Reply To: Exercise 6: Unwanted Beliefs
Leadership Step-by-Step
Unwanted Beliefs
1. How did this compare with writing your beliefs
I have to first acknowledge again that I did not find a way to make it work to write things down as I was feeling them. I usually felt something in the middle of doing other things, in transit somewhere, in a group, etc, and stopping to write down what I was feeling didn’t feel like an option. I wrote them down later.
I didn’t feel much difference in this exercise and the last about recording feelings. I watched my feelings of judgement and of others and myself arise frequently as I had unwanted feelings. I think that being a therapist trained me to watch my own negative feelings scrupulously in relationship to others and it is a lifetime habit. I tried to recognize anything different that might arise in this particular exercise but I honestly can’t say that I saw my feelings differently.
2. Were you able to separate your beliefs from the emotions they evoked.
The hotter the emotion, the more time it took me to get out of the emotion and articulate the belief underlying the emotion.
3. Were you able to separate your beliefs from your identity.
This is a lifetime process! One of my beliefs about what this life is about is continuously learning that I am not my ideas, my thoughts or my beliefs. I see it as the helix. I keep seeing/learning this in ever evolving levels of understanding.
4. How did you feel while thinking about the beliefs and emotions.
I sometimes felt like what Josh described feeling when he meditates; “I’m probably doing this wrong”. I thought of Josh’s example of believing that not locking your knees was the “right” way to stand as a child, but then thinking “that has a should in it”. So what is the belief behind that should? That standing with your knees locked will hurt you? So much of my processing time was trying to figure out if I was missing something. If the way I first expressed my belief had an implied should, I tried to examine what I thought the outcome would be if that should wasn’t met. I felt a little twisted around in a way that didn’t feel particularly enlightening.
5. How did that feeling change over the course of the exercise, if it did.
It really didn’t change.
6. Did awareness of the belief make the feelings stronger? Weaker? Different?
Yes. Examining the belief behind/underneath the feeling changed the feeling, sometimes to a different feeling and sometimes it diminished in intensity. I don’t think I had an experience of the emotion increasing in intensity.
7. Where and how might you apply your experience to the rest of your life.
The story that Josh shared in the chapter about his experience with his professor can also be described as “reframing” the experience he had with the professor or “changing the narrative” he used to explain the experience to himself. I think this is what this exercise helps us do. When we have negative emotions, creating other ways of looking at the disturbing events by looking at our beliefs can completely change how we experience what was originally experienced as distressful.