Think Above the Line: Shame

Think Above the Line

Mindset Monday at Real Frequency....Today's topic is about the importance of refocusing thoughts that are about PAST FAILURES to those that help is replicate PAST SUCCESS.

Background: Mindfulness is a term that we hear, but let's get focused on what it really means. Mindfulness is to pay attention and to have mental "intention." Mindfulness is the first step needed to recognize and then re-direct negative thoughts.

THINK ABOVE THE LINE is a concept developed by Collin Henderson, MEd which is essentially a quadrant with the Y axes being Productive vs Non-Productive thoughts and the X axes being defined by thoughts that reside in the Past vs Future. The first step in moving our more-than-80,000 thoughts-per-day away from being mostly-negative is to first recognize what types of negative thoughts we have. If we can begin to "catch" ourselves in negative thought (thoughts BELOW THE LINE), we can then pinpoint the type of thoughts we are having, we can start training ourselves to address and redirect these thoughts.

One identification for a type of negative thought is "Shame." Shame defines the types of thoughts we have that reside in "south west" corner of the thought quadrant. Or, thoughts that are focused on negativity and that are also focused on the past (past mistakes). Those of us that spend a lot of thought energy on past mistakes are continually constructing barriers toward present and future success.

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 acknowledging the past mistake and then by working to forget about it. We don't dwell on it or let it define us. We recognize the mistake, but then we shift our thoughts to a time when we crushed it. And then, we focus on what we were doing that led to us crushing it. We ask ourselves how we can replicate past success by taking whatever drove that success and making it into positive habits. We recreate the environment that helped drive the success we had.

This is how we move from negative thoughts that have no value to thoughts that have positive intent. We consciously redirect our focus from a mistake to a success. We consciously think about why we had that success. Last, we consciously work to recreate an environment that will help us succeed in the future.