How to Coach Yourself and Others Influencing, Inter Personal and Leadership Skills | Page 128

It is a really great idea to write down our reasoning and not just do it mentally as if
forces us to confront our irrational thoughts and actions in a much more effective way.
To be perfectly honest, it requires hard work and commitment to make it work but the
longer we work at it the easier it becomes. I have to remind myself that the times that I
am really down and not feeling very good about myself and life in particular, these are
the times when I most need to do it.
REBT employs the ‘ABC framework’ — depicted in the figure below — to clarify the
relationship between
(A): activating events
(B): our beliefs about them
(C): and the cognitive, emotional or behavioural consequences of our beliefs.

The figure shows how the framework distinguishes between the effects of rational beliefs
about negative events, which give rise to healthy negative emotions, and the effects of
irrational beliefs about negative events, which lead to unhealthy negative emotions.

Negative events and healthy vs. unhealthy responses.