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Whew! 15 years of work! Although this is book #5 for me, it was the most difficult to write – because it’s about ME and MY thinking errors (don’t you just love self-disclosure?!). The publisher says that if you use the code MVY7M9SU they will knock off $3. That’s about 20%. Nice!

What Were You Thinking?

Some Common Thinking Errors and What to Do About Them

Authored by Joseph Bennette

A critical look into how our magnificent brains can help us make the most of our lives – and get us into deep trouble. Fortunately, thanks to our big brains we have the capability to solve our own thinking errors – once we know what those errors are. Explore some common thinking errors and what you can do to prevent or correct them. From the introduction:

Just what are thinking errors? Is it a thinking error to disbelieve what someone else believes? Is it a thinking error to misjudge someone’s character? Is it a thinking error to challenge convention? Just what do I mean when I subtitle my book, “Some Common Thinking Errors and What to Do About Them”?

We’re thinking all the time. Some of that thinking tends to bring about outcomes that differ from our intentions or wishes. Frustration is often the result when outcome doesn’t match intention or expectation. Maybe you’re seeking to lose a few pounds and have discovered that wishing isn’t enough. Maybe you’ve tried diets and other programs to lose some weight yet always find yourself defeated when you regain the pounds later. There is probably a thinking error at the root. Fix the thinking error and amazingly, the pounds drop like rain.

Every living creature makes mistakes. By ?mistakes, I mean choices resulting in disappointment, frustration, missteps, danger, and death rather than the intended or expected outcome. Humans are no exception. We make mistakes – loads of them!

We will continue to make mistakes. That is the course of life. The intent of this book is to help you perhaps lessen the number of mistakes and make your wishes come true more often in the way you wish them to come true.

I don’t intend to tell you the truth about life or to support any belief or belief system; only to investigate and challenge some common thinking errors. If you find after clearing these thinking errors that you are more supported in your beliefs, great! My hope is that you will find the courage to challenge your thinking and investigate your beliefs with clear thinking processes. I hope you will find the courage to change your life as necessary.

What Were You Thinking?

Some Common Thinking Errors and What to Do About Them

by Joseph Bennette

“Grandparents are a positive force for all families but play a significant role in families undergoing difficulties,” said Shalhevet Attar-Schwartz, PhD, of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “They can reduce the negative influence of parents separating and be a resource for children who are going through these family changes.”

The study appears in the February Journal of Family Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association (APA). The researchers found that children and adolescents whose parents have separated or divorced see their grandparents as confidants and sources of comfort. Spending time with a grandparent was found to equip adolescents with better social skills and fewer behavior problems, especially among those children living in single-parent or stepfamily households.

As in previous studies, this research found that grandchildren are closer to their maternal grandparents and closest to their maternal grandmothers.

I have found this to be true in my own family. I grew up in a “traditional” two-parent home with two sets of grandparents and always felt very close to all four of my grandparents. My children grew up without much contact with their grandparents and struggled through adolescence. Now, I’m a grandparent and can see how our older grandchildren, who are just now coming into adolescence, tend to stay in touch – asking advice, talking about their “love lives” and much more – as though my wife and I were their closest confidants.

As my wife and I are new to this phenomenon, I can’t tell you the outcome. I can, however, tell you that the influence my own grandparents had in my life was profound and substantial. The last of my grandparents died in 2007 at the age of 97. And although I miss them terribly, my life feels steady and secure because of the influence of my grandparents.

As a grandparent, I can attest to the monumental influence grandparents have in the lives of their grandchildren. Even when there is little or no physical contact – a letter, email, or phone call can significantly change the direction of an adolescent. And it’s not the advice given that makes the difference – although good advice can make a difference – rather, it’s the care and concern that matters most to the adolescent. Grandparents can touch deep resources within the adolescent – genetic resources of which the adolescent and the grandparent are mostly likely unaware – yet are profoundly powerful.

I like to think there is something “magical” in grandparents. They’re just people – like everyone else. But for whatever reason nature endowed us with a supernatural reverence for our grandparents that makes them more than “just people” - they’re fantastic people. We can’t help but want to love and respect our grandparents – even when they do everything they can to dissuade us. We WANT our grandparents to be special for us. And that want, I believe, gives us access, through imagination, to some of our most powerful psychological assets.

If you are a grandparent, I hope you will take the opportunity today to make some magic in the life of one or more of your grandchildren. Especially maternal grandmothers (mothers of mothers) have a special “in” to the hearts and minds of their daughters’ children. A letter; postcard; phone call; text message; IM; email; whatever means you choose – do it today. You don’t have to “teach” or “share wisdom” or “be wise” – just let them know you care. That’s all. Everything else is just “how” you let them know.

Parenting is for parents. Grandparenting is for the angels. May we grandparents spread our angel wings of care and support around our grandchildren and create a generation of caring, loving, compassionate young people who will carry on the tradition to their own grandchildren.

Study Source:
“Grandparenting and Adolescent Adjustment in Two-Parent Biological, Lone-Parent, and Step-Families,” Shalhevet Attar-Schwartz, PhD, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Jo-Pei Tan, PhD, University of Putra; Ann Buchanan, PhD, and Julia Griggs, PhD, University of Oxford; Eirini Flouri, PhD, University of London; Journal of Family Psychology, Vol. 23, No. 1.

Tempted? Clench your lip muscles shut!

A study reported in the Journal of Consumer Research says firming muscles can shore up self-control. Of course, it only works if the choice you are faced with is in alignment with your goals and the muscle clenching is done at the moment of highest self-control dilemma. For example, when faced with the choice to snag a high fat snack when your goal is to lose weight is the perfect time to clench your muscles – adding will-power to your self-control dilemma.

Apparently it doesn’t matter which muscles you clench – what matters is the timing. You must clench DURING a crisis of will-power – like when you’re staring that cigarette in the face! It doesn’t help – in fact it works to your detriment – to clench muscles before the temptation.

So, next time you feel the urge to break your diet, clench your lip muscles shut instead!

Study source: Iris W. Hung and Aparna A. Labroo. “From Firm Muscles to Firm Willpower: Understanding the Role of Embodied Cognition in Self-Regulation.” Journal of Consumer Research.

A little trauma actually strengthens your resilience.

Mark D. Seery of the University at Buffalo published a paper on the psychological effects of adversity vs resilience. He concludes that a little adversity is actually good for you. But, how much is “too much” adversity depends on each person’s resilience. Many studies have shown that traumatic events can cause long-lasting psychological damage.

The common wisdom is “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” – which is not supported by scientific evidence. Quite the contrary, most evidence points to the opposite – that which doesn’t kill you makes you weaker, at least psychologically.

However, Seery contends that a little trauma actually strengthens your resilience – a bit like exercise traumatizes yet strengthens muscles. Just like in the case of strengthening muscles by traumatizing them (to build muscle, one must damage muscle cells a little), a few traumatizing events in one’s lifetime can strengthen their resilience after future traumas.

Resilience or “bounce back” requires time. Bounce back time differs from person to person and from time to time within one person. Resilience is dynamic, changing with knowledge, techniques, and environmental factors such as social networks and support groups. Several factors affect it, including how one dealt with similar negative events in the past.

“Negative events have negative effects,” Seery says. “I really look at this [building resilience] as being a silver lining. Just because something bad has happened to someone doesn’t mean they’re doomed to be damaged from that point on.”

I contend that it’s not the result of negative events that make you weaker or damage your psyche. Rather, it’s what you do about the trauma makes a difference in your level of resilience and resilience time. Many studies indicate that the sooner one initiates a technique for lessening the impact of the negative event the better.

I’ve personally used Rapid Eye Technology’s Immediate Release Technique (IRT) and Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT).

Association for Psychological Science. “The Silver Lining To Adversity.” Medical News Today. MediLexicon, Intl., 29 Dec. 2011. Reported online at www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/239417.php.

It takes more energy to stop a thought than to change it.

Thinking, that is! A study out of Case Western Reserve University shows that it takes more energy to stop a thought than to change it. No wonder it’s so hard to stop smoking or stop berating yourself or stop that tune that got stuck in your head. It just takes too much energy!

Some years ago, I underwent a year of intensive thought transformation in which a group of us focused attention on catching each other or sometimes even catch ourselves saying the “wrong” things – things that detracted us from our goals. “Try” was on the taboo list of words for obvious reasons – it holds a built-in failure. So, each time we’d hear one of us say the word, “try”, we’d say, “Cancel that!” The process seemed horribly difficult as we were catching each other often over that year. In the end, however, the goal was attained and my speech cleared up so much.

I wonder if we were unintentionally making it harder on ourselves by canceling (stopping) our thoughts instead of reframing them – sort of like nudging an asteroid instead of hitting it head-on.

For my readers unfamiliar with reframing, the concept is to redescribe a thought form from a different perspective or to relabel it. So, in the case of the word “try”, we replaced it with “do”, etc. Instead of stopping, we looked into changing our thoughts by changing our language. Instead of resistance to change, we explored our options. Instead of saying, “NO”, we examined ways to say yes (positive) instead while retaining the same outcome. Wow, did that speed up our process!

Consider in your life where you are saying, “no” or are working to stop a thought process instead of changing or modifying it. Might it be less energetic (read “difficult”) to do if you were to think in terms other than stopping? Might you seek ways to nudge the asteroid?

Study reference: http://www.nature.com/jcbfm/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/jcbfm2010107a.html

Happy thoughts helped Peter Pan to fly.

Two researchers, Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert, used an iPhone Web app to collect data on people’s feelings, thoughts and activities. They wanted to know how people felt doing various activities including doing nothing at all. What they discovered was that during times when people were not actively engaged in a specific activity, their minds tended to wander. During times of mind wandering, respondents reported lower feelings of happiness than when they were engaged in an activity, especially sex. Says Killingsworth:

“A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost. Mind-wandering appears ubiquitous across all activities. This study shows that our mental lives are pervaded, to a remarkable degree, by the nonpresent. Mind-wandering is an excellent predictor of people’s happiness. In fact, how often our minds leave the present and where they tend to go is a better predictor of our happiness than the activities in which we are engaged.”

Mind wandering is natural for humans, apparently the only animal with the brain capacity. It occurs to me that if our minds must wander, why not give them something useful to wander about? Instead of ruminating on past failures, why not focus that rumination on past successes – or daydream on future successes? We’re practicing mind wandering all the time (okay, the study authors say only 46.9% of the time), so focusing on happy thoughts, which helped Peter Pan to fly, might make the difference between serious depression and living a happy life.

Think about it.

Source: Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert, “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind”, Science 12 November 2010: Vol. 330. no. 6006, p. 932 DOI: 10.1126/science.1192439

A leading hospital says up to a third of the children it treats for certain conditions are ill because their parents smoke around them.

Dr Steve Ryan, Medical Director of Liverpool’s Alder Hey Hospital, says bronchitis, asthma and ear infections could be cut if parents quit smoking.

He said parents often lied about whether they smoke near their children. The British Lung Foundation says 17,000 under-fives are treated every year for exposure to second-hand smoke.

Speaking to BBC Radio Five Live, he said out of the 35,000 children the hospital treats every year, 2,000 are there because they have been exposed to their parents’ smoke.

He said between a quarter and a third of those suffering from certain conditions such as chest infections and asthma were the victims of passive smoking.

High Intensity

Parents often know the health implications of smoking around their children, he added. “People feel guilty,” he told BBC News. “If it was easy, they would give up. Looking after children is good fun but it can be stressful and for some, cigarettes are a way of relieving that stress.”

He does not think legislation is the answer but believes parents should be aware of the various levels of risk.

The top level, he said, was parents smoking in cars, where children were “trapped” and exposed to a “high intensity” of fumes. Mothers smoking is a greater risk than fathers smoking, and smoking in the same room as your child is also high risk, he added. “Having smoke on your clothes is a lower risk,” he said.

“But a good tip for parents is always put on another layer of clothes when smoking outside. Our staff are made to put a coat on when they go out to smoke during their breaks.”

Medical conditions

Amanda Sandford from smoking campaign group Ash said an estimated half of all children are exposed to smoke in the home. “It is clearly a widespread problem and I don’t think people realize that so many children are regularly breathing in smoke,” she said. “About a quarter of adults smoke and there are more among young adults, people between 25-34, the age at which they are more likely to be parents with younger children.” She added that now smoking was banned in enclosed public places, parents should treat their home like the workplace, and smoke outside.

Research published in 2005 suggested children exposed to their parents’ smoking were three times more likely to develop lung cancer later in life. The government’s independent Scientific Committee on Tobacco and Health concluded in 2004 that exposure to second-hand smoke can cause a number of serious medical conditions, including lung cancer, heart disease and childhood respiratory disease.

Banging the Drum

Martin Birchall, an Ear Nose and Throat (ENT) surgeon and professor at Bristol University, said: “Passive smoking at home, exposing children to smoke they cannot escape from, increases the risk of them getting ear disease, sticky runny noses and sore throats, and further down the track, some of these ENT symptoms can in due course led on to worse diseases such as asthma.”

He added: “We need to keep banging the drum. We need to publicize the fact that every cigarette you smoke is a cigarette that your child is smoking also.” A Department of Health spokesperson said: “Second-hand smoke kills. We must continue to help people understand the dangers of second-hand smoke, especially for the health of their children.”

If you are ready to call it quits on smoking – and want to stop and stay stopped, I recommend that you purchase my book, “You Can Stop Smoking and Stay Stopped Forever” – available at 1derworks.com and Amazon.com.

Adapted from BBC news release

A member of the United States Senate, known for his hot temper and acid tongue, exploded one day in mid-session and began to shout, “Half of this Senate is made up of cowards and corrupt politicians!”

All the other Senators demanded that the angry member withdraw his statement, or be removed from the remainder of the session.

After a long pause, the angry member acquiesced. “OK,” he said, “I withdraw what I said. Half of this Senate is NOT made up of cowards and corrupt politicians!”

Did you notice how both of the Senator’s iterations meant the same thing? How many times have you confused yourself with negative affirmations? For example, how many times have you told yourself that you could not do something. Most of the time, such self-defeating affirmations are absolutely false. You aren’t telling yourself the truth.

For example, maybe you’ve told yourself that you can’t stop smoking. The truth is, of course, that you really CAN stop smoking, you just don’t want to. Maybe you’ve told yourself that you can’t possibly get that big contract because… [dozens of reasons why not]. The truth is, you’re AFRAID you won’t get the contract. Or, you believe it is UNLIKELY you’ll get the contract.

The truth is – we don’t know all the possibilities. We too often settle for the tiny bit of information we have at hand believing we have ALL the necessary information to make a solid statement of truth. “I can’t live without her…” Bullsh*t! Of course you can live without her – you just don’t like your vision of how life would be then.

Reason dictates that we consider possibilities – rather than settling on one. It’s the quantum measurement problem in the macro world – whenever you settle on one possibility, the others tend to disappear, leaving only the one you choose. But it does not make it truth!

“Believe nothing. Entertain possibilities.” – Caroline Casey

It’s okay to settle on one possibility to the exclusion of others – it’s the way of life. I’m not suggesting that you go against nature. Rather, I’m suggesting that you continue entertaining other possibilities after you have chosen one. Let yourself be open to alternatives. Rigidity of thought – “I’m right!” thinking – tends to embitter one’s life and sour relationships. Instead, when you are sure you are right, act resolutely yet be flexible enough to entertain alternatives.

You may just find that truth is not half what it’s cracked up to be.

If there is to be Peace in the world, there must be Peace in the nations.
If there is to be Peace in the nations, there must be Peace in the cities.
If there is to be Peace in the cities, there must be Peace between neighbors.
If there is to be Peace between neighbors, there must be Peace in the home.
If there is to be Peace in the home, there must be Peace in the Heart.
—Lao Tzu

Perhaps the great Zen master was on to something there…

I see the Peace referred to above as an action. That is, as something we DO from an inner point of BEING tranquil and peaceful (full of peace). Peace, in my way of thinking, feeling, and believing, is only in its manifestation – what we DO about it. Peace as a concept is just a thoughtform – basically fluff – (“the absence of war or hostilities” – what is that?) – of virtually no significance until acted upon. Only ACTIVE peace matters. Some will manifest peace as did Master Tzu or Gandhi. Others like Jesus or the Buddha. Still others like the Prophet Muhammad. It doesn’t really matter, I suppose – so long as the peace in the heart makes itself known in action - in DOing.

BE > DO > HAVE (the “have” part is feedback as to how you are DOing and BEing). Look around at what you do and have and you will have a valid reflection of who you believe you ARE. If you want a real awakening to how out of peace you really are – and have an effective tool at hand to make a change – take the RET circle walk – and get deeply honest with yourself and your perceptual world. You may be surprised at how out of peace you ARE – based on your ENVIRONMENT, BEHAVIOR, and PAYOFFS, etc. Don’t let it distract you in discouragement – let it be a call to ACTION. Maybe really connect this time with your spiritual self (however you conceptualize that) – then ACT from that point of peace.

“Be the change you wish to see in the world.” (Gandhi)
I say, “And then Do it!” By doing you manifest what is in your heart. Many stop at the BEing and don’t get around to the DOing part. It seems to me that Being without Doing is pretty useless altogether… RET puts being at peace into action. I like that.

What do you think? Should I get the towel out and dry myself after being all wet, or am I on to something…?

(My thanks to Rapid Eye Technician, Shakti Devi for sharing the Lao Tzu quote.)

Proxy or surrogate healing is the act of standing in for another during some kind of therapeutic process.

I consider myself a pretty pragmatic guy. I appreciate how important it is for us to have an answer or some kind of reason for why things happen as they do. We invent religions and gods to help us cope with what we don’t understand or fear. Even science has its own religion of sorts – always seeking to find that illusive reason why.

I, too, would love to know why. It’s in my nature to want to know. Although questioning is important, asking the right question is much more important – and difficult to do. In lieu of proper questions, I’ve often settled with poorly formed questions along with answers I’ve settled upon and defended – answers to the wrong questions or a question asked wrongly. Further, I have tended to put “reasons” behind my settled upon answers – a means by which I can protect my “truths” and make them seem right no matter their veracity. We call this process justification or rationalization.

For a moment, let’s dispense with all reasoning/justification/rationalization and simply look at cause and effect. Something happens and that causes something else to happen. Some cause and effect relationships we have experienced often enough that we feel that we can predict effect from cause.

For example, if I step off the step, I fall to the ground. I’m familiar with the action of gravity on this earth and I can expect to fall to the ground every time I step off the step. Further, I can predict with fair accuracy that if you step off the step, you, too, will fall.

Physicist David Boehm showed that cause and effect is all an illusion, though, because all causes are entwined with all effects in a mesh so tightly woven that it is literally impossible to separate cause from effect – we just believe that we can – it makes us feel safer to know that we can know cause from effect.

This is “if-then” thinking and we all do it – it is our nature. We like to accurately predict – it makes us feel safer. Even when we accurately predict hurt, it somehow feels better because we were right about our prediction.

That leads me to cheating. We are great humans but lousy scientists overall. That is, as humans, we like to be right rather than correct. I will tend to “fix” the outcomes of my experience to make me look more right – rather than accepting what is as correct. To that end, I set myself and others up so that I will more likely make myself right. I cheat!

The Golden Setup

Now to the good stuff. Let’s consider the common cold. What if I want to experiment with what happens when I change a small part of the cause-effect relationships I have assigned to a cold? What if now I want to introduce a new element into the cold equation? I want to introduce a setup – a new “reason” for the cold – a new purpose. I want to affect my cause-effect relationship in the case of a cold.

Since I am introducing a new element that I already believe might change how I experience a cold, I am primed for a new cause-effect setup – and a new or different outcome. In NLP language, I’m messing with my presuppositions to achieve a new outcome – a “frame-up.”

In my experiment, I tell myself that my cold is no longer a sub-par condition – that is, I am no longer “under the weather.” Rather, I tell myself that the purpose of the cold symptoms is cleansing or body energy realignment, or mind-body belief system adjustment, or proxy clearing, or even weight adjustment processing. I elevate in my mind the purpose of the cold from recovery from disease to some positive function – part of my weight reduction regime, for example. I’ve assigned a new frame for the symptoms I collectively call “cold.”

Now, when I see the weight loss, my new cause-effect relationship is “when I experience the symptoms of a cold it is part of the overall weight reduction my body does as a result of my weight management plan and goal.” This is just as valid a cause-effect relationship as my previous one that basically said, “My body is reacting to a disease element that is invading my body.”

From a purely results oriented viewpoint – without any judgment – which cause-effect relationship would you consider more useful in a weight management regime? I think it’s obvious.

Proxy or Surrogate Healing

I don’t adhere to the “processing the woes of the world by proxy” viewpoint because I don’t think there is anything fundamentally wrong in the world. There are merely events that I interpret. If I want to change something to suit my mood, attitude, present mind set, or whatever, all I have to do is change MY MIND – MY PERCEPTION. Proxy is just one way I can do that.

It’s a scientific fact that if you change your mind, you will change your body as a result – it’s all part and parcel. This is no mystery – change your mind about where you want your finger to be in space, for example, and you will move your finger accordingly – your body has adjusted to suit your mindset about the location of your finger – so long as your thought about movement rises above a certain threshold so as to become action – that is, the thought extends beyond simply thinking about moving your finger (trying) into the realm of action where your finger actually moves (doing).

If I proxy the hurts and woes in the Middle East, for example, my body will change as a result of my change of mind/heart. That change could show up as cold symptoms – it’s merely evidence that we can interpret.

If one enjoys “processing” (an action taken in response to environment, such as body sweats, tearing, heart racing, etc.), they might over time believe – and reinforce their belief with more experience interpreted in the same manner – that they are somehow blessing the world over and over and over – but seeing little or no real change as a result – which might cause them to continue to do more of the same – like doing proxy every day for the world that never seems to get any better – “so I better keep doing more proxy or the world will get oh, so much worse if I quit… blah, blah, blah…” This is the same mentality that sent thousands of warriors and young women to their deaths in the rituals of the Mayan, Hawaiian, and Aztec cultures to name but a very few.

The truth may be that the world never needed healing in the first place because it was never sick or hurt or wrong or whatever else from just being what it is.

I call such behavior – doing proxy repeatedly because it appears to be needed – proxy addiction – just like healing addiction – or substance addiction – or any other kind of addiction. It is simply one way to use the power of justification/rightness. All addiction is, from that point of view, is a pattern of satisfaction – a cycle that reinforces good feelings – feelings the person likes and wants to repeat. It could be thought of as part of a cycle of action and feeling that includes justifying one’s behavior toward others.

At this time of my life, I’m letting go of getting all wrapped up in the right “why’s” – the right answers. I already have those. Instead, I’m now interested in seeking out the questions. That is what the world is short of if anything.

“What the world needs now are questions, sweet questions – that’s the only thing that there’s just too little of…”

It’s a reasonable answer, eh?!