How Coaches Can Help Clients to Stop Negative Thinking

Ani
Hi, and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. Good morning, Brian.

Brian
Good morning, Ani.

Ani
In a bad mood or something.

Brian
I'm having a no good, very bad, rotten, very bad day. There's that book that did that?

Ani
Book? That's such a good one. It's such a great book. Is that what we're talking about today? Yes. No, I mean- No good- No. No good, rotten days.

Brian
We're talking about negativity today.

Ani
Okay. What episode are we on?

Brian
And how coaches can help their clients with negative thinking. Can you help me with my negative thinking?

Ani
Brian, you feel I can't with this topic. I can't with this topic.

Brian
You can't with this topic? No.

Ani
No? Helping people to stop negative thinking? Yeah. No. No? I'm not participating in this topic.

Brian
Okay, so let's actually maybe set the framework. A couple of weeks ago, I came into the kitchen and I was thinking about this topic of negative thinking. The reason I was thinking about this topic of negative thinking- Because people talk about it all the time. Because people were telling me they want to stop negative thinking. I thought to myself, Isn't that interesting? Because actually, it was what cued me in. I was leading a workshop, and a lot of the workshop was around creating more empowered states based on our somatic intelligence. As we did this empowered state, at the end of it, I did takeaways. When a couple of people said, My empowered state is just push away all the negative thoughts. I thought, Okay. All right. Maybe we didn't totally nail what the process was about. I was like, Okay, I'm just taking it as information. I brought it to you and I said, What do you think about this? What is about negative thinking. And when we have negative thoughts, does it feel bad? What did you say?

Ani
I like it. But it's true. Negative thoughts aren't always bad. We just want to eradicate negative. But there's a lot of empowerment in recognizing that you're having a thought or you have a feeling about something. And negative is not bad. I'm very passionate about this topic.

Brian
So when someone says they're having a negative thought, what are they even talking about? What is the actual thought is what I guess I'm curious about?

Ani
Honestly, I think a lot of ladies talk about this in particular because there's this subconscious program that we're supposed to be good people. If I was a good person, I wouldn't have bad thoughts or wouldn't have negative thoughts I think there's that. There's also this thing, I just want to feel better. I'm always thinking these negative thoughts that are a bummer, and I don't want to feel that. If I could just get rid of the thoughts, then I would feel better. But I do think for women in particular, a lot of it comes from our conditioning around needing to be good and smile and pretend like everything's okay all the time. Yeah.

Brian
So is it safe to say then that some negative thoughts or can the same thought that someone is calling negative? Because I think just the negative positive judgment we just have to talk about anyway, right? So what makes it negative, what makes it positive to begin with. It's a judgment call. Yeah, that's what we've been taught that.

Ani
Right. I mean, is it a negative thought or is it a positive thought? Is it a judgment call? And the natural laws tell us that nothing is inherently right, wrong, good, bad, positive or negative. Nothing is inherently negative.

Brian
So can a thought that we call negative sometimes feel different than other times?

Ani
I think so. I think different thoughts can feel different ways.

Brian
Can the same thought feel different ways? Is that what I'm asking?

Ani
I think the same thought can feel different ways.

Brian
Same thought can feel different ways. Yeah.

Ani
Sometimes I can feel bad about myself when I'm having that thought. Sometimes I can feel really empowered when I'm having that thought.

Brian
My question then is, if that's true, and sometimes you can feel bad about yourself when you're having that same thought, and sometimes you can feel empowered in having that same thought, does the thought change from negative to positive, or is it still a negative thought? You would just feel differently about it.

Ani
I just think we have to take the whole negative-positive out of the whole equation. I think that's actually the problem. I think the judgment around whether it's negative or positive needs to leave the building. Then we can have a conversation about what we're actually trying to talk about. When clients tell me that they have problems with negative thinking, I don't leap down their throats. Like you're doing now. I ask them what they're trying to get at. And usually what they're trying to get at is feeling better in their body, feeling better emotionally. They don't want to be... And then we hear people have said that, and it's not that there's not any truth to this, that if I'm harboring anger all the time, I'm going to get sick. So then they're scared. If I don't fix this problem, I'm going to get sick. And it's really hard to deal with this like, voice in our head all the time. And we just think if we could change that, we'd be fine.

Brian
So as we are having this conversation in our kitchen a couple of weeks ago, what occurred to me is that perhaps just changing the semantics around this a little bit in terms of maybe it's not so much not wanting to have negative thoughts, but what we're really concerned about is when the thoughts feel distressing.

Ani
Right. That I can get on board with. That I can get on board with, and I think that there's obviously stuff we can do about that. But having the idea around having distressing thoughts rather than negative or positive, I think we really have to change the language.

Brian
Yeah. So let's go back to coaching. So today's topic of the podcast is, how can we help? How can coaches help their clients to stop negative thinking or negative thoughts?

Ani
God, I just can't even hear Well, I bet you there's a lot of people listening to this who are saying, yes, I want to learn how to do that.

Brian
And the very first thing we're bringing to you is the question in your clients, well, what makes that thought negative? What makes a different thought positive? Right. Just to start to help someone understand how they're thinking about how they're thinking.

Ani
Exactly. How they're thinking about how they're thinking. Is there patterns that play here we want to know? Once people start to question how they're thinking, then they can start to see if there's patterns and what's deeper? Where is this actually coming from? Then, of course, what are you trying to achieve? Why are you even asking this question? What are you trying to achieve? That illuminates so much awareness for an individual.

Brian
The reason that first question, I think for me is so important to help people understand how they're thinking about what they're thinking is not necessarily to change their thinking. Because we know that your subconscious mind tells your conscious mind how to think about things. If your subconscious mind wants your conscious mind to think a certain way about things, then no matter how you're doing coaching with your client, they're always going to think about it the way that their subconscious mind wants them to think about it. We used to work with with a coach who one of the things he would do that drove me nuts all the time is he would say something, and then he would say, Now think about it. Think. I'm thinking to myself, I'm trying to think, but I keep coming up with the same message again and again and again, how dysfunctional I am or how worthless I am. I am thinking about it. That's what I'm thinking about. He just kept saying, Think, think, think.

Ani
It feels like banging your head against the wall.

Brian
It really felt like he was just banging a book over my head, and it really I really wasn't. I really think that's because on some level, I was learning how to think about how I was thinking, but I still couldn't change my thinking because thinking isn't only generated from what's going on in between our ears. Thinking is generated from our subconscious, which is our body. Right.

Ani
Yeah. And back to this negative thought. I mean, as I've been working with people, specifically women, over the years, there can be negative thoughts that are coming from the place that there's some real injustices or empowerment that they haven't tapped into yet or uncovered yet. That when they do, they realize very well why they're having those thoughts, and they make sense. Yeah. One of the things we tell our clients and our students all the time is you make sense. You make sense. So for example, when the person is saying, think, think, and you're feeling like, I am thinking. There's probably patterns around that for you, not being able to figure it out or not being able to move forward, feeling stupid or something. Then you can say, Oh, this is why I'm feeling that way. I make sense. Once we get to the place of saying, I make sense, and I'm already whole, and I'm not broken, and nothing needs to be fixed, all of a sudden, that opens up a whole another world of possibilities for what we can experience. Totally. And thinking is just a really small aspect of our experience.

Ani
It's just one aspect of our experience. There's so many other aspects of our experiences. I think that's another... If I just changed my negative thinking, that's another tell-tale sign that I'm a person who is very exclusively polarized around the thinking nature of my life and how much authority it has because there's so much more in an experience than just the thoughts.

Brian
And oftentimes, even more powerful reservoirs of information than just the thoughts.

Ani
So that first step is to help clients reframe or look at the idea again or explore even what makes a negative thought a negative thought.

Brian
Why is it negative? And that the sole idea of helping someone become aware of how they're thinking about how they're thinking. And you said a few times that... You've gone back and forth between the words thinking and feeling a few times as you've gone back and forth. So this is really interesting because when I said, is it more about distressing thoughts? Distressing brings in a quality of a felt quality.

Ani
And I've watched myself go back and forth with this, but I think for those of you listening, check it out. When you have a negative thought, when you have a thought you don't like, is there some felt quality reality around it. And that's actually probably what you don't like. Exactly. It's how it feels. I've made friends with a lot of my feelings, which is why I can say to you, well, first of all, I'm not as attached to the things that I'm thinking because I've made friends with a lot of my feelings. And also, you said something about the negative thoughts. I don't get all hung up about the negative thoughts or whatever. I'm way more interested in how I can modify my... I'm going to say feelings, but what I really mean is my sensory base. Because that's where the power is. So you're right. I have gone back and forth here, but I'll bet you people who are saying, I wish I could eradicate my negative thinking, are really trying to change how they feel about it.

Brian
Totally, yeah. And that's why I highlight that you're going... And I think you're going back and forth because you can't not. Because we can never really separate our thinking from our feeling. And we work with a lot of people when we ask them some questions, some body referencing questions, they're like, I don't know. I just can't find it or I can't feel it. And a lot of us have just been taught, conditioned, trained, even traumatized from being able to feel what's going on in our bodies. Let's say that. So as coaches, it's really important to know how to help people create more self-referencing, what we call interoceptive literacy before doing somatic coaching, deeper somatic coaching. And that's a part of the process that we teach people in our programs. But the idea is what they really don't like are the distressing sensations associated with the thoughts that they're calling negative. Exactly.

Ani
I'll tell you this, too. I could give you an example, but it's happened so many times. Usually, what a person is referencing when they have a negative thought and then they queue in with their body, I'll ask them something like, what's behind that? Is a lot of grief. That's actually what is behind the other thing that's on top of it. So they don't want to feel the grief. So there's another emotion on top of the grief that's protecting them from the grief. And that is stimulating these thoughts that happen to be labeled as negative. That's, by the way, our subconscious throwing our awareness over the thought Oh, if you just fix that thought, the subconscious, meanwhile, is like, Yeah, they're not going to fix that thought. No, they're not, because it's a deeper felt quality state. The subconscious's job is to help us stay the same, and concentrating on fixing the negative thoughts is actually keeping us in a self-sabotage loop. It's keeping us the same. We're not going to fix it. Once we actually look at what's underneath of the feelings that we're trying not to feel, then we can actually create some change.

Brian
Yeah, absolutely. Let's just say one of that. I was recently having a conversation with one of the students in our year-long Mastermind program, our private Mastermind program. And they were asking me about this exact thing. I've got these thoughts, I'm really trying to change my thinking and those sorts of things. I asked them, I said, Well, let me ask you this question. So you're having certain thoughts, and you're feeling a certain way. And do you like how you feel when you're having those thoughts? He's like, No, I don't like how I feel when I'm having those thoughts. I said, And what have you been trying to do? He said, I'm trying to change my thoughts so that I feel differently. I said, Well, how is that working for you? And he said, Well, not really, really well. I said, Well, think about this. If you felt good. Let's say if you felt the way that you wanted to feel. I said, How do you want to feel? And he gave me some examples of how he wanted to feel. I said, Now, if you felt that way, and then you had that same thought, would you care about that thought as much?

Brian
He's like, Not at all.

Ani
Exactly.

Brian
I said, It's interesting that if we feel empowered, if we feel empowered, all of our thoughts will either be detached from them because it might be a thought that we don't like, but we're not really buying into it because feel empowered, or every thought is an empowered thought. What I tried to help him understand is that so many people, and if I could just grab everybody by the shirt collar and say, Hey, you who've been trying to change your thinking, how often do you try to change your thinking because you want to change how you feel, and it just is so difficult to do. You're trying to think differently. And so you think differently for two minutes, and then when you're not paying attention anymore, you start thinking about things you don't want to think about again because you feel not the way you want to feel. You feel distressed. There's something of distressing sensations, but we keep coming back to it. We're like, We think that's the way. We've been told to change our thinking, and that changes everything. But that's very, very limiting. Where if you change how you're feeling, if you change from a distressing sensation to an empowering sensation, then whatever thought you have is going to feel empowered.

Brian
Yeah.

Ani
We're trying to fix the wrong problem.

Brian
We're trying to fix the wrong end of the problem.

Ani
Yeah. It's like cause and effect. How do I actually cause and effect this thing? If you want to change the effect, which is the thoughts, change the cause, which is the feeling states, but also just if you want to feel differently, then change how you're feeling. Exactly.

Brian
Change how you're feeling. People are like, Well, how do I do that? It seems easier to change how you're thinking.

Ani
It seems easier, I think, again, because how we've been conditioned to think about ourselves ever since they said, I think therefore I am. Who said that? Descartes? Yeah. I think therefore I am. It was 400 years ago. It's over.

Brian
It doesn't work anymore.

Ani
Yeah, maybe it worked for him once. But it's over, people.

Brian
But you have to think about what happened at that time in history. It's like science got the mind and the religion got everything else. Everything else. Science got the brain and everything else got the soul and our feelings and all that stuff.

Ani
We're still operating from that place.

Brian
The idea is here, gang, this is it. How do you actually help your clients to stop negative thinking is actually to help them feel differently. That's how you do it. That's the shortcut. Don't even focus on the negative thinking. Focus on the sensory base that is the reality for how they move through the world. That will automatically change how they're thinking things.

Ani
That's what we teach in our Somatic Transformations program. Body change. Somatic transformations. Change how you feel. The cool thing is whatever a person wants to experience, by the way, is in them already. When we're trying to change that negative thought, we're actually not working at the level that we can create the change because we're not working with the sensations. Also, we're very likely looking in the wrong direction because we're looking at the negative thing rather than looking for what we want, which sometimes people have a hard time articulating, by the way. They have a hard time articulating what they want. We were just working on this in Office Hours. We have a monthly community meeting. A lot of times we talk about business building. We talk about the content that we teach here at the Somatic Coaching Academy. All of the graduates of all of our programs are invited. We were talking about identifying what you want yesterday, and we were helping people to do that because it can be challenging for people. Then recognizing whatever it is you do want already exists within you. We had to find it.

Brian
Yeah, find it and then feed it and nourish it and nurture it so that it can grow.

Ani
Another reason why it's really important to let go of this positive, negative stuff, because it's a lot easier to find hope, peace, equanimity, whatever, empowerment, whatever other words you want to use that is the state I want to experience. But if we're just going to go, Well, I don't want to feel negative. I want to feel positive. We need more information than that. It's such a simplistic and not helpful way to think about ourselves, to think about negative, positive. We're rich beings as human beings, and we have so many different opportunities to experience so many different things. What would I like to experience? Is it joy? Is it empowerment? Is it anger? Is it sadness? What if we can even let go of the fact that nothing is good, bad, right, or wrong in terms of the felt quality feeling realm and allow ourselves to tap in with how we do feel so we can get deeper and experience the range, the full range of being human.

Brian
It makes me think like that negative positive is very black and white. It really is. But all of the other empowered, strong, all the other sensationsizations, that's the color palette. It's literally like bringing color and texture into our experience. It's like when television went from black and white to color, everyone was like, and it felt more like real life. It felt rich. And that's what bringing all these sensory components, this interoceptive literacy is. It's this deep context and deep richness of colors within us rather than just the black or white of good, bad, right, wrong, positive, negative. Yeah.

Ani
Yeah. It can be hard to be a human. It can be hard to be a human. I have a client, we joke about this every single week about humaning. It's rough. And so let's give ourselves the opportunity to tap into the range of color that we have available to us as humans so that we can experience all the richness of it. Because otherwise, we just get really focused on that negativity. Yeah. There's so much more available to us.

Brian
So go deeper than the level of just the negative thinking. Realize there's that whole environment and rich tapestry of a sensation that lives within our experience. And when we learn to consciously shift that sensation, the thoughts just naturally change.

Ani
Yeah. And it's a lovely internal environment to live in.

Brian
So if this was an interesting episode to you, and whatever you learned, please comment below. Check out the website. Look at our Somatic Transformation Fundamentals program. If that's something that really tapped into or really interested in. And look forward to being back with you again next week.

Ani
Bye-bye.