Watch your thoughts

You’re sitting at work with a mountain of files. One task on your to-do list involves the oldest, most frustrating and complicated file, and you know that you need to get something done on it but it’s just so hard to turn your attention to it.

Does this sound familiar?

When I started paying more attention to what I was thinking and feeling throughout a work day, it was easy to notice some patterns. Obviously, certain things are easier to get done in a day: interesting research you know you can do well, corresponding with lawyers you like and respect, giving advice to clients that feels useful and appreciated, collaborating on a project with your nerdiest work friends, etc.

But I also realized that the hard tasks, the ones that felt like pulling my own teeth to focus on, were hindered not just by the difficulty of the files themselves but what I was telling myself was going to happen once I started working on them. I’d be ahead of myself, imagining what people’s reactions would be to my work and what those reactions meant about me, or I’d start questioning my abilities to do the work itself. When I would catch myself midway through another article on disneytouristblog.com (I know I know), I came to see that my poor subconscious was just trying to shield me from bad outcomes I was already feeling before anything bad had happened. I had been thinking something negative, I started to feel bad, and I sought comfort through avoidance. The result? The horrible files would be punted to tomorrow’s to-do list again and again, leaving me feeling just a bit worse every time I thought about them.

When I learned to investigate what I was telling myself about a situation before it started, I realized that it was my thoughts and not the situation that were causing me to delay working on those projects. My thoughts like “I can’t make sense of all of these records” were actually stopping me from doing things like trying to make sense of all those records. How silly, right? But just like the annoying truth that exercise generally helps me feel better and scrolling the internet during work hours doesn’t actually leave me feeling good, I had to stop and acknowledge the bad feelings before I could move forward in a better way. I realized that I’m not going to see myself consistently doing the things that I intend to do until I assess what I am thinking about those things:

thoughts

lead to feelings,

which lead to action or inaction.

To see if this is true for you, I suggest you try this:

Think of a task at work that you have been meaning to get to but keep putting off. Making a call, sending an email, drafting a document, etc.

Picture yourself at your work in a moment where you’re deciding what to do next, and think of doing this task.

Make a list of all of thoughts that come to your mind in this situation. (“I really don’t want to.” “This is meaningless.” “I don’t know what I’m doing.” “This is going to keep going forever.” “I’d rather eat my big toe.”) Pick the one that feels the strongest.

Stop and ask yourself how you feel. What sensations come up in your body? Can you identify any emotion that you feel?

What happens next? What do you do and not do in response to this feeling?

I’m going to guess it’s not the outcome that you want. But can you be surprised? We are logical beings in our own illogical ways, and we’re not going to keep doing things that feel bad.

Now instead, try this:

Imagine that you’re back at your desk, and you’re well underway into this undesirable task. You’re doing it, it’s going well. You’ve taken the step that you had been avoiding for a long time.

How do you feel? Really take a moment and picture yourself. What feelings do you notice in your body, and where? What name would you assign to how it feels to do this work? How does this compare with how you felt in the last scenario?

Going backwards still, ask: What thought could I just have had that would lead to feeling this way? What thought came just before that feeling? That’s the thought to hold onto. Make sure it is one that you can believe, because your body knows a lie. So maybe rather than “This will be the smartest sounding email anyone has ever read!”, pick something closer to “I know enough to convey this information well” (or whatever you can believe).

This model for tracking thoughts and feelings can be used for any situation where your actions are not lining up with what you want. With these tools, you can face a situation and consciously think something that is helpful and conducive to getting you where you want to be. Swap the good thought for the stressful one, and you may just get outcomes beyond what you had expected… including that ominous to-do list.