Video Transcript: Overcoming the Overwhelming

We are in Session 11.  Thanks for joining us.  We're so excited that you're here and we're about ready to talk about overcoming the overwhelming.  This is the part where we start looking at all that we have been talking about as it pertains to anger management, how to teach it, how to share it with others, how to learn it for ourselves, and how to do a better job of changing our behaviors, our attitudes, making shifts, and our choices and making better decisions. 

All of this culminates in how we overcome the overwhelming.  And we do find ourselves in those situations from time to time. So we're going to look at this first slide. And we're going to describe it as what you see here.  If you're on page 15, you're on the right page. And we're in the portion that is the Strategies that manage mindset. 

Three things: Rethink, Repeat and Reframe.  And we're going to describe and share with you information I think that can be helpful when you try to start focusing on how you help this situation become easier for you to manage.  And I say easier because for all intents and purposes, it's a value to us when we can recognize that we have options.  And the options are to Rethink, an option to Repeat, the option to Reframe. 

The longer I live, the more I realize how impactful a positive mindset can have on your life and in many ways, it is more important than several things that come to mind.  So think about it.  

There is an extraordinarily little you can do about your past mistakes other than learn from them. And your education only means something if you put it to use and recognize there's always more to learn. So as we said before, all professionals that I'm aware of practice and the practice that they do is constantly learning and relearning what they need to know about their particular profession.  Hopefully, you've learned lessons from making mistakes that will last a lifetime. And if you move beyond them, using what you've learned to do better the next time. 

So if we take a look at our ability to Rethink, Repeat, and Reframe, we take that to the next level by looking at how we change our self-talk. What we say to ourselves is equally as important as to what we say to others.  And if we're supposed to be in a constant state of prayer, which we are, a communion with God, we take all of our challenges, all of our problems, as we're rethinking how we're going to manage a situation that has not turned out the way we wanted to the first time, second, or third time, and we keep finding situations where we say I’ve got to rethink this, I’ve got to rethink it.  Yes, we do. 

And rethinking it means that we're taking a thinking break and spending extra time trying to determine how to make this more effective.  And if we're honest, we are faced with problems and challenges.  And if we try to solve those problems with the same solution we used 25 years ago, 10 years ago, six weeks ago, it may not be useful, it may not be helpful.  So you can't solve today's problems with yesterday's solutions. 

And every time you solve a problem, another problem will be created.  It's just how life works. And at the same time if we Rethink, it means we're using the ability, the neural plasticity, if you will, that's in our brain, to help us move information around in such a way as to see it from a different perspective.  And when we do that, we become more effective. 

So change the way we self-talk to each other.  Instead of saying, I'm not happy, say I'm happy. And I choose to be happy, I choose to be excited, I choose to be enthusiastic.  I choose to move in this direction, whatever that direction might be.  And remember, it's all about separating ourselves from our behavior.  When we do that, we add value to what goes on in our lives. 

We mentioned the Harvard study that indicated that we can manage 7+/-2 things on any given day from all the external stimulation that's in the world.  And so we filter through our thought process when we look outside and it's raining and so if our perception is ‘oh, it's raining, there goes the picnic’ and someone else may be looking at it, ‘oh, there's the rain, now my crops will survive because they'll be watered’.  And that is what life is about.  So we have to use this self-talk mechanism to help us change the way we think.  

When I decided to start my questioning by saying, “I am naïve.  I am asking innocent questions because I don't know any better,” it sets up a much more positive environment.  When you sit down and say, “Thank you for bringing that to my attention,” as opposed to “I, you might not, I don't know if that, I don't know…”. what you're doing is you're changing your self-talk, you're rethinking it, and you're thinking in it, and thinking about it in a different way.

Let's look at Repeat Behavioral Patterns.  We said that what causes us to behave is certain cues over here.  I don't know if you've ever had your mouth water because you wanted a piece of pie or a cookie.  You were hungry and you saw something and the salivation started in your mouth because you were hungry, but the Behavior Pattern then is that that satisfied that desire to eat, or that satisfied to drink this or that.  And those Behavioral Patterns, that's what they are simply Behavioral Patterns, well, if they're repeatable, and they're repeating, and they're giving you the outcomes that you want, continue to use them.  But if they're Behavioral Patterns that have created destructive situations for you in your life, then you need to change. 

I was driving home from the office, and I was on the road and about the same place I usually was when I reached over and started to pick up the third bottle of beer on my way home.  And I realized that there were five bottles left, and I realized that I would drink all five before I went to bed.  I realized and rethinking it, and repeating this behavior over and over and over, that I had stopped in time to get to the liquor store before it closed to buy this eight pack of what was called a pony, and I had already reached for the third one on the way home, and knew that if I drank all eight, I would be anesthetized before I went to bed.  I put it down and I have never touched another drop because that Behavioral Pattern was glaring at me. 

And from my experience in my early childhood, I realized that I did not want to do that I did not want to consume alcohol.  I'm not saying it's bad, but I'm saying for me, it's bad.  I'm not saying that you shouldn't, it's a choice that you make.  I am saying that anything in excess is something that we have to be careful of because if we're repeating it and it's become excess, it's a danger to us.  And we have to be conscious of that. 

So the Behavioral Patterns that we create need to be Behavioral Patterns that are useful, helpful and help others in addition to ourselves.  So that we can practice being someone who is using reciprocity in our lives, the ability to give and receive, and that's in relationships, but it also has to be the ability to give and receive ourselves. 

If we're consuming too much alcohol, we're not getting the outcome from that we want, or maybe we are, and we're trying to bury something that we need to have surface come along and then Reframe. 

See, Reframing is the third strategy here in this managing of your mindset.  When you Reframe something, it means your attitude changes toward it.  And what was my attitude?  Alcohol is not bad; it is for me.  That's the attitudinal adjustment that I made because I realized for a very long time, I was stopping soon so I could run to the store before it closed, and I would consume eight bottles of beer before going to bed.

I'm not proud of that.  I'm not ashamed of it.  I noticed that my behavioral pattern was dangerous to me.  And so by reframing that and changing my attitude about what alcohol would do to and for me, I changed the Reciprocity I was practicing with myself.  

And reciprocity is typically defined as what we do with regard to giving and receiving.  And again, going back to our language and our communication and how we interact with each other, if we're rethinking something and we change our self-talk, we have to be clear on what we're saying to our self.  Alcohol does not serve me well. That was the choice, I decided to speak into my life.  And in its place, I decided to stop doing what I had been doing, that had I continued, would have been very destructive for me.  That's not a value judgment for anyone. It's simply saying it was a way for me to understand what was better for me than what I was practicing. 

Our choices are what we become the sum total of, and the Reciprocity piece of this, when we describe it as it pertains to us and our relationships and involvement with other people is simply this.  There are people who know how to give and they give generously, and they give and give and give some more.  And there are people who take and know how to take, and they take and take and take some more.  And there are a number of people who know how to do giving, and a number of people who know how to take.  But it's difficult, more difficult, to give and receive, to be able to take both and put them in that same perspective that needs to be there, a healthy perspective, on what it means to practice Reciprocity, the ability to give and the ability to receive.  And it's the simplicity of it that makes a difference. 

That suppose someone pays you a compliment.  If you were to say to someone that is really a terrific looking shirt, and that person said, “Oh, you know, I got it on sale,” they're depriving the person who said that's a terrific looking shirt of getting the thank you that they may have wanted, and may have appreciated, and their genuineness, their sincerity and wanting to give a compliment.  And then to take what comes back, and this person that hears, “Oh, you know, I bought it on sale, it's not a big deal,” they took that back.  That may or may not have been what they wanted, it may have not made a difference to them. 

But the point I'm making here is if we guard our words, and we change our self-talk, if we are always looking at our patterns of behavior, and how to manage them more effectively, and then if we do this attitudinal adjustment from time to time, we start recognizing the value of not playing that P-L-U-M game that we talked about, Poor-Little-Unfortunate-Me.  

And our self-esteem needs to be strong enough to accept compliments for what they are, genuine, genuine compliments that come from others that are trying to and making an attempt to affirm us, and it's okay to be affirmed.  And people who have anger issues are those whose needs are not being met, who are fearful of something, and who find themselves deprived or empty.  

And our hope is that we help people reach more of their potential by loving them and caring for them in a way that helps them feel the worthwhile portion of who they are when they can't feel that for themselves, and by encouraging and affirming them we can make some of that, we can plant some of that into their thought process.  Put the seeds in and they have to be nurtured, and then they may or may not grow, but we've done our part. 

If you look at your handout, and you see there's a little box there and it says add this to your positive self-talk.  God forgives us.  Can you make this statement to yourself?  I forgive myself.   I made that statement to myself when I stopped drinking beer.  I forgive myself for not recognizing that I shouldn't do this, sooner.  And yet, it was soon enough, because it came at a time when I can recognize that it's the time to be able to identify that challenge in my life.

We don't know that we don't know.  We talked about that. We said that we someday learn or know that we don't know something.  And there's two more steps in that process that Abraham Maslow laid down; a psychologist who came up with this idea of not knowing that you don't know something to knowing that you don't know something. 

The first and the second are there to kind of give us an alertness, an ‘Aha’ an ‘Oh’.  The first one, we don't know that we don't know; the second one, we know that we don't know, and from those two, we move to the next two.  

The third step in that process is Learning the Skill.  In his words are to move from an unconscious incompetent, I don't know that I don't know, to a conscious incompetent, I know that I don't know, to a conscious competent, which means learning the skill and practicing until it becomes automatic.  And then you become what he referred to as an unconscious competent.  So you move from incompetency to competency, and you do this in steps. In gradual steps. And as you do that you learn.

Children need their shoes tied.  Now I know Velcro is out there and some people just use Velcro on kids’ shoes, and everything's fine.  But every kid needs to learn how to tie their shoe.  It gives them an opportunity to become more dexterous; it gives them small motor skills.  There are many, many things that go with tying shoes.  And a child doesn't know that their shoes are untied.  They do not know what they do not know.  But we see it.  

So as adults will say, “Honey, can we are your shoes untied.” Now they looked down and they see that shoes are not tied.  And now they know that they don't know how to do that so they walk over to you and you tie their shoe.  When you do that enough times, and that child watches enough times that they want to try it, because they take a risk.  They're willing to take a risk.  And if you notice children take lots of risks.  And they willingly take risks, to Rethink, Reframe. Those things are natural to them. 

A child of four years old, has about 10,000 words.  A child that six years old has 50,000 words.  Look at what they learned in a very short period of time.  So this child that's been watching you tie their shoe looks down one day and decides I'm going to rethink this.  Now they don't do that consciously, but they think they can do what they've watched you do.  

So they try to tie a bow. And usually that bow is very loose on their shoe.  It's not going to hold, and they slide across the floor all excited because it looks like what you do.  And they want to show you that they tied their shoe.  And you look down at their shoe and you know what's going to come untied.  And there's one of two ways that you can respond.   

You can say, “That bow is going to fall out,” or you can say, “Wow, look at what you did.”   All you're saying is, “Look at what you did.”   You're not saying “That's great. That's wonderful. I'm so proud of you.”  You're just “Wow, look at what you did.”  And over time, they will learn how to tie their shoe because you'll continue to help them practice, and practice with them and for them until they can do it for themselves. 

When you're helping someone work through their anger, you're working with them and for them and helping them do for themselves.  But you're helping them do the Rethinking, the Repeating the Reframing.  And then they'll be able to say I forgive myself for these angry outbursts.  Because I forgive myself because God's forgiven me, I'm going to treat this person better.  I'm going to treat you better.  I'm going to commit to doing that and making that happen. 

You see, each of us gets one shot at this life.  Now, this is right here in your notes.  I want to read it because I'd like you to think about how you would put this in your own words.  How much of it are you going to use to meet your obligation to pay it forward?  Each of us gets one shot at this life.  Are you going to pay it forward as you learn these lessons in your life?

I think that's what happens when someone's called to the mission field, when someone's called to be a counselor, when someone's called to be a coach or a pastor.  I think in that moment, they see their lives and they say, “You know what, I've got one shot at this.  How can I help make this life, this world, a better place?”  And you start giving and giving and giving of yourself, knowing that you have to love yourself enough to love everyone in that way and follow that commandment. 

So would you agree the next generation needs a chance to add to God's creation?  He created you and He created me with a unique and genuine longing to love, be loved, and make a worthwhile life out of the messes that we create.  We're going to have messes in our life.  But what we do is say, “It's over, what's next?”  We keep on moving forward.  And when we move forward, the benefit to us benefits others because in our sphere of influence, we have changed something in ourselves.  And the thing that we have changed, it has been changed because Holy Spirit has somehow helped us recognize that we need to make a change and a difference in our lives.  And then we take that change and we broaden it, make it bigger, and make it more clear to ourselves by helping others see more clearly.  And when we do that, we're changing the environment around us and we're transforming the world. 

I was in an interview years ago in a radio station.  And we were having this discussion and it came time for people to call in.  And a lady called in and she said, “Tony, I really enjoyed what you've been talking about.” And she referenced the host and said, “I appreciate you having your guest there,” and she said, “I'm not trying to change the world, I'm just trying to change my neighborhood.”  And my comment back to her was, you are changing the world because you're changing your neighborhood.  And that's really what we all do. 

We live in this tiny, tiny space on a big, big planet.  And we are planted there by God.  And when we recognize that we have a mission, and what it is is to develop and nurture ourselves in such a way as to have the ability to help others develop and nurture themselves, all through God's grace, all through prayerfully recognizing that He forgave us, and we have to forgive ourselves. 

If we overcome the overwhelming, it's simply because we're equipping ourselves so efficiently and so effectively with dealing with the unknown, and it is unknown. We do not know what will happen next, but we can plan for it as long as our plans include asking for God's guidance and direction.  And when we do that our planning is going to be better.  It's going to be better outcomes all the way around because what we're recognizing is that our Dominant Need needs to be prayerfully considered.  And we get into the practice of making better to decisions and better choices over time because what we're doing is trying to live a life that that aligns with our spiritual self and makes a connection to our mind and manages our body more effectively. 

What's interesting about our mind and heart is that they're connected through the vagal nervous system.  It's the only organ in the body that is connected directly to the brain through a vagal nervous system.  The rest of your body is connected with the spinal column. 

I don't know a lot about anatomy but the little bit of understanding I have about neuroscience and the brain fascinates me with regard to just precisely how precise we have been crafted by our Creator.  And then the responsibility that we're given, and the fact that human beings go from infancy to young adulthood with an enormous amount of guidance and direction, from parents, and loving and caring teachers, and adults who try to help us become better at what we do, and try to guide us in the right direction.  And then our role is to take responsibility for that and pass it on.  And we pass it on when we share our experiences and our background in a way that can help someone else who's making tough decisions for themselves. 

There's a lot of pain in the world.  There's a lot of hurt in the world.  And it manifests itself in the way we interact with each other.  And we see it in what people say to us and how they say it. And what we see and how we say it back is going to determine how much of it continues to be raw nerve-overwhelming frustration, or if it can be transformed into something that teaches a lesson that helps them move to the next step and the step after that.  And when that happens, we're all doing what we're supposed to be doing. 

We look at this last paragraph.  There are a couple of other sentences here, we have each other to learn from, to lean on, and raise up.  That's the challenge.   We have each other to lean on, and to learn, and your difference and mine makes a difference when our minds are set on doing our best. 

If you ever think you're so overwhelmed that you're not making a contribution, be aware that if you're trying to do the right things, you are making a contribution.  And what you're doing is helping someone see in you what they may not see in themselves until they can see it for themselves.  

That's what I've been talking about and sharing with, whether we use George as this example of someone who so much and struggle and pain with himself and feels so depleted of positive energy that he has to scream and bark and holler and rant and rave to get his way, because it's worked for them in the past. 

There's something there that George has to deal with.  And the only way we can help George deal with that is to treat him with dignity and treat him with respect and at the same time not accept his behavior that's unacceptable.  And you can only do that by separating him from his behavior in the words you use, the expressions that you convey to him to help him with that event. 

So we look at this overcoming the overwhelming and we say okay, what kind of tools can we use to manage this and be more effective at this?  And these three simple statements here, Strategies we call them - 

Rethink - change the way you talk to yourself and how you speak to others, to

Repeat - and that's the behavioral patterns that we can observe in ourselves, we can observe in others; we can help people see in themselves, and to 

Reframe, have the attitude that comes with recognizing our awareness is as aware as we can be, until we become more aware. 

We don't know what we don't know until we become aware that we don't know.  And then we go out and try to find the resources we need to be able to refine it and develop ourselves in such a way that it becomes automatic.  And then we do it well.  We do it well.

I remember the first time I was asked to make a presentation.  And I was asked to make the presentation and it was going to happen a week later.  And I remembered being so nervous and so terrified of standing in front of a group and making a presentation.  And I looked down, and I had two different shoes on… in front of ten people.  And I was mortified.  But you know what?  I said, “Okay, so I've got two shoes on.”  I pointed it out; they laughed, I laughed.  And there's something about laughter that brings people together.  It's a universal language. 

And I talked in one of our sessions about how important it is to revisit and reignite the humor in your life.  And that was a humorous moment.  And to acknowledge and admit that there I stood in two different shoes because I was nervous, made me real to them and made them real to me. But more importantly, it was something we could do together.  We could enjoy that moment together, that laughter that took place.  It's a universal language. 

And when you can start to see the funny side of life, and the fun things that happen, and the giggles that just come automatically, it's part of reframing things.  It's part of recognizing that we're not all that important, that what you are, is genuinely who we are, and we need to accept who we are and move from there to growing that who we are to all that we can possibly be.  And when that happens, it happens over time. 

And if you take this information, and let's say that that over the next two years, you visit it from time to time.  You look at Session 3, or you look at Session 1, you pick up that Session 10, and you look at that diagram that we've laid out.  And you do that periodically, revisiting this material, reading a book on any one of the subjects we've talked about -  Neuro Linguistic Programming, for an example, Precise Communication is another one, being an Active Listener, any of those, and what you'll discover is that 24 months from now, you'll look back and you'll be surprised at how far you've come because of your willingness to do what we've been talking about. 

Take a close examination, be objective, and not pounded, beat up on yourself or feel guilty because of where you are or where you wish you were and you have decided to make new decisions to Rethink, and to Repeat those behaviors that work and work well but discard those that are not working well, and change the things that you say to yourself.  And when you do that, your life becomes a symphony because all the notes begin to be played in a way that makes it more beautiful than it had been. 

And you create a tapestry in your life that serves as a testament to how far you keep going forward.  Can't live in the past.  You can go back there and visit and say these are the things I've learned from there, but I don't live there. 

You can live in the present by being present to the moment.  And that's a harder thing to do in our culture today because of smartphones.  A whole lot of people are looking at their phone rather than being in the moment they're in with themselves and with others.  Even around a dinner table there are people who are on their phone rather than interacting with, eyeball to eyeball, those around that meal. 

So I urge you to Rethink, to Repeat, and to Reframe all you say and do and the one most important thing you can do is do what God has already done.  If you've asked for it, you've been forgiven.  Now it's time for you to say, I forgive myself.

I'll see you soon in Session 11.  God bless.