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Florencia Andrés: «The first step to control negative thoughts is to observe them»
Psychology
Did you know that by spending just a few minutes a day reading the new book by the experts in coaching and speakers Verónica de Andrés and Florencia Andrés you can reach a incredible level of motivation and confidence? How powerful can one tip a day be? Apparently yes, because theirs are backed by more than thirty years of work and research and dedicated to training hundreds of thousands of people to develop their full potential.
Verónica de Andrés and Florencia Andrés have published «Renew with total confidence», A book based on the best sellers “Total confidence” that includes the best tools to develop the emotional intelligence, self-esteem and motivation in a simple XNUMX-day plan. In it, the authors reveal The power of thoughts, words and emotions and provide us with strategies that will help us use our time in another way and live better.
But what are these tips for? Mainly for you to win confidence in yourself, so that you know how to develop a mentality that adds, that improves the bonds with those around you and to reveal the secrets of success in whatever you set out to do.
Reading this book is recommended to do it daily: when you wake up, before going to bed, before an important moment or, simply, when you think “I need a shot of positive energy now!”
Part of your book is focused on redirecting the thoughts we have. How can we control the negative ones?
In the first place, becoming aware of the power that our thoughts have in our life. We have around 50.000 thoughts a day, and 80% are usually negative and, what is even worse, in relation to ourselves that what they do is create mental images that, in turn, determine our actions. The first step in controlling our thoughts is observing them. A simple and effective practice is detect what is our first thought of the day, because they will set the “tone” for the rest of the day. Observing them and choosing them carefully is a first step.
When we have a negative thought haunting our head for hours or days, what do you recommend doing?
There are many practical ways to replace that recurring negative thought with another thought. A tool that we can do is that of the 3 questions:
The first question is, does it serve me or does it not? I mean: is this what I’m thinking of any use to me?
The second question: Does it make me feel good or bad?
The third: Does this thought open up possibilities for action or does it close them?
If it doesn’t help me, it makes me feel bad and it closes my possibilities of action. It is time to discard it and choose a thought that above all things moves me forward.
Is it effective to ask ourselves questions?
Questions are powerful because our mind works like the Google search engine: look for what I ask you to find. The negative questions they lead the mind to search for answers. And guess what those answers are like… Exactly! Negative! Example of negative questions: “Why am I always unlucky?”, “Why don’t others respect me?” or “why am I always so tired and without energy?”
And the mind searches and finds explanations: “you don’t have enough discipline”, “you allow yourself to be mistreated by others”, “you are very disorganized with your schedules and your meals”… and thus we enter a vicious circle.
The problem then is not the answers we give ourselves but the questions we ask ourselves …
Exactly. The positive questions they guide the brain to find solutions. We can consider the same situation that worries us, but using the power of our mind to our advantage. We can ask ourselves “what can I do to change my luck?”, “How can I get others to respect me?” or “How can I feel energized throughout the day?” Then the mind immediately focuses on find solutions to those problems.
And not only look for solutions but takes us out of the negative thinking pattern. And although we have a thousand reasons to be more negative, there is something that is important to remember: negativity never helps.
There are scientific studies that support, as you say in your last book, that cultivating positive thoughts in our mind could extend life, but do those thoughts have to be realistic?
One of the practices that is proven to extend life is daily gratitude practice: give thanks for what we have. And in that you can be extremely realistic. Cultivate the power of positive thinking It has nothing to do with being a person disconnected from reality, who spends his time fantasizing about imaginary worlds. Rather, it is about being able to activate our emotional intelligence to be healthier, have more energy, be more creative and productive, and live longer.
Do negative thoughts have a positive side?
We must learn to decode our inner critic, which many times what it seeks is to help us improve, even if it is not noticed that it wants to help us improve, due to the ruthless tone it uses. For example, if a person has been thinking for months “I am a disaster, I will never get a job” perhaps there is a part of that self-criticism that is trying to help him improve. So what can we do with our “inner critic” – the one who tells us things like “you will never be able to lose weight”, “you will never earn good money”, “you always fail in love”, “you always leave everything to the last minute »- is to analyze it and decode its message.
A very practical way to do this is to ask our inner critic: what could he do differently? And focus my thoughts there. In this way I go from self-criticism to self-coaching. I listen to my inner critic and ask him: “What can I do differently?”, “Do I have to take my health seriously?”, “How can I be more organized?”, Or any other question that we ask. remove sleep.
Is spending a few minutes in the morning thinking positively an exercise that helps us educate our minds?
The way we start our day define the rest of the day. That is why it is so important that before starting the day and dedicating ourselves fully to attending to all our obligations, we take a few minutes to reprogram our mind to direct it where we want. And we know that we are all very busy, that’s why in the book we talk about very simple practices that can be done every morning, dedicating only 5 minutes of reading to the book before starting the day. In our times, where many people are exhausted by the physical, mental and emotional effort that the pandemic implied, it is more important than ever that we let’s take care of renewing ourselves. Renew ourselves to rediscover motivation, energy, creativity, projects …
As we make those minutes our morning “ritual”, we are generating a new brain wiring, which makes us get used to thinking in the positive range, and therefore to feeling more positive emotions. And this not only improves our mood a lot but it makes us much more effective in whatever we do, because our brain has been designed to function optimally under the influence of positive emotions. Does this mean that when I am frustrated or angry I cannot think? Yes I can, but with much more wear and tear, with much less creativity and with less speed. That is why when we retrain ourselves to think differently, our whole life is transformed. And that transformation begins with taking a few minutes of the day for yourself, to renew yourself.
You speak in “Renew yourself with total confidence” about the “nocebo effect.” We have heard of the “placebo effect” but what is this other?
What is the placebo? For example when a doctor gives his patient a “remedy” and says “you take this medicine, it will be cured.” The patient takes the medicine and is cured. What the patient did not know is that this was not medicine, it was just a sugar pill. But since he believed that he was going to be cured, he was cured because such is the power of our mind. Just as we can self-suggest to “make believe” to our mind many things that help us to live better, to achieve our goals, to fulfill dreams.
But there is also the B side: the nocebo effect: when we think so much about something negative that it ends up being fulfilled. In our book we tell the case that illustrates the power of the nocebo effect: one day, a railway worker was accidentally locked in the train’s refrigerator car. With no one to rescue him all night, he began to fill with negative thoughts “if no one gets me out of here soon, I’ll freeze to death.” He wrote a farewell letter to his family saying “I’m freezing.” The next morning, when they opened the refrigerator car, they found him deceased. The autopsy showed that he had been frozen to death. But here comes the impressive part of the story: that night, the refrigerator car was out of service. The man froze at 13 degrees Celsius! He was so convinced that this would happen that his body responded to the power of his mind.
The good news is that we can learn to use our minds to our advantage. We, through our work, are fortunate to be in contact with the more than 500.000 readers of our books through social networks. And every day we receive incredible stories of the transformation they experienced in their lives by applying these tools.