In this series of posts, I’m putting two ideas together—the idea that smart, creative, sensitive individuals are confronted by special challenges and the idea that journaling is a valuable self-help tool—and turning them into a set of journaling prompts designed to lead you on a personal journey of discovery.
I hope that you enjoy these prompts. Here are five more challenges, and four journal prompts to go with each challenge. Engaging with any one of them may well serve you. I hope you find these valuable! And I hope you’ll take a look at Why Smart People Hurt and at my latest journal, Affirmations for Self-Love.
Today we look at the challenge of examining our thoughts so that we understand what they actually mean and why they have arisen. Many of our thoughts are suspect or ought to be treated as suspect. A given thought may have arisen from some defensive place, some mischievous place, or some other shadowy place.
If you think that a given thought might be suspect, you would then interrogate it, as you would a suspect in a criminal case. This might sound like, “Okay, thought, what’s going on? What are you doing in my head, are you serving me, are you out for some mischief, what exactly are you doing?” Let’s look at this idea more closely!
- The challenge of identifying suspect thoughts. Say that you are in Paris. You pass by the window of a pastry shop. A gorgeous cake catches your eye. You hear yourself say, “That cake looks delicious.” Are you alerted to the fact that maybe that’s a suspect thought, maybe having to do with your desire to jettison your diet?
+ Are you in the habit of wondering if a given thought is suspect or not?
+ If that wonder does cross your mind, what do you do next? Do you actually do a little investigating?
+ Can you recall a time when it really paid dividends to not accept a thought at face value but to investigate it instead?
+ What thought have you had today (or recently) that might be worth investigating and “interrogating”?
2. The challenge of our defensiveness. How can we successfully interrogate our thoughts if we don’t really want to know what our thoughts are signifying or hiding? What might help reduce our all-too-human defensiveness, so that we are freer to examine our thoughts?
+ Picture a wall between you and your secrets, the secrets you keep from yourself. How might you go about taking that wall down?
+ Picture a few bricks in the wall having been removed. Take a peek. What do you see on the other side?
+ Does it feel safe to remove a few more bricks? Are you willing to learn more?
+ What about removing the whole wall? What might the consequences be of such an amazing, dramatic, brave act?
3. The challenge of creating a personal “cognitive language.” Do you have a way to distinguish between the thoughts you want and the thoughts you don’t want? What would you like to call a thought that you do want? A productive thought, a positive thought, a useful thought, an encouraging thought, an aligned thought, a purposeful thought?
+ Can you remember a time when you consciously worked to make your inner language more positive or encouraging? What was that experience like?
+ Can you remember a time when you made your inner language more negative than it already was? What was that experience like?
+ What is your aim for your thinking: that it be positive, productive, encouraging, useful, or something else?
+ Create a thought that captures the flavor of how you would like your inner language to sound. What do you notice?
4. The challenge of a given suspect thought “refusing to talk.” On the advice of counsel—on the advice of some protective mechanism somewhere deep inside of you—your suspect thought may simply reply, “No comment.” What then?
+ If you have the feeling that a thought that you’re thinking may be suspect, but you can’t figure out whether or not it really is, what might you do?
+ Is there a particular suspect thought that you would like to interrogate? Play out that interrogation.
+ Imagine a suspect thought “opening up” to you. What do you see?
+ What is your go-to or favorite defense mechanism? Do you know?
5. The challenge of acquiring the habit of investigating or “interrogating” thoughts. If you haven’t made this a habit, how many suspect thoughts will remain free to pester, beleaguer, and derail you!
+ What might the habit of investigating your own thoughts look like?
+ Journal to the prompt, “I think that I would like to learn more about my inner language. To that end, I will do the following.”
+ Create an “I will try to only think thoughts that serve me” affirmation and try it out.
+ Picture yourself as a “cognitive detective” and create a story where you break the case and, by so doing, improve your cognitive landscape.
More to come! Enjoy!
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
