An Exercise For Shifting Your State

The Positive Pants Podcast

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An Exercise For Shifting Your State

Today I have an exercise for you around shifting your state.

Why is shifting your state important?

Shifting your state is a super quick and efficient way to be able to feel more of how you want to feel and less of how you don’t.

Learning to shift your state can help you with anxiety, depression, being stuck in a freeze state, generally getting out of a funk…all sorts of things.

Please remember, as always, it’s important not to avoid or suppress feelings because it’s a sure fire way for them to stick around longer than you want them too.

But shift the focus a little away from avoidance to retraining. Learning this tool is a great way to start rewiring new neural pathways for feeling MORE of what you do want to feel.

A great example of this is a gratitude practice.

The more you consciously focus on the things you’re grateful for, the more of it you’ll start to find.

Gratitude is called an ‘intervention’ in positive psychology because it can shift your negative state to that of gratitude. Plus, the more you do it the more it’s wired in as an unconscious pattern.

It becomes a way of being.

So it’s kind of handy right!

So grab your journal for this one because we’re going to do a little exploration, but first, a little context.

So, I've explained this before but if you’re new here, you have 3 core state ‘categories’ Mental, emotional and physical’ (there are technically 4, the 4th is spiritual but that’s for another day because it takes a little more explaining) and then comes the magic part.

This is a super quick way to get out of most negative headspace. If you change one, you change them all.

Which is another key piece of information to help us leverage a little knowledge about how we tick to our advantage.

So, If you’re feeling emotionally low, beating yourself up or you’re in a negative thought loop, deep in procrastination mode, if you change your physical state (movement, posture etc) Or your mental state (consciously choosing another thought, etc) then automatically your emotional state will change which can be exactly what you need to get you moving again.

Changing your physical state is THE quickest and easiest way out of all of them.

One of the presuppositions of NLP to be aware of is ‘The mind and body are a linked system’ which illustrates this really well. (It also correlates with looking at the vagus nerve and the brain to body pathways)

So if you’re physically feeling a certain way it will affect your state of mind and vice versa. Posture is a really good way to show this.

When you’re feeling down and a bit low what does your posture do and how does it make you feel?

When you’re happy or having fun what does your posture do and how does it make you feel?

Noticing these simple physiological changes you can make are a nice little way to learn to ‘trick’ your mind into believing you feel a different way so it then follows suit.

So catch yourself in those moments where you’re not feeling at your best about to procrastinate or self sabotage in some way and make the decision to do something about it, KNOW you can change it if you want to and if you choose to.

The bottom line is the more self aware of all of these things you are, the better you can manage it and the quicker you’re able to take a step back from your emotions, observe them instead of being consumed by them and go HANG ON...and realise it may not be YOU!

So, we might not want to feel the same thing all the time.

Sometimes we might want to feel happy and energised.

Sometimes we want to feel calm and content.

So the first thing I'd love you to do is identify some of the ways you regularly like to feel.

For example, if you feel anxiety, what would you rather feel?

For me, Peace always comes high on the agenda.

For you it might be different. You might like to feel productive instead, especially if that's something your anxiety gets in the way of.

So the next part is to create awareness around what you normally do that helps you feel that way.

For me, if I'm wanting to create a sense of peace, calm and contentment I know exactly what to do. It will be either going to the gym and then the hot tub or it will be getting out in nature.

I know doing something active will always create that for me. There are SO many other reasons why getting active does that for me but you don’t need to know that for now, you just need to start noticing all the things where you feel that state you’d like to feel.

Once you have your awareness and your list. Start trying to catch yourself in a state you don’t want to be in and consciously do one of those things, and then I just invite you to notice the difference, and how quickly.

Eventually when you’re doing this exercise you’ll end up with a great awareness of how you’d rather feel AND the tangible things you know to do to create that for yourself.

I hope you find this helpful. It was a huge game changer for me and something I still use daily.

And remember, as with everything, the more you practice the more natural and automatic it becomes.

The more it’s wired into your system and the more ‘you’ it becomes.

Fx