Understanding and getting in control of your behaviours will reduce stress and increase your confidence. Before we do that I want you to take a look at some interpretations of events. Is the picture of bunnies good or bad? There is a significant upside to getting in touch with your interpretation patterns as they can reveal some self-defeating and inappropriate behaviours. There are predispositions that may give you clues to the way you react according to your interpretation or view of reality.

1. Black and white attitudes with no shades of grey. This is called dichotomy where you see events as totally fantastic or absolutely terrible. The truth is rarely found at either of these extremes.
2. Overt personalisation where you see another person’s reactions as being in direct response to you. If someone is in a bad mood it may be because of something elsewhere in their life and may have nothing to do with you, so don’t accept the blame.
3. Magnified reaction means that you see an event as having far more impact on your life than it deserves. There is no point in getting emotional over the delay on a train or in traffic as the circumstances are beyond your control and rarely really threatening, they are just inconvenient.
4. Remembering adverse circumstances and events to the exclusion of the positive ones. For every downside there is always an equal and opposite upside.
5. Allowing your emotions to flow from false feelings or beliefs. If you do something that makes you feel stupid, the false belief would be that ‘I am stupid’. You are not. You probably just made a silly mistake but you are far from stupid.
6. Basing a major decision on purely emotional factors instead of a critical analysis of the facts, or the pros and the cons of the situation. Your emotions and intuition have parts to play in decision making but they should not assume dominant roles.

Ask yourself, ‘Have I been guilty of any of these behaviours?’ and if you have, when now would be a good time to make a better choice of response or behaviour?

So is the picture of bunnies good or bad? Well that depends on if you love to have rabbits in your garden or if you think that the burrows under the summer house will cause it to collapse. Yet again you get to decided.

Extract taken from The Personal Success Handbook by Curly Martin.