Your Life is Important

Nathaniel Branden continuously challenged his readers to re-think, re-claim and re-author their lives.  In an afterword to The Art of Living Consciously (1997), Branden defined what he felt was the central message of his work:

“Your life is important.  Whether you achieve what you want in life matters. Honor and fight for your highest potential. Self-realization-the best that is within you – is the noblest goal of your existence.”

Need more be said?  I think not!

The 10 Cognitive Distortions

Without realizing it, we can easily develop patterns of thinking that hinder and limit us.  Check through this list, and see whether any of the Ten Cognitive Distortions apply to you. (Most people will find at least one or two.)  Once you’re able to identify your “twisted thoughts”, you’ll be able to challenge them and develop a more positive mental attitude:

  1. All-or-Nothing Thinking. You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.
  2. Overgeneralization. You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
  3. Mental Filter.  You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors the entire beaker of water.
  4. Disqualifying the Positive. You reject positive experiences by insiting they “don’t count” for some reason or other.  In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experience.
  5. Jumping to Conclusions.  You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that support your conclusion.  a. Mind reading. You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don’t bother to check this out. b. The Fortune Teller Error. You anticipate things will turn out  badly, and you feel that your conviction is an already established fact.
  6. Magnification (Catastrophising) or Minimization. You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or somebody else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow’s imperfections).  This is also called The Binocular Trick.
  7. Emotional Reasoning.  You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are:  “I feel it, therefore it must be true”.
  8. Should Statements.  You try to motivate yourself with “shoulds and shouldn’ts” , as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything.  “Musts and oughts” are also offenders.  The emotional consequence is guilt.  When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration and resentment.
  9. Labeling and Mislabeling.  This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing an error, you attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser“.  When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: “He’s a louse.”  Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.
  10. Personalization.  You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.

–     David M. Burns MD in Feeling Good, Avon Books

Hypnosis and Your Beliefs

“Quite without any inductions, you have ‘hypnotized’ yourself into all the beliefs that you have – this simply means that you have consciously accepted them, excluded data to the contrary, narrowed your interests to those specific points and accordingly activated the unconscious mechanisms that then materialize those convictions through physical experience.  Formal hypnosis merely brings about an accelerated version of what goes on all the time.”     – Jane Roberts in Seth Speaks