Think Above the Line: Fear

It is Mindset Monday at Real Frequency....Today's topic is a PART 2 about the importance of refocusing thoughts that are negative to those that are positive.

THINK ABOVE THE LINE is a concept developed by Collin Henderson, MEd. For more on its construct, please see our first piece in the series of Thinking Above the Line which focused on the lower left (or southwest) quadrant of the graph. This piece was about SHAME. To summarize that piece quickly, we need to identify and redirect negative thoughts. The idea of starting this process by recognizing negative thoughts is that if we can NAME it, we can TAME it.

So, we already covered Shame. Today we are going to dig in on the other negative thought-type, which is "Fear." Fear defines the types of thoughts we have that reside in the lower right (southeast) corner of the thought quadrant. These are thoughts that are focused on negativity and that are also focused on the future (future mistakes). Those of us that spend a lot of thought energy on fear sabotage our potential success by telling ourselves not to make mistakes with thoughts like “Don’t mess this up,” and “don’t fail,” and “don’t lose.” Worse, these thoughts prevent us from trying.

This is critically important because at Real Frequency, we believe in Collin’s concept that everything happens TWICE. First in our mind and then in real life. When we think about “worst case scenarios” we are actually programming our brains to fixate on these negative outcomes and to move in that direction. Why? Because our conscious mind is the goal setter. Our subconscious mind is the goal getter.

If you have ever hit a golf ball over water, you probably know what it is like to think the thought “don’t hit it in the water,” during your backswing. Guess where that ball is probably sitting right now. Knowing the power of negative thoughts during a backswing in golf, would you ever hire a caddy that spoke to you in a negative way during your round of golf? Would you want to hear them say to you “Don’t slice!” “Don’t miss this putt!” “You can’t hit it that far!” all day long? NO WAY. You would not hire that person because you know the negative impact that would have on you. SO WHY DO YOU TALK TO YOURSELF IN THE SAME WAY EVERY DAY?

Once thoughts are recognized for taking up residence BELOW THE LINE we can start to redirect our thoughts to a place ABOVE THE LINE. We do this by working to catch ourselves using words like “can’t” and “don’t” when thinking about the future. We listen for worst-case scenarios in our minds, and then we work to redirect. Specifically, we recognize this language and then we work to shift our thoughts to a time when we crushed it. And then, we focus on what we were doing that led to us that success. We recreate the environment that helped drive success we have had, and then we tell ourselves that by recreating that environment, we are setting the stage to win again. This is the process of building confidence through the use of systems.

This is how we move from negative thoughts that have no value to thoughts that have positive intent. We consciously redirect our focus from fear to excitement and we are able to believe that what we are excited about is the likely outcome, because we are ensuring that our situation mirrors a time when we had past success.