Is Your Neighbor Really the Problem?

You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit! Remember that little ditty from childhood? Welcome to the last brain training session about the Process of a Thought where we’ll cover the last 2 parts of that journey that ends with what we “get,” (aka: our results).

Quick recap:

Things happen in life

We have a thought about those “things”

Our thoughts produce an emotion (or feeling)

Our feelings influence our actions

We get our results

Today's subject matter: actions and results. I got a little carried away last week showing you how to process emotions... and forgot to circle back to something important: feelings aren't just something to process. They're fuel. They're what actually drives your behavior.

And like any fuel, not all of it burns the same way. Feed your body sugar, you get a quick high (how long does that really last?). Feed your body a well-balanced meal, you get steady, sustained energy. Neither is right or wrong... just different experiences, with different results.

Feelings like anger, frustration, annoyance, and fear often produce behaviors like procrastination, rumination, saying things we wish we hadn't, or avoiding the situation altogether. Those behaviors rarely get us closer to the relationships, work, or life we actually want.

Feelings like love, excitement, motivation, gratitude, and courage tend to produce behaviors like moving forward on tough projects, having the hard conversation, or walking away from habits that don't serve us. Those behaviors generally do get us closer to the relationships, work, or life we want.

Here are a couple real life examples from a client:

Circumstance: Neighbors bought the farm

Thought: Neighbors are going to develop the farm

Feeling: Anxiety

Actions: Trying to guess what the neighbors are going to do, predicting construction and traffic noise, worrying about noise (parties, ATVs, dirt bikes, roosters) and worrying about smells.

Result: I develop anxiety and don’t want to get to know my neighbors

Notice that the circumstance is totally neutral with nothing emotional attached to it. In this situation, even the thought that the neighbors are going to develop the farm could elicit different emotions from different people. For this client, it produced anxiety. For someone else, it may have produced intrigue. The feeling of anxiety brought on certain behaviors and those behaviors gave a particular result.

Here’s another one where we went a step further to change the thought to see how it might play out differently:

Circumstance: Adult daughters call on phone

Thought: Oh no, something bad has happened

Feeling: Anxiety

Actions: Mind spins, how can I help them, nervous energy, sweat

Result: The conversation feels strained (not what I want)

This is exactly where that emotion-processing tool from last week comes in. You can't skip straight to swapping the thought — not while anxiety is still running the show. Once she'd actually processed the feeling, a new thought had room to land. So we took the same situation and adjusted the thought, and here's what happened:

Circumstance: Adult daughters call on phone

Thought: I’m excited to talk to the girls today

Feeling: Good

Actions: Calm, more in tune, more patient

Result: A great conversation with my girls

That's it. That's the whole mechanism behind every result you've ever gotten - good, bad, or "why does this keep happening to me." You don't need to fix your circumstances. Catch the thought instead.

I have a free video (less than 10 minutes) that walks through this process in more detail, plus a downloadable copy of the model to keep. You can find it here: https://www.outofsmallthings.com/lpthemodel.

High five! ✋ 

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