How to Coach Yourself and Others Influencing, Inter Personal and Leadership Skills | Seite 119

Pay attention to the shift in your emotion, no matter how small. When you notice
yourself getting more upset or distressed, ask yourself, “What am I telling myself right
now?” or “What is making me feel upset?”

3. The effect of thinking traps and irrational thoughts
When you’re accustomed to identifying thoughts that lead to negative emotions, start to
examine these thoughts to see if they’re unrealistic and unhelpful. One of the first things
to do is to see if you’ve fallen into Thinking Traps (e.g., catastrophizing or
overestimating danger), which are overly negative ways of seeing things. You can also
ask yourself a range of questions to challenge your negative thoughts, such as “What is
the evidence that this thought is true?” and “Am I confusing a possibility with a
probability? It may be possible, but is it likely?”
Finally, after challenging a negative thought and evaluating it more objectively, try to
come up with an alternative thought that is more balanced and realistic. Doing this can
help lower your distress. In addition to coming up with realistic statements, try to come
up with some quick and easy-to-remember coping statements (e.g., “This has happened
before and I know how to handle it”) and positive self-statements (e.g., “It takes
courage to face the things that scare me”).
It can also be particularly helpful to write down your realistic thoughts or helpful coping
statements on an index card or piece of paper. Then, keep this coping card with you to
help remind you of these statements when you are feeling too distressed to think clearly.
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy is designed to help us recognize the irrational thinking
patterns and learn strategies to challenge those thoughts and thereby have a positive
feedback effect on our moods. In essence we are trying to retrain our thinking patterns
back into more of a rational pattern.
The therapy is based on the idea that how we think (cognition), how we feel (our
emotions) and how we behave (behaviour), are all interconnected. Basically the view
that emotions cause our thought patterns is reversed by this therapy which maintains
that irrational thoughts lead to negative emotions and moods, and thus behaviour.
The classic example of where irrational thought can alter are moods is where we make a
mistake and think, “I am useless – I never get things right”, then our moods tend to
become depressed and then our behaviour changes to avoid other situations where we
feel we will fail again and this tends to reinforce our belief in our uselessness. Soon we
have a self-fulfilling prophecy feeding on itself. Sound familiar?
One of the main pillars of REBT is that irrational and dysfunctional ways and patterns of
thinking, feeling and behaving are contributing to much, though hardly all, human
disturbance and emotional and behavioral self-defeatism and social defeatism. REBT
generally teaches that when people turn flexible preferences, desires and wishes into
grandiose, absolutistic and fatalistic dictates, this tends to contribute to disturbance and
upsetness.
REBT commonly posits that at the core of irrational beliefs there often are explicit or
implicit rigid demands and commands, and that extreme derivatives like awfulizing,
frustration intolerance, people deprecation and over-generalizations are accompanied by
these.
According to REBT the core dysfunctional philosophies in a person's evaluative emotional
and behavioral belief system, are also very likely to contribute to unrealistic, arbitrary
and crooked inferences and distortions in thinking. REBT therefore first teaches that
when people in an insensible and devout way overuse absolutistic, dogmatic and rigid
"shoulds", "musts", and "oughts", they tend to disturb and upset themselves.