A quick tool for increasing your self-awareness and redirecting your self-talk …

Every day you have thousands of thoughts, most of them experienced at an unconscious level.

The more unaware of your thoughts — the more unaware of what you’re “saying” to yourself in your “self-talk” — the more irrational your thinking will be.

That can cause you a lot of trouble!

The respected minister from the 20th century, D. Martin Lloyd-Jones, described in “Spiritual Depression” the wrestle with our self-talk like this:

Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them, but they start talking to you, they bring back the problems of yesterday, etc.

Somebody is talking … Your self is talking to you. Now this man’s treatment [in Psalm 42] was this: instead of allowing this self to talk to him, he starts talking to himself. “Why art thou cast down, O my soul?” he asks. His soul had been depressing him, crushing him. So he stands up and says, “Self, listen for a moment, I will speak to you.”

One of the most life-changing actions a person can take is purposely becoming more self-aware, becoming more aware of their self-talk, and learn how to challenge their thinking and purposely redirect their irrational self-talk to more rational thinking.

Clients at Scott Free Clinic experience a comprehensive equipping in understanding self-talk and how to practice “cognitive restructuring,” or redirecting their irrational thinking to more rational thinking. Since we don’t have the space and time here to go through all that, let me give you a quick, simple, but effective tool in identifying and addressing your irrational self-talk.

But first …

It’s important to grasp this profound truth about human behavior: Our thoughts create our emotions, and the combination of our thoughts and emotions create our behavior. That’s why it’s vital that we raise our self-awareness, become more aware of what we’re thinking and the content of our self-talk, and learn how to redirect our irrational thinking to more rational thoughts.

So, that simple tool that can be used anytime, anywhere, is to simply learn the “3 C’s” exercise:

First, “Catch it” – Identify the thought that came before the emotion.

Next, “Check it” – Reflect on how accurate and useful the thought is.

Finally, “Change it” – Change the thought to a more accurate or helpful one as needed.

Here’s an example:

Stan and Kate are a married couple, and their best friends are Miles and Laura, also a married couple. Stan and Kate had accepted an offer to go to the movies with Miles and Laura on Saturday afternoon, but Stan and Kate were so busy Saturday morning they called and canceled. Miles and Laura decided to go to the movies anyway. Stan and Kate finished their chores sooner than planned, so they decided to get out of the house and went to see a movie. When Miles and Laura were leaving the theater at the end of their movie, they saw Stan and Kate entering. That prompted an automatic thought in Miles:

“Hey,” Miles said to Laura, “that’s Stan and Kate! I thought they were too busy to join us for a movie. Can you believe they ditched us to go by themselves? I thought we were friends!”

In the fleeting seconds that Miles spotted his friends, he had an irrational thought that came from “jumping to conclusions.” That would have been an ideal time to exercise the “3 C’s”:

Catch it – Identify the thought that prompted his negative emotion.

Check it – Miles jumped to a conclusion about Stan and Kate that wasn’t accurate, so he needed to check his thought to see if it was accurate or useful.

Change it – Because Stan and Kate really were their friends, Miles and Laura could change their thought – at least to something more neutral – until they could reconnect with their friends and learn the truth rather than jumping to a conclusion. An example: “Maybe they finished what they were doing sooner than they thought …”

Cognitive distortions like jumping to conclusions, “mind reading,” and making assumptions without accurate information are just a few of the ways we foster irrational thoughts and negative self-talk. The only emotions we can experience are directly parallel to what we say to ourselves, and the combination of our thoughts and emotions will forge our behavior.

Just learning to apply the “3 C’s” exercise at any time, in any setting, can help you raise your level of self-awareness and redirect your thoughts to more rational ways of thinking.

Scotty