Completing Cycles

I’m a bit of a positive newsletter junkie and Jack Canfield is one of my favourites.  One thing I’ll be writing about in the future is how anxiety disorders and other emotional problems are nothing more than incomplete emotional cycles we need to complete in order to heal.

It’s not mentioned here but Mr Canfield does an excellent line in journal management skills – journaling can be an effective element of your cycle-completion-system as it helps both in releasing emotional energy and in transferring the ‘data’ involved in an emotional release so it ends up making sense in our logical minds.

I’ll be writing much more about ‘cycle completion’ in the future, in the mean time I hope you enjoy his article:

The Cycle of Completion: Making Way for Success
by Jack Canfield

Do you live in a state of mental and physical clutter? Do you have a bunch of unfinished business lurking around every corner?

Incomplete projects, unfinished business, and piles of cluttered messes can weigh you down and take away from the energy you have to move forward toward your goals.

When you don't complete tasks, you can't be fully prepared to move into the present, let alone your new future.

When your brain is keeping track of all the unfinished business you still have at hand, you simply can't be effective in embracing new tasks that are in line with your vision.

Old incompletes can show up in your life in lots of different ways...  like not having clarity, procrastination, emotional energy blocks and even illness. Blocked energy is wasted, and a build up of that energy can really leave you stymied.

Throw-out all the clutter and FEEL how much easier it is to think!

Make a list of areas in your life (both personal and professional) where you have incompletes and messes, then develop a plan to deal with them once and for all. Fix and organize the things that annoy you.

Take your final steps in bringing closure to outstanding projects.

Make that difficult phone call. Delegate time-wasting tasks that you've let build up.  Some incompletions come from simply not having adequate systems, knowledge, or expertise for handling these tasks. Other incompletions pile up because of bad work habits.

Get into completion consciousness by continually asking yourself...What does it take to actually get this task completed?

Only then can you begin to consciously take that next step of filing completed documents, mailing in the forms required, or reporting back to your boss that the project has been completed.

The truth is that 20 things completed have more power than 50 things that are half-way completed.

Finishing writing a book, for instance, that can go out and influence the world is better than 13 books you’re in the process of writing.

When you free yourself from the mental burden of incompletes and messes, you'll be AMAZED at how quickly the things you do want in life arrive.

Another area where you'll find incompletes in your life is in your emotions. Are you holding on to old hurts, resentments, and pain? Just like the physical clutter and incompletes, your energy is being drained by holding on to and reliving past pain and anger.

Remember, you'll attract whatever feelings you're experiencing. So, if you're stuck in revengeful thinking and angered in muck, you can't possibly be directing energy toward a positive future. You need to let go of the past in order to embrace the future. Letting go involves forgiveness and moving on.

By forgiving you aren't releasing the other person from their transgression as much as you're freeing yourself from their transgression. You don't have to condone their behavior, trust them, or even maintain a relationship with them. However, you DO have to free yourself from the anger, from the pain, and from the resentment once and for all!

When learning to forgive, make sure to complete the cycle.

Acknowledge your anger, your pain, and your fear. But also own up to any part you've played in allowing it to happen or continue. Make sure to express whatever it was that you wanted from that person, and then see the whole event from the other's point of view. Allow yourself to wonder what that person was going through and what kind of needs he/she was trying to fulfill at the time.

Finally, let go and move on. Every time you go through this process you're learning how to avoid letting it happen again!

I'll be back in two weeks with another edition of Success Strategies. Until then, see if you can discover ways to immediately implement what you learned from today's message.

(For more insight on this subject, read Chapter 28 titled
Clean Up Your Messes and Incompletes in The Success Principles)

© 2010 Jack Canfield

Jack Canfield, America's #1 Success Coach, is founder of the billion-dollar book brand Chicken Soup for the Soul© and a leading authority on Peak Performance and Life Success. If you're ready to jump-start your life, make more money, and have more fun and joy in all that you do, get your FREE success tips from Jack Canfield now at: www.FreeSuccessStrategies.com

Mindmapping to Balance the Left and Right Brain

Mindmapping is an approach that helps in exploring new ideas; recording your life experiences and working through emotional issues. As often as I can I swing open my A4 journal to draw an A3 sized mindmap across two pages. I start with a central point (such as the date) and then link off from it on everything I've done that day.

At the bottom of this post there a video on iMindmap from Tony Buzan (I've never used this software but would love to); to the left there's a sample mindmap I produced using Inspiration 8; these are paid software packages but you can get free, if not quite so colourful, mindmapping software. I've put a link to a list of free software at the bottom of the post.



My approach to mapping is to write one word or a short sentence (or a quick sketch) and then revisit the map putting in little 'tick boxes' to tick when an action has to be performed.

I record feelings, images, scenarios, actions.  The initial steps use my right brain and then I move over to left brain activities.

I transfer the actions to a small notebook and tick off completed actions through the working day - this is a left brain process.

If you're right brain dominant (which I am) leading a left-brain life can leave you feeling unfulfilled and on a treadmill of to-do's - but those to-do's still need to be done!

You can increase your Mind Power using mindmapping to bring your left and right brain thinking together. Mindmapping is particularly useful when you want to record the outcomes and insights achieved during intense emotional work (exposure therapy, for example, produces overwhelming sensations that 'hijack' the thinking brain - mindmapping allows you to record what you learn experientially without asking you to 'pull yourself together' in order to engage the left/logical mind).

Hope you enjoy the following article from Dr. Vj Mariaraj:

How to Increase Your Mind Power by being a Whole-brain Thinker Using the Technique of Mind Mapping
By Vj Mariara

The term ‘ambidexterity’ means being adept in using both right and left hand. It is a rare inborn trait but it can be learned. The versatility displayed in the use of each hand determines a person’s ambidexterity. Michelangelo, Leonardo Vinci, Einstein, Fleming, Harry Truman, etc., were all ambidextrous. In modern times, you will find many, who were originally left-handed but in the course of their childhood, acquired right-handed habits (at school or home) and thus became ambidextrous.

Along the same lines, we could say we are being ambidextrous when we are multi-tasking – talking over the phone and taking notes or riding a bike, etc. The difference being that instead of our hands, we are using both our right and left hemispheres to successfully juggle our tasks. We have all heard about some people being ‘right-brained’ or ‘left-brained’. In essence it means that the person displays more ‘right-brain’ or ‘left-brain’ oriented skills, although we are all the time integrating both hemispheres in our daily activities.

‘Right’ brain qualities involve imagination, risk taking, artistic abilities, highly philosophical, creative, etc. ‘Left’ brain qualities, on the other hand, are practical, conformist, seek order, have good comprehension skills, etc. Thus ‘right-brain’ people are said to think subjectively, holistically and have strong intuition, while ‘left-brain’ people tend to be more logical, analytical and highly rational. It is found that more often, left-brain thinkers are engineers and scientists, while right-brain thinkers end up being artists and poets.

How and why is it that some people are more adept at certain kind of thought patterns than others? The fact is that while we may inherit certain mental traits and capacities, how we use our mind is what determines our mental prowess. As children we are innately right-brained, displaying great creativity, imagination, spontaneity, open-mindedness and enthusiasm but ironically, as we grow, social, cultural and racial influences constrain these natural traits.

The most comforting thought however is that we can greatly improve our mental abilities by choosing to change our thoughts and applying our mind in a particular direction. Thus if a person is a known conformist, who always walks down the beaten path, he could deliberately try new things, learn to take risks and think imaginatively.

When we combine the power of the two hemispheres, we will be working at our full potential. Ambidextrous mind or whole brain thinking - as it is also known - enhances our brain functions and injects a heightened level of awareness. To foster an ambidextrous mindset, we can work on right-brain learning activities by including patterning, metaphors, analogies, role-playing, visuals, and movement into reading, calculation, and analytical activities. Conscious effort to incorporate left and right brain activities, human consciousness studies, reflective thinking and meditation are excellent means to achieve an ambidextrous mind.

One easy technique that helps in such whole-brain thinking process is Mind Mapping. It aligns the mind to the diffusion of thought and paves way for streaming thoughts and linking new associations. Association essentially is finding the links in logic and ideas, and when these are explored in full, it leads to insight, imagination and creativity.

If we look at great discoveries, we will find the application or association of principle (s) to another. Pertinently, colors, pictures, symbols, etc., highly enhance our learning process as they invoke vividness, clarity of perception and easy dissemination. Mind Mapping technique employs all these aspects and therein lies its power and dynamism. When learning and understanding is done using the Mind Map technique, it naturally becomes a highly effective and powerful way of gaining knowledge. It sure is an ideal way for fostering an ambidextrous or whole brain thinking culture.

Dr. Vj Mariaraj is a Mind Map enthusiast and has been using Mind Maps for the past twelve years. He has created over 5650 Mind Maps. To learn more about mind mapping and to download a free Mind map of a Business Book, send an email to freemindmap@aweber.com

Article Source: Vj Mariara
How to Increase Your Mind Power by being a Whole Brain Thinker Using the Technique of Mind Mapping

My favourite mindmapping software is Inspiration 8, which I've used to produce some of the work on this blog. The main site is here but you can buy Inspiration relatively cheaply on both Amazon and Ebay (just type 'Inspiration software' into the search boxes on the right). I started with version 6 and just kept buying the next upgrade off these sites.

There are also some very good free mindmapping software programmes; here's a list from Wikipedia.

Tony Buzan's iMindMap Mind Mapping Software

Whilst many products have claimed to allow you to Mind Map on a computer, none have managed to fully duplicate Tony's world renown process. Until now that is! iMindMap™ gives you the infinite visual variety, portability, freedom, brain friendliness and effectiveness of traditional highly proven Mind Mapping techniques. Watch our free videos on computer based mind mapping to find out more.

How do you use mindmapping? Please leave a comment.

Regards - Carl

Seth does an exposure therapy session and talks about setbacks

Seth goes through his daily exposure therapy routine here (which involves challenging himself to drive further and further away from home).

There are several things to notice:

Acting Like an Expert

No-one is as expert in an anxiety disorder as the person who has it - if you have one you have to start to realise that.  Do you notice how Seth reports on his experience as though he's sitting on the outside of it rather than as a subjective victim?  This is the objective viewpoint at work and he is using his camera to enhance the affect.

If you want to achieve something in life you have to start acting and behaving as though you already have.  This perspective changes the way you function at an unconscious level.  Nothing improves the motivation to learn something better than wanting to teach it to help others; even if you haven't quite learned the lessons fully yourself yet.

Seth has a really good grasp of the process - he's just got to get through it is all.  With lot's of positive self-talk and fierce disciplined determination he will do.



Something else Seth spoke about was 'anticipatory anxiety'.  There are three main types of anxiety involved in this work:

• anticipatory


• actual response


• after-shocks (this stage of the response tends to be accompanied by a sense of helplessness and despondency).

There is a way of seeing all three of these as just one stream of energy which helps you stop thinking about 'which type of fear is it?'  Imagine you have a river of negative energy stored in your body related to the situation you fear; as you approach the situation to which the energy is connected you start opening up and allowing the river through; in direct exposure mode you're letting the full flowing river go by without trying to halt in; in after-shock there's still a period where the emotional energy dregs are still seeping through.  If you picture yourself as releasing a portion of the store of trapped energy every time you do this it helps to make it a more positive experience.

In the next video Seth talks about another experience that all recovering anxiety sufferers go through: setbacks

Dealing with and overcoming anxiety 53 - A setback

Please leave any thoughts, arguments or advice below.

Regards - Carl

Overcome the Naysayer's

'They'll never change' is one of the most untrue statements we can make about other people - the truth is 'they'll' change (and so will we) whether they want to or not because those who don't change under their own steam get changed by life events around them regardless.

People sometimes say this to others in a bid to keep them 'categorised and controlled'; at other times it's simply a cynic who sees a half-glass-empty world (cynics are not necessarily always a bad thing to have around, to be honest, I'll talk about why in a later post) - but more often than not it's because we don't want someone else to change because we don't want to be changed by them (or shown up to be the kind of person who doesn't cope well with change).

So when you start bouncing around with energy in regard to a new idea prepare to get negative feedback on that enthusiasm - and it'll be usually labelled as 'common sense'.

Here's a nice article about what to do when this starts from Jason and Rebecca Osborn:

Success - How To Overcome The Naysayer’s

By Jason Osborn

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once said, “We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.”

Sometimes the closest people to you are the ones that stop you form achieving greatness in your life. You go to them, full of excitement, to tell them all the great things that you want to do in life. Instead of hearing the support and encouragement from your friends and family, you hear words of doubt and fear.

They may not be saying these things to purposely hurt or discourage you, but they don’t want you to fail or get hurt. So, to stop you from getting hurt down the road they try to stop you at the beginning.

Still, others may try to tell you why it can’t be done and how there are many obstacles in the way that can’t be moved. They look at who you are currently and don’t see the greatness that’s hidden on the inside.

Don’t let these people stop you from reaching your greatness. Here are 4 ways to overcome the naysayer’s.

1. Protect Your Dream.

Whenever you have a burning desire to do something great in life, it’s very hard to not tell everyone you know. You just assume that everyone will be just as excited about it as you are. Minimize the amount of naysayer’s in your life by not telling everyone. You will probably still have people who are negative, but a few naysayers’ are better than a ton of them.

2. Surround Yourself With Greatness.

If you want to do great things in life you need to be around others that have done great things. I’m sure you have heard the saying ‘Success breeds success’. If you are always around people who have never accomplished anything, and never want to accomplish anything great, it will be hard for you to do it yourself. Successful people will help you understand how to overcome the obstacles that you will face. Which leads me to the next point.

3. Get A Coach Or A Mentor.

If a professional sports team wants to be the best, they hire a coach to help get them there. If they don’t have a coach that can encourage them, train them, guide them, and give them a good kick in the backside when needed, they will never become a great team. Find someone that has done something similar to what you want to do and have them mentor you. Keep this in mind, they are probably very busy and may not have any interest in coaching or training anyone. Don’t let that stop you. If they can’t or won’t, keep looking until you find someone who will. Also, bring something to the table for them as well. You need to give to get.

4. Your Past Doesn’t Dictate Your Future.

You may not have a successful life but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a successful future. Naysayer’s will always try to remind you of your past failures or inadequacies. Keep improving yourself and keep growing. Learn from your past but don’t let it stop you from having a great future. If there is something that you need to change in your life in order to achieve success, then change it. You are the deciding factor on how great your life is going to be. DON’T let your past dictate your future.

If you want to do something great with your life, there will always be someone there to tell you that it can’t be done. Practice these four keys and you will be able to overcome the naysayer’s.

Source: www.isnare.com

Have you got a technique for dealing with the naysayers? Please leave a comment below for others to read.  Here's a link to one of my favourite books for folks who are 'stuck in place' by all that negativity glue around them:

Your Systematic De-Sensitisation Plan Part Two

In yesterday's post I discussed how a 'systematic desensitisation/exposure therapy' plan is really a 'surrender plan' and went on to say when you first start it can come as such a shock to the system the idea of it being a 'plan' can seem ridiculous because of how overwhelming it is.

I also discussed the need to establish a support network (and you should see these people on a regular cyclical basis for their input and help to be effective).

In this post (and it's another biggie) I'm going to cover the following points:

1. Focus on How You Want to Feel


2. Practice Every Day


3. Study Your Emotional Responses and Develop a Subjective Viewpoint


4. Work Towards Linking Responses To Triggers


5. Establish a Weekly Cycle


6. Focus on One Reaction at a Time


7. Create Distraction and 'Switch-off' Points


8. Judge Progress by What You Can Do


9. Accept the Strangeness of Your Thoughts


10. Hunt All Negative Feelings Down Like the Dirty Dogs They Are.

1  Focus on How You Want to Feel

The first step of any successful system is the identification of a desirable outcome.  Imagine yourself free both of the emotional problem and of the restrictions it places on you - what would you do?  How would that freedom affect your relationships with others - and with yourself? Visualise a place where you want to be emotionally peaceful.  A state where you can be completely content; not be festering on 'how do I deal with my emotional problem?'  This kind of thing is achievable.

What if your desired outcome is not realistic? What if when you get 'there' it's not exactly how you envisioned it?  It does not matter.  When starting towards any goal in life, unless it's a very short-lived one such as 'putting the butter in the fridge' (and sometimes even that doesn't happen if you trip on the kitchen carpet)  we have to accept that final-destination type goals are variable - we never really achieve exactly what we envisioned.  What we do achieve, however, is the journey towards 'different' and 'better'.  As long as we stay on the journey we will keep re-visiting our desirable outcomes and things will gradually improve.

If you have multiple emotional problems you will eventually find yourself having a greater amount of 'emotional free time' to play with and it is realistic to set a goal of having a greater percentage of time free from emotional issues.  If you have a single emotional problem you could start your desensitisation plan on a Friday and be completely problem-free by Monday; but this is unusual - in most cases it will take several weeks and sometimes months.

Although you may not achieve an idealistic new 'you' all the time it will be a much happier you than who you are at the start of the process (instead of being happy 100% of the time you may have to settle for being happy 90% of the time; sigh).

2  Practice Every Day

You have to be careful when you practice, however.  'Opening up' an emotional response fully can leave you feeling exhausted and your focus of attention, especially if you're exposing yourself to an obsession, can be skewed for the rest of the day.  When is your best time of the week for spending 'intense' time?  Try to save the most intense work for those times.  Most days you need to be just 'skimming the edges' of the response.  This will teach your unconscious mind slowly that the response itself is not so dangerous - and it will prepare you to bring the intense work to easier fruition.

Additionally it is around the 'staying with the feeling but not fully going in' that you may get insights into what the response relates to.  If you have had a response for a long time it's easy for the information about the 'issue' to which the response relates to be lost.  For example, if you had a frightening experience in an enclosed space but forgotten the detail you may be confused when having a strong response to a new place that reminds you of it.  By skirting around and exploring the feeling at a lesser intensity you can raise the memory and this gives you a bigger picture to work with.  This helps.

By the time 'intense work time' arrives you will be itching to get in there and accept that the intense emotional response is linked to a viewpoint you accept. Let us say your reason for panicking in enclosed spaces is because you imagined suffocating in such a place but you've told yourself to stop being silly and refused to feel and release the panic.  Would it be silly to panic if you were suffocating and had a strong fear response - no, in fact it might save your life.  So we gradually figure out what the issue is (if we're not sure) and bring that and the response together.

Try not to work on your emotions when walking on busy streets or driving or operating machinery (if you can help it - sometimes the work just follows us around whether we want to switch it off or not).  Keep aware of any situation in which you could be injured or killed due to  not paying attention to the outside world.   I came close to being hit by cars twice because my attention just wasn't on what was going on around me.

Desensitisation work is very distracting.  It dominates your focus of attention and wipes your short-term memory.  You can end up doing such things as not paying for goods when leaving a shop because you can't remember if you paid at checkout or not (I didn't do this but I did upset a newsagent once when he wanted my money and I'd put it back in my pocket because I thought I'd paid him already).  These things happen.

So try and pick a safe place to practice and don't intend to 'open up' completely if you've got some other complex responsibility to meet.  If you've got the day to yourself though, go for it.

3  Study Your Emotional Responses and Develop an Objective Viewpoint

A subjective viewpoint is that of the person affected by the emotional response - this is the viewpoint of a person believing they are being 'done to' and, I hate to say it, it is the viewpoint of a 'victim'.

An objective viewpoint is that of the person sitting on the outside of the emotional response who is able to study it; test it; re-draw it and play with it and figure out how to bring the response under control and then stop it.  This is the viewpoint of a laboratory scientist who treats the subjective viewpoint as a test subject.

Transitioning from the subjective view to the objective view is very, very difficult and takes time.  A Counsellor can assist in making the transition as they sit on the outside of the experience and unconsciously coach you in how to sit in their place while they also sit in your's.  A Counsellor is very unlikely to tell you this is what's happening - it just happens.  You get used to the idea of 'sitting outside the experience and looking in'.

Why do you need to develop the objective viewpoint?  Because it's the decision-maker when it comes to the argument between two other viewpoints that are involved.  When you have an anxiety disorder of any kind and you decide to remove it you've got a war going on inside of you between these two additional viewpoints.

The third viewpoint we're dealing with is that of the trapped emotional response fighting for release - this is the emotional energy contained in the anxiety disorder. In a fictional story this viewpoint would be called the 'Protagonistic Viewpoint'

The fourth viewpoint is the resistance to the release - driven by the parts of you that don't want to go through the releasing experience.  When you want to keep the disorder trapped the disorder is the bad guy and the commitment to keeping the response trapped is the good guy - but when you start to desensitise the argument for and against release is reversed.  The anti-release viewpoint, in a fictional story, would be called the 'Antagonistic Viewpoint'.

The Objective Viewpoint, the part of you that sits outside the experience looking in, decides which of the two viewpoints wins the fight.

4  Work Towards Linking Responses To Triggers

During my healing I would constantly surprise myself as I came to realise the issues behind my responses.  At first all I could see were the emotions themselves and I was 'sailing blind'.  But as I repeatedly went into the emotional responses I started to see the 'issues' appear and I'd think 'well, I agree with me thinking that - I can understand it'.  Once I got to this point I was ready to 'unitise'.  It can be difficult to release an emotional response when you don't know what triggered it.

However, I've also released a trapped response without knowing the trigger, particularly when the response, such as panic attacks, was based around the fear of another response!  It's not so easy to remove these responses because you can't clearly see the cause - it's a bit like being afraid of murky fog - you can't clearly identify things.  Nevertheless, the trapped response will evaporate if you keep going.

5  Establish a Weekly Cycle

It's a good idea to build the healing cycle around your appointments with your counsellor - this way you work towards providing the counsellor/doctor/psychiatrist with a progress report.  You can see your counsellor once a week and then as your healing progresses move the appointments further apart.  Each week you should aim to move a little bit further forward - but remember that just being on the journey is enough most weeks.

6  Focus on One Response at a Time

Your intention should be to move towards the 'maximum intensity point' within the emotional response and regard yourself as working in small emotional release cycles.  What happens, whether you plan for it or not, is that by just moving repeatedly into the most intense part of the response you force the emotional release cycle to complete.

Trapped emotional responses form 'layers' in our bodies and when you complete an emotional cycle you remove the top layer and move onto the one below - until one day they're all gone!

I have been reading recently that you should create a scale where level 1 is the mildest fear response and level 10 is the most intense and you should try and keep yourself at 'level 3' or there's a risk of re-inforcing the emotional response .  This may work well with phobias - but it's not quite so simple with obsessions.  I have also recently seen a report by a respected doctor that states desensitisation does not work on obsessions. Sorry but this is utter rubbish.  Desensitisation and exposure therapy work on all emotional responses as long as you're willing to do the work necessary, it's that simple.

Personally when I wanted to heal from my obsessions I wanted to heal as quickly as possible - I just could not be bothered with all that scales malarkey.  I was a Level 8 no matter what and it was Level 12 that finally sorted it out for me.  But yes - focus on one emotional layer at a time.

7  Create Distraction and 'Switch-off' Points

I'm a bit of a workaholic - I like a list of 'things I did today' at the end of every day and one of my arguments against doing the emotional work was that it was not 'productive'.  By combining the emotional work with some tedious and mentally undemanding task such as wallpaper stripping or ironing (mind that hot iron - ooch) I could do both the 'self-indulgent' emotional work and also find myself with a stripped wall or the ironing done at the end of it.

I could not do complex intellectual work and the emotional work at the same time - I could not even write my experiences down during the emotional work because if you're doing the emotional work right the logical mind, the intellectual, judgemental and interfering left neo-cortex, is hijacked and shut down.

Another distraction I combined with the intense emotional work was pleasant relaxing music; it took the edge off the pain -  my favourite was the Theta Meditation System music from Dr Jeffrey Thompson (there's a link below) - but I bought a whole stack of other relaxing music to use too.

You should reward yourself at regular intervals (especially after completing a period of desensitisation).  This all creates a more pleasant after- affect.  'Yeah, it was unpleasant, but look, I got the wall stripped'.

8  Judge Progress by What You Can Do

One of the problems with judging how well you're doing on the basis of how you feel when it comes to emotional desensitisation is it's all relative to how you feel right now.  You could have got rid of thirty unwanted emotional responses but if you're stuck in the middle of response thirty one and you look to how you feel as an indicator of how you're progressing you'll come up with 'I feel terrible!  It's not working!'.

This is yet another great role a counsellor can serve - acting as an external 'milestone marker' - someone who reminds you of your progress; of what you were struggling with when you first met and what you can do now as opposed to way back then when you first started.

Base progress on what you can do - on the places no longer off limits to you emotionally - rather than how you feel.

9  Accept the Strangeness of Your Thoughts

Trapped feelings look for, and produce, strange thought patterns in order to try and gain escape from the body.  Once those feelings have left the body through the correct thought pattern that created them in the first place (the 'triggering issue') all those strange thought patterns that kept catching your attention disappear.  This is how it works.  Accept the strange thoughts as a part of the healing process and don't give them too much time and weight.

10  Hunt All Negative Feelings Down Like the Dirty Dogs They Are

At some point your anxiety disorder will start to disappear.  Your panic attacks will stop; your phobias will be gone; your obsessions will be distant memories.  The question you have to ask now is: what caused them?  Anxiety disorders can be caused by sudden shocking events - but I suspect it's more usual for them to appear after an anxious foundation has first been laid down for quite some time.

To maintain emotional happiness you have to be watchful for any future negative emotional responses - and hunt them down; feel and release them; at the earliest opportunity.  If you don't do this you risk a relapse into your anxiety disorder.  I've written a previous post called, I think, 'Get the Vacuum Cleaner Out' - when you get a hint of a negative emotional response find it and go into it as soon as possible.  Having this approach will keep you free of further anxiety problems.

If you don't remove negative feelings in this way, as a habit, the dirty dogs will start nipping at your heels again and they don't go away.  But then you already knew that.

That's the end of this post.  Please note that because it's a generalised view of the desensitisation process there may be some parts of it that need to be adapted slightly for different conditions.

All comments; criticisms and discussion points are gratefully received and if you would like to put a post on the blog in response to this post please email me at carl@managemesystems.com and I'll gladly post it (as long as it's relevant and above board etc) with a link back to your site.

I'm thinking about taking the whole week's posts on desensitisation and producing a free pdf download and an mp3 too - would that be of any use?

Regards - Carl

The Sensitisation-Desensitisation Cycle

There are certain things I never intend to de-sensitise to and it doesn't bother me that I'll probably have a fear of these things for the rest of my life.  These things include, for example:

• bungee jumping (I don't believe any piece of elastic in the world is capable of holding my weight)


• sitting in a lion cage in a zoo stroking the mane of a half-starved lion


• swimming alongside Great White Sharks in order to get a decent photo opportunity.

How about you?  Do you think having any of those fears will hold you back in life?  It depends on what you do for a living, I suppose.  I might do those things if the feelings I'd get afterwards, for whatever reason, would leave me feeling worse than the blind terror response that prevents me from doing them. But the belief that it's 'common sense' to be afraid of those things stops me from thinking I have some kind of problem I've got to deal with.

The terror I'm describing here doesn't exist in my body at the time of writing - but it would if I was about to do the things described.  So as I approached these situations, and I started to produce intense fear responses, I would not declare myself 'phobic' or tell myself I had a difficult-to-deal with anxiety disorder.  Would you?  I suspect, especially in regard to the lions and Great White Sharks, you'd say I've got my head screwed on right and I would say the same thing about you.

But there are people who do bungee jumping, working with lions and swimming alongside Great White Sharks for fun.  So what's going on here?  Are they nuts?  No - they're de-sensitised.  They've used their desire to pull them through any fear they had - the danger is, in fact, that because they lack fear they may allow their enthusiasm to get the better of them and end up dead.

I don't know where it's stored in our brains (it may be the Amygdala - a couple of almond shaped brain bits that are at the centre of our fear management mechanism) but I suspect we hold a 'register' that lists the things we are afraid of.  A big list of images and other sensory memories that cause us to react with terror whenever our senses tell us we're near something that's on that list.  The things on the list are called 'triggers' and the great thing for most of us is we hardly ever see or experience those triggers.

Problems arise when the triggers on our 'deadly list of fear' are things we come across in normal day-to-day life.  I know a lady, for example, who is terrified of plastic piping and anything related to plumbing.  Now that's a problem.  That fear is at the same level as playing-with-sharks is for most of us but because she consciously knows the pipes aren't sharks, and that in reality they are harmless, she has difficulty accepting the idea that she's got to go de-sensitise to them in the same way she would have to if she wanted to be a swimming-with-sharks expert.

All that happens when we develop a phobia is that we've listed something on our 'fear-list' - and if socially it's accepted as not being something dangerous to us we call it a phobia.  When it's something socially accepted as dangerous we call it 'common sense'.  It's a perfectly normal process.  And so is removing it.  The purpose of this post is to get across the message that sensitisation and de-sensitisation are normal processes.  To help demonstrate this I'm going to talk about two lower level examples (the only difference between these examples and a full blown anxiety disorder is in the emotional intensity involved).

The two examples are:

• catastrophisation and


• the unconscious incompetence/unconscious competence cycle.

Catastrophisation

Commonly known as 'making mountains out of molehills' catastrophisation is something most of us do at some time.  Using our imaginations we let a small amount of bad news (eg being late for work) build into a scenario in our minds that triggers negative emotional responses in our bodies.  The bad feelings drive further negative thoughts.  By the time we get to work we've decided our boss has already fired us; always hated us anyway and our being late is the final chunk of evidence they need to put their dastardly plan to get rid of us into action.  We picture losing our homes as the salary dries up and our kids destitute on the street (if you haven't got any kids just imagine that if you did have your imaginary kids would be destitute on the streets - this is the imagination working here, we can invent anything we want, OK?).

So when your boss sees you at work you're all riled and ready to tell him where to stick his job as he invites you into his office and tells you he's decided to give you a pay award for all your hard work.  Eh?  Sensitisation over - only not quite, as it takes about four hours for the emotional energy to disperse while you keep telling yourself 'all that grief I gave myself for nothing'.

The 'catastrophisation' process is one of our scenario building mechanisms designed to protect us from possible danger but in a modern world it can cause us harm if not properly managed - it is also an example of the sensitisation-desensitisation cycle at one of its lower levels; but let's not belittle it - you need to get this habit under control or you could end up telling your boss where to stick that job and regret it later.  Catastrophisation as a cycle usually only lasts a day or two until the truth of a situation is fully revealed.

The Unconscious Incompetence/Unconscious Competence Cycle

What a mouthful, eh?  I like to call it the 'don't know-don't care/do know-don't care' cycle.

This cycle, and our refusal to go through it, is the main cause of people not making progress in their jobs and personal lives.  Learning the cycle and applying it on a regular, systematic basis can help you to manage your personal growth.  There are four stages to the cycle:

Stage 1: Unconscious Incompetence - 'don't know-don't care'

I can't fly a plane but it doesn't bother me because I don't need to know because I never intend to fly a plane.  Even when my employer tells me he's sending me to another part of the country in a Cessna two-seater it doesn't bother me because my employer tells me the pilot is very experienced.

Stage 2: Conscious Incompetence - 'don't know-do care'

We're at 20'000 feet over mountains when my experienced pilot tells me he feels dizzy and promptly passes out.  As the plane starts to dip it suddenly really bothers me that I haven't got a clue how to fly a plane.  Where's the microphone thing?  Ground Control!

Stage 3: Conscious Competence - 'do know-do care'

Ground Control talk me down (amazing how they do that, eh?) and after they take the pilot off to hospital I report back to my boss who tells me I'd better take flying lessons as he wants me to make the trip on a regular basis and it's obvious I've got a knack for flying.

Stage 4: Unconscious Competence - 'do know-don't care'

Five years later and I'm a pilot myself now and I regard other non-pilots as being dangerous around planes and not too bright.  I can fly with one hand tied behind my back and the danger now is I'll not give myself enough sleep one night and while giving a business person a trip somewhere in my two-seat Cessna I pass out due to exhaustion and they have to go through the same learning cycle I did.

OK - which of the four stages is the most intense 'sensitisation-desensitisation' stage?  What kind of thoughts go through a person's head and how do they feel?

This is such a common behavioural cycle that it's taught in most administrative management courses - and it merely describes the de-sensitisation process - just at a lower level of emotional intensity than you'd find in a phobia or an obsession.  It can last from a single day to many years as someone transitions through the stages of the cycle.

Please leave any comments/answers or questions below.

In the next post I'll be looking at the difference between phobias and obsessions when it comes to becoming de-sensitised.

Regards - Carl

PS if you think I'm joking about shark swimmers ... all you need is a little stick to poke 'em with and you're safe ... apparently ...

Powerful Sermon: Stuck on a Misery-Go-Round? Let It Go

This mp3 lasts somewhere in the region of 30 minutes and although it concerns mainly women and the need to let go of relationships that are hurting them it applies to men and so many other areas of life.

I first listened to it a couple of years back and pulled it out of my browser bookmarks this morning to have another listen.  Truer words were never spoken.

Please leave any comments below. Click below to listen (ps -:
on some computers this mp3 sounds like a 'sonic duck' - if it does I apologise but all is not lost - click here to go the 'theonlineword' site - type '5246' in the search box at the top left corner - the sermon is provided at the site in different media formats and with a supporting pdf.

Diagram of the 5 Elements of the Systems Model

Take a look at the following diagram for a moment and just imagine these interlocking parts as a moving wheel that keeps repeating and repeating through time.  A cycle is one rotation of of the wheel - but a repeating cycle is a 'system'.  Your entire life is a single cycle - but that single cycle is full of millions and billions and maybe even zillions of interweaving self-repeating systems.

The 5 key elements of all systems are:

• Inputs


• Processes and Activities


• Outputs and Outcomes


• Feedback Mechanisms


• The Environment

[caption id="attachment_22" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="The 5 Key Elements of the Systems Model (please click to enlarge image)"][/caption]