With Halloween coming up this week, I thought I’d bring to light the tick-or-treat aspect of life. Every single day we have the ability to lean toward a trick or a treat. Not just on October 31st.
Fear, jealousy, anger, guilt, angst, boredom, frustration and many other seeming negative emotions often get the better of many of us. Sometimes they are a trick – tricking us to run away. Sometimes they are a treat -Â alerting us to something to be aware of.
Can you remember the last time that Fear popped up in your life? I can. What did you do with it? The number one thing that most people do with fear is to embrace it and stop what they are doing. This is the TRICK – stopping you from moving forward. I love these two acronyms of Fear: False Expectations Appearing Real and Forget Everything And Run.
What we know from NLP is this:
- All emotions are useful in some context
- The mind and body are connected; therefore affect each other
- The unconscious mind takes everything personally and literally – and only knows good
- There is a positive intention behind every behaviour
So what does all of this mean? I suppose, instead of being tricked into the negative side of an unwanted emotion – look for the treat. This is the art of Reframing; being able to look at something from a different perspective.
Lets use anger as an example. If something happens and it causes a person to be angry, does this mean that the topic at hand is wrong or bad? Not necessarily. However, a lot of people are tricked by their emotions. They take their emotions as being ‘real’ as opposed to just a chemical reaction getting your attention. In this case – anger could mean that your values are not being met, that you or someone important is being mistreated, that things are not going your way – or any number of things. The TREAT of any emotion or behaviour is to look at it from a different perspective – WHAT ELSE COULD THIS MEAN? (content reframe)
How about someone that is scared to start something new? A new job, a new relationship, a new focus in life. Does that feeling of being scared mean that the person shouldn’t do it? Probably not. It is just an alert system that most likely says ‘have you looked at everything’. It’s about finding the sweet spot of even a negative emotion. So, a person could feel that emotion and still go on – and the treat has many potential benefits. So many more than the trick will ever have!
Remember the saying – courage is feeling the fear and doing it anyway. This takes it one step further – Courage is feeling any negative emotion and acknowledging it to still move forward.
Which will you choose – the Trick or the Treat?