one can make you think or feel something and every thought that you have is a choice. I understand that this may be rubbing some of you the wrong way right now. For clarification, I am NOT saying you are always responsible for your circumstances, but you are responsible for how you think of them. I’ll explain why this is actually a good thing.
People often mistake their thoughts as their circumstance. A typical example is believing that your circumstance is that you have a shitty boss who is making your life miserable. That is actually a thought and not your circumstance. The circumstance is that you have a boss. Your thought is that your boss is shitty. That thought is causing a feeling of misery. That feeling is driving an action/reaction/inaction and ending in a result.
When it comes to problems in our life, simply changing our actions or our circumstances is akin to treating the branch of a disease instead of the root. We must get to the root of the matter and that is our thought about the situation. Here’s the good news… you can CHOOSE to have different thoughts about anything. Which means YOU are in the driver seat of your emotions, behavior, and results! Allowing someone else’s behavior to affect how you think and feel means you have given that person all of your emotional power. Choosing your thoughts means YOU control the narrative.
That “shitty” boss? Could it be possible that they aren’t a shitty person, but are actually struggling with anxiety and reacting to it? By changing your thought of them from being a jerk to a person who is suffering causes you to think and feel differently about them, right? So maybe you don’t react the same which results in you having a better day than one spent feeling angry. You could certainly change jobs to change the circumstance, but it’s pretty much guaranteed that wherever you end up you will have some conflict with another human. So if you haven’t mastered your thoughts, then you will be back in the same place you were before.
There are people out there who rely on tactics to disempower others in order to make themselves feel powerful. You can choose to think thoughts that cause you to feel scared and react in a negative way which only satisfies the person’s need to affect you negatively, OR you can choose to think thoughts that cause you to feel neutral or positive and allow this person’s words to roll off you never giving them the satisfaction of generating a reaction. For someone who’s weapon of choice is to cause a reaction, this is the way to disarm them completely and to empower yourself.
This isn’t just some tactic to defend yourself from people you don’t like. And this is not a “just think happy thoughts la la la” strategy. You have to believe the thoughts you are choosing. This is a self-coaching model that you can implement any time you are in some sort of conflict, experiencing a negative emotion, behaving in a way you don’t want to, or not getting your desired results. It’s something that has helped me find a lot of peace which I think we all could use right now. Hopefully it’s helpful for you too.
A perfect example of this is the story of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter. A professional boxer at the top of his sport who was wrongly incarcerated for murder and spent 20 years in prison until he was finally granted a new trial.
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