Working Toward Wonderful: A Toolbox for Self-Discovery and Growth
Autor Alyss Thomasen Limba Engleză Paperback – 30 iun 2014
Readers can get ready to know themselves better than ever! Working Toward Wonderful provides a complete toolbox that can reveal areas in life where a person is dissatisfied, unhappy, or just confused. Asking questions is a simple but powerful tool: each question takes the reader closer to the goal of a wonderful experience, a wonderful new beginning, a wonderful life. Instead of the traditional self-help guide that urges change and positive thinking, this book is a catalyst for action and change.
More than just a quiz book, Working Toward Wonderful provides practical ideas and step-by-step suggestions to overcome negative ways of thinking and embrace the positive, designed so a reader can pick it up and choose a chapter to read based on their most pressing concerns.
More than just a quiz book, Working Toward Wonderful provides practical ideas and step-by-step suggestions to overcome negative ways of thinking and embrace the positive, designed so a reader can pick it up and choose a chapter to read based on their most pressing concerns.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780897936989
ISBN-10: 0897936981
Pagini: 182
Ilustrații: B&W illustrations, charts, worksheets throughout
Dimensiuni: 216 x 274 x 18 mm
Greutate: 0.54 kg
Editura: Hunter House Publishers
ISBN-10: 0897936981
Pagini: 182
Ilustrații: B&W illustrations, charts, worksheets throughout
Dimensiuni: 216 x 274 x 18 mm
Greutate: 0.54 kg
Editura: Hunter House Publishers
Cuprins
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Ask Yourself
Chapter 2: Choose Your Values
Chapter 3: Time, Stress, Anxiety and Relaxation
Chapter 4: Dealing with the Past
Chapter 5: Happiness, Joy and Creativity
Chapter 6: Relationships and Communication
Conclusion: Hope
Introduction
Chapter 1: Ask Yourself
Chapter 2: Choose Your Values
Chapter 3: Time, Stress, Anxiety and Relaxation
Chapter 4: Dealing with the Past
Chapter 5: Happiness, Joy and Creativity
Chapter 6: Relationships and Communication
Conclusion: Hope
Notă biografică
Alyss Thomas is a registered psychotherapist, group analyst, and writer who lives in Devon, U.K.
Extras
Excerpt from Introduction
A new oracle of change
Many times we turn to various different ways of trying to read the future. The old oracles,such as the I Ching or tarot, help us obtain some perspective on dif?cult and perplexing problems and questions. These ancient oracles are still highly popular. However, they evolved in cultures very different from our own, and represent values, such as the depiction of the ?xed roles of women, that may no longer be helpful to us. This book offers a fresh look at our need to ask questions and ?nd the right answers for ourselves. While respecting and appreciating traditional wisdom, it also offers a straightforward contemporary approach based on consistent, logical principles. Asking ourselves questions is a powerful way to drive our lives forward.
Why you don’t need a fix
It is easy to feel vulnerable and insecure, and to feel that someone else out there must have the answers for you. It is not particularly difficult to train as a counselor, a life coach, or a seminar leader, and to offer people solutions, models and advice as to how they can tweak their life into shape. Are these people really better experts on you than you are yourself? Sometimes it can be reassuring and comforting to enlist professional help, and there are times when therapy of various kinds can really help you address stuck issues and move ahead. Sometimes another person’s feedback is essential to help you see yourself more accurately and clearly. However, it is unhelpful to assume that there is something wrong with you that needs fixing. Many people are trying to sell you something you can’t really get from anyone else: a good attitude, and the ability to ask yourself the right questions. This is what this book is about.
The 1000 Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask Yourself takes a different approach to psychology than those you may and in many other popular psychology and self-help books and programmes. It doesn’t focus solely on changing your behaviour or challenging outmoded negative beliefs – although this is included. The quiz format is designed to help you bring new awareness to your underlying values, attitudes and emotions. Awareness itself is transformative. You will ?nd the questions continue to work on you long after you have put the book down. Thus, the quizzes have a ‘soft’ format and do not have routine psychological profile answers. They are designed to help you refresh your mind.
The trap of negativity, complaining, hopelessness, low self-esteem, guilt and self-blame
Sometimes it is amazing that we ever get out of bed at all. Why bother? Overcoming yourself is more than half the battle. It can take tremendous work to create the right attitude in yourself so you are ready for the good things to happen. Often it isn’t the problem itself that is the problem, but the attitudes we insist on hanging on to. It will not be possible to read this book without shifting your attitude at least a little! If you are not ready yet, creep back into bed, but remember this persistently cheerful and determined book will be waiting for you.
Excerpt from Chapter 1: Ask Yourself
Self-sabotage
Are there ways in which you limit your own success, get in your own way, and generally screw things up for yourself? Are you a self-saboteur? Do you procrastinate and muddle along?
What does this mean? Either your life has taken some very unexpected turns, in which case your values and goals could have changed quite radically, or you might have tried to slow things down because of self-sabotage factors. These factors do not, of course, include sabotage that happens to you from the outside, which is not your fault.
The self-sabotage factors
How many of these can you honestly say you have never at any time been guilty of?
• negative self-talk, such as ‘I can’t do it’ or ‘I’m not good enough’
• low self-esteem
• low confidence
• a sense of unworthiness, or that you don’t deserve good things
• low expectations
• confused priorities
• unclear values
• disorganisation
• procrastination
• fear of success
• fear of failure
• fear of making decisions
• blaming others, or blaming circumstances
• making excuses, and believing your own excuses
• avoidance of pressure, competition or any discomfort
• guilt
• fear of making the wrong decisions
• being afraid to ask for what you need and want
• being unwilling to ask for help
• being too isolated and not sharing your thoughts and feelings
• being too patient and tolerant of bad conditions or bad treatment
• fear of what other people might think
• being unable to say ‘no’
• being in relationships with others who have their own ideas about how you should spend your time
• putting your own real needs last
• self-delusions
• denial that there is something that needs fixing
• spending time with people who don’t believe in you
• allowing others to take advantage of you
• fear of what other people might think
• feeling victimised, passive or helpless and that there is nothing you can do to improve things
How many of these factors can you admit to?
These factors can be single-handedly responsible for preventing you having the life you need and deserve. Just becoming aware of them can make a huge difference, and this can be the beginning of a whole new attitude. These are the real bad guys in your life, and you can kick them out.
Self-sabotage is often called ‘being your own worst enemy’. It results not just from all the negativity, bad feelings and bad experiences in our lives, but from what we tell ourselves about those experiences. We are self-sabotaging when we go round the loop of negative thinking over and over, tell ourselves something isn’t really worth the effort, or that fabulous things only happen to other people. Often this is the result of childhood conditioning. We learn to expect little, we feel helpless in the face of life’s problems, and we try to soothe and distract ourselves so we don’t have to feel sad or bitter or angry about what we haven’t got.
The best treatment for self-sabotage is optimism and hope, combined with a willingness to see that it is largely our own depressed attitudes, repetitive negative thinking and unchallenged attitudes from the past that hold us back.
Linda worked as a dental nurse. She was good at her job and the patients really liked her warm personality. The dentists enjoyed working with her. They offered to pay for her to go on a dental hygienist training course so she could run the hygiene surgery. She talked it over with her husband. They both decided it wasn’t a good idea. Linda would have to travel to the course each week, and it would mean long hours, studying at weekends, and not always being back in time to cook the evening meal. Perhaps her husband felt a little uneasy that she would eventually be able to earn more than him. He told her she needed to be home for the kids each evening as he was often going to be working late.
In this example, both people in the couple are sabotaging Linda’s development and increased financial independence. It is much more comfortable for them to continue at their existing level of income and skill. Years later, they are still doing the same jobs at the same level. They still have to be careful with money, and Linda is beginning to feel the first stages of empty nest syndrome with the kids leaving home. This is something Linda agreed to, to maintain the status quo rather than risk rocking the boat.
Excerpt from Chapter 4: Dealing with the Past
The myth of moving on
Dealing with past memories, losses and change is not the same as forgetting the past and moving on as though nothing happened. Deep hurts flow from our past into the present, and healing and transcending them is a serious life task. Sometimes people think all they have to do is move on to the next thing, and avoid anything that has uncomfortable memories or resonances. Moving on is seen as the right thing to do. For example, they might feel that to live in a house that looks a bit like the one their parents lived in would somehow drag them back into the feelings of childhood. Or somebody gave them lemonade when they were a child and they hated it, and now they hate everything that has even a hint of lemon and go to great lengths to remove lemon from any food they are served. Avoiding lemons is avoiding the real issue – which is, how is that memory still allowed to have such a strong effect on you?
Memories like this are known to psychotherapists as ‘screen memories’. This is a type of memory that stands in for a whole set of feelings, resonances and further memories to do with experiences that have not been fully processed and understood. These experiences have not been reflected on and digested. They ‘just happened’. They are things we have swallowed and which are still running around inside our system because we have been unable to metabolise them. Memories like this need our patient attention and understanding; they need us to reflect on them and consider how they have affected us. If we can do this, our life experiences become a source of personal strength.
Rethink the past
We all hold some core beliefs from way back in the past which affect our self-esteem and confidence in some situations. These are not things we consciously think about, but they are things we have told ourselves as a result of experiences we have been through or what adults told us when we were kids. Part of the problem with these hidden core beliefs is that we don’t fully realise they are there. They are truly hidden. Only someone who knows you well would ever guess they are there, and you yourself may never realise how faithful you are to the old way of seeing things. Another problem with these beliefs is that they are antiques. They are relics. They were invented by you when you were a child, or when you were much younger, when you had a more limited view of the world. They were decisions you made about how to handle life. They saved you from having to face each new situation from a fresh point of view, and now they actively prevent you from learning how to solve problems for yourself. They are no help to you as an adult in your complex, multi-layered adult reality.
Do you have core beliefs that began in the past that you think will never change? Did you receive childhood messages that you were bad, naughty, ugly, fat, not the clever one, not the pretty one, unpopular or unwanted?
Negative life statements
Do you secretly, deep down in your darkest moments, think any of these thoughts about yourself?
• ‘No one loves me.’
• ‘I must always be good.’
• ‘There’s no point in trying.’
• ‘I am always the one who leaves/gets left.’
• ‘Nothing I do will ever be a success.’
• ‘I don’t deserve to have what I really want.’
• ‘I don’t have any close friends.’
• ‘Nobody loves me.’
• ‘I don’t have a right to be myself.’
• ‘I’ll never get the attention I need.’
• ‘I always have to be nice and look after others to make them love me.’
• ‘There’s no point trying because I’m dumb.’
• ‘Other people always do better/have more than me.’
• ‘I’ll never have what I want.’
• ‘I can’t trust anyone.’
• ‘I have to do everything myself.’
• ‘I must always look nice and be seductive to get any attention I need.’
• ‘Everything works out badly in the end.’
• ‘I’m no good at …’
• ‘I’ll try, but I’ll probably fail.’
• ‘I’ll never have enough money.
• ‘I won’t survive.’
• ‘I’m useless.’
These life statements dictate some of our attitudes and behavior if we don’t realize that they are trying to run the show. They are trying to protect us – from too much risk, excitement or potential disappointment or failure.
A new oracle of change
Many times we turn to various different ways of trying to read the future. The old oracles,such as the I Ching or tarot, help us obtain some perspective on dif?cult and perplexing problems and questions. These ancient oracles are still highly popular. However, they evolved in cultures very different from our own, and represent values, such as the depiction of the ?xed roles of women, that may no longer be helpful to us. This book offers a fresh look at our need to ask questions and ?nd the right answers for ourselves. While respecting and appreciating traditional wisdom, it also offers a straightforward contemporary approach based on consistent, logical principles. Asking ourselves questions is a powerful way to drive our lives forward.
Why you don’t need a fix
It is easy to feel vulnerable and insecure, and to feel that someone else out there must have the answers for you. It is not particularly difficult to train as a counselor, a life coach, or a seminar leader, and to offer people solutions, models and advice as to how they can tweak their life into shape. Are these people really better experts on you than you are yourself? Sometimes it can be reassuring and comforting to enlist professional help, and there are times when therapy of various kinds can really help you address stuck issues and move ahead. Sometimes another person’s feedback is essential to help you see yourself more accurately and clearly. However, it is unhelpful to assume that there is something wrong with you that needs fixing. Many people are trying to sell you something you can’t really get from anyone else: a good attitude, and the ability to ask yourself the right questions. This is what this book is about.
The 1000 Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask Yourself takes a different approach to psychology than those you may and in many other popular psychology and self-help books and programmes. It doesn’t focus solely on changing your behaviour or challenging outmoded negative beliefs – although this is included. The quiz format is designed to help you bring new awareness to your underlying values, attitudes and emotions. Awareness itself is transformative. You will ?nd the questions continue to work on you long after you have put the book down. Thus, the quizzes have a ‘soft’ format and do not have routine psychological profile answers. They are designed to help you refresh your mind.
The trap of negativity, complaining, hopelessness, low self-esteem, guilt and self-blame
Sometimes it is amazing that we ever get out of bed at all. Why bother? Overcoming yourself is more than half the battle. It can take tremendous work to create the right attitude in yourself so you are ready for the good things to happen. Often it isn’t the problem itself that is the problem, but the attitudes we insist on hanging on to. It will not be possible to read this book without shifting your attitude at least a little! If you are not ready yet, creep back into bed, but remember this persistently cheerful and determined book will be waiting for you.
Excerpt from Chapter 1: Ask Yourself
Self-sabotage
Are there ways in which you limit your own success, get in your own way, and generally screw things up for yourself? Are you a self-saboteur? Do you procrastinate and muddle along?
What does this mean? Either your life has taken some very unexpected turns, in which case your values and goals could have changed quite radically, or you might have tried to slow things down because of self-sabotage factors. These factors do not, of course, include sabotage that happens to you from the outside, which is not your fault.
The self-sabotage factors
How many of these can you honestly say you have never at any time been guilty of?
• negative self-talk, such as ‘I can’t do it’ or ‘I’m not good enough’
• low self-esteem
• low confidence
• a sense of unworthiness, or that you don’t deserve good things
• low expectations
• confused priorities
• unclear values
• disorganisation
• procrastination
• fear of success
• fear of failure
• fear of making decisions
• blaming others, or blaming circumstances
• making excuses, and believing your own excuses
• avoidance of pressure, competition or any discomfort
• guilt
• fear of making the wrong decisions
• being afraid to ask for what you need and want
• being unwilling to ask for help
• being too isolated and not sharing your thoughts and feelings
• being too patient and tolerant of bad conditions or bad treatment
• fear of what other people might think
• being unable to say ‘no’
• being in relationships with others who have their own ideas about how you should spend your time
• putting your own real needs last
• self-delusions
• denial that there is something that needs fixing
• spending time with people who don’t believe in you
• allowing others to take advantage of you
• fear of what other people might think
• feeling victimised, passive or helpless and that there is nothing you can do to improve things
How many of these factors can you admit to?
These factors can be single-handedly responsible for preventing you having the life you need and deserve. Just becoming aware of them can make a huge difference, and this can be the beginning of a whole new attitude. These are the real bad guys in your life, and you can kick them out.
Self-sabotage is often called ‘being your own worst enemy’. It results not just from all the negativity, bad feelings and bad experiences in our lives, but from what we tell ourselves about those experiences. We are self-sabotaging when we go round the loop of negative thinking over and over, tell ourselves something isn’t really worth the effort, or that fabulous things only happen to other people. Often this is the result of childhood conditioning. We learn to expect little, we feel helpless in the face of life’s problems, and we try to soothe and distract ourselves so we don’t have to feel sad or bitter or angry about what we haven’t got.
The best treatment for self-sabotage is optimism and hope, combined with a willingness to see that it is largely our own depressed attitudes, repetitive negative thinking and unchallenged attitudes from the past that hold us back.
Linda worked as a dental nurse. She was good at her job and the patients really liked her warm personality. The dentists enjoyed working with her. They offered to pay for her to go on a dental hygienist training course so she could run the hygiene surgery. She talked it over with her husband. They both decided it wasn’t a good idea. Linda would have to travel to the course each week, and it would mean long hours, studying at weekends, and not always being back in time to cook the evening meal. Perhaps her husband felt a little uneasy that she would eventually be able to earn more than him. He told her she needed to be home for the kids each evening as he was often going to be working late.
In this example, both people in the couple are sabotaging Linda’s development and increased financial independence. It is much more comfortable for them to continue at their existing level of income and skill. Years later, they are still doing the same jobs at the same level. They still have to be careful with money, and Linda is beginning to feel the first stages of empty nest syndrome with the kids leaving home. This is something Linda agreed to, to maintain the status quo rather than risk rocking the boat.
Excerpt from Chapter 4: Dealing with the Past
The myth of moving on
Dealing with past memories, losses and change is not the same as forgetting the past and moving on as though nothing happened. Deep hurts flow from our past into the present, and healing and transcending them is a serious life task. Sometimes people think all they have to do is move on to the next thing, and avoid anything that has uncomfortable memories or resonances. Moving on is seen as the right thing to do. For example, they might feel that to live in a house that looks a bit like the one their parents lived in would somehow drag them back into the feelings of childhood. Or somebody gave them lemonade when they were a child and they hated it, and now they hate everything that has even a hint of lemon and go to great lengths to remove lemon from any food they are served. Avoiding lemons is avoiding the real issue – which is, how is that memory still allowed to have such a strong effect on you?
Memories like this are known to psychotherapists as ‘screen memories’. This is a type of memory that stands in for a whole set of feelings, resonances and further memories to do with experiences that have not been fully processed and understood. These experiences have not been reflected on and digested. They ‘just happened’. They are things we have swallowed and which are still running around inside our system because we have been unable to metabolise them. Memories like this need our patient attention and understanding; they need us to reflect on them and consider how they have affected us. If we can do this, our life experiences become a source of personal strength.
Rethink the past
We all hold some core beliefs from way back in the past which affect our self-esteem and confidence in some situations. These are not things we consciously think about, but they are things we have told ourselves as a result of experiences we have been through or what adults told us when we were kids. Part of the problem with these hidden core beliefs is that we don’t fully realise they are there. They are truly hidden. Only someone who knows you well would ever guess they are there, and you yourself may never realise how faithful you are to the old way of seeing things. Another problem with these beliefs is that they are antiques. They are relics. They were invented by you when you were a child, or when you were much younger, when you had a more limited view of the world. They were decisions you made about how to handle life. They saved you from having to face each new situation from a fresh point of view, and now they actively prevent you from learning how to solve problems for yourself. They are no help to you as an adult in your complex, multi-layered adult reality.
Do you have core beliefs that began in the past that you think will never change? Did you receive childhood messages that you were bad, naughty, ugly, fat, not the clever one, not the pretty one, unpopular or unwanted?
Negative life statements
Do you secretly, deep down in your darkest moments, think any of these thoughts about yourself?
• ‘No one loves me.’
• ‘I must always be good.’
• ‘There’s no point in trying.’
• ‘I am always the one who leaves/gets left.’
• ‘Nothing I do will ever be a success.’
• ‘I don’t deserve to have what I really want.’
• ‘I don’t have any close friends.’
• ‘Nobody loves me.’
• ‘I don’t have a right to be myself.’
• ‘I’ll never get the attention I need.’
• ‘I always have to be nice and look after others to make them love me.’
• ‘There’s no point trying because I’m dumb.’
• ‘Other people always do better/have more than me.’
• ‘I’ll never have what I want.’
• ‘I can’t trust anyone.’
• ‘I have to do everything myself.’
• ‘I must always look nice and be seductive to get any attention I need.’
• ‘Everything works out badly in the end.’
• ‘I’m no good at …’
• ‘I’ll try, but I’ll probably fail.’
• ‘I’ll never have enough money.
• ‘I won’t survive.’
• ‘I’m useless.’
These life statements dictate some of our attitudes and behavior if we don’t realize that they are trying to run the show. They are trying to protect us – from too much risk, excitement or potential disappointment or failure.