PROCESSES TO EMPLOY:
Brutal Honesty, I over E, Present/Understand/Fix, Slowing Down Life’s Pace, Internal Focus, Fact-Finding, Conscious Thought, Truth-Telling, Sustained Learning, Trust, Faith, Goal-Setting

The 3 Ds discussed in the previous chapter help keep your mind operating at a conscious level, avoiding the autopilot negative internal dialogue, which causes you to lose control of how you think and talk to yourself. Learning to disengage, divert, and direct the way you think and speak internally demands that you apply conscious thought throughout the process. “Conscious thought” is thought that is occurring in the moment. You are thinking the thought, you are aware of what you are thinking, and you are aware that you are thinking that thought.

The awareness of what you are thinking separates autopilot negative thoughts and internal language from that which is under your control. It is language you can control, rather than language that controls you. Learning to control your thoughts is a powerful internal process. Remember, how you think becomes how you behave internally and translates to how you speak and act in the real world. When autopilot thinking and speaking controls you, you have less control over how you speak and behave. Applying conscious thought and learning to question and explore your thoughts can dramatically impact how you live your life.

Internal Exploration
“Conscious thoughts” are the thoughts, feelings, and memories that a person is aware of at a given moment. It is also the ability to understand why those thoughts, feelings, and memories are arising and where they are coming from. Sometimes, those thoughts come from our past, and sometimes, they concern the near or distant future. At other times, they occur in the present, and we begin internal dialogues about them. Regardless of the time frame, we can start speaking to ourselves in negative and unhealthy ways, and we must understand as much as we can about those internal dialogues.

When those internal conversations come from something that occurred in the past, it is important to understand not only what happened but where, why, and how. This is called context, and it has much to do with how we express ourselves internally. Applying conscious thought to the past means exploring its context as well as its content. Doing this can help us put closure on those events and change how we speak about them in the present.

When our conversations focus on future events that have not happened, we tend to approach them with fear and apprehension. Sometimes, the fears are rational, meaning we can define what we are afraid of. At other times, they are more irrational and can evoke exaggerated fear about the event. Consciously thinking about a future event means exploring its context and the people involved in it. This gives us a more realistic view of what might happen. We may still experience some apprehension, but it should correspond to what could realistically happen. Now, our conversations can be about what will happen, how it might happen, and what we can do about it. We might conclude that there is nothing to do now and that the matter needs to unfold in greater detail before we address it. It is much better to have a conversation about something you are attempting to control than something that is out of your control.

Sometimes, the conversations that cause us to speak to ourselves in angry and abrasive terms are about what is happening in the present. This is because we are more cognizant of a present event’s details than we are of past or future details. That's because we will have forgotten some details of a past experience, and some information regarding the future may still be unknown. In the present, what is occurring has more depth and breadth. We can feel it, and it has greater potential to confuse our minds and accelerate our bodies.

Conversations about the present need to be about the facts, which are easier to focus on since it is happening in real-time. Defining the facts helps us reduce our emotional investment in the situation and lessens the physical acceleration that can be connected to emotional attachment. The present needs to be all about the facts. Our internal dialogue should be more about what happened than how we feel about it. We can discuss our feelings after all the facts have been collected.