When to use this exercise
You can use this exercise at all times when you want to reach a specific goal and reduce negative thought patterns that may prevent you from performing your best. This exercise requires continuous repetition to result in positive thought patterns which support peak performance.
Purpose
The purpose of this exercise is to facilitate the formation of constructive thought patterns and habitual ways of thinking that can positively impact your performance. It supports your self-leadership skills and helps you to reach your goals. By carefully examining our dysfunctional beliefs and assumptions, and replacing them with constructive thought patterns, we can optimize our performance and better reach our goals. The building blocks for constructive thought patterns include more optimistic self-talk and mental self-evaluations. Even if this can seem obvious for many of us, we seldomly intentionally practise building constructive thought patterns that could support us in reaching our goals.
Steps
- Identify a goal you want to achieve
- Reflect upon the feelings and thought patterns this goal brings up for you. Are your thoughts optimistic or are your thoughts dysfunctional, which prevents you from reaching full performance?
- Start creating constructive thought patterns around the goal you want to achieve. First, identify the dysfunctional beliefs and then replace them with more constructive thought processes. This could, for example, be thoughts like “I feel confident I can do anything I set my mind to” or “no matter what happens, I know I’ll make it”
- Repeat these constructive thought patterns until they become a habitual way of thinking. If you consciously replace negative self-talk with a more optimistic inner dialogue, it changes the way you feel about the goal.
- Once you have successfully changed your dysfunctional thought patterns into constructive thought patterns around this one goal, you can now also explore the opportunities of this exercise in other areas in your life.