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How to change the way you think and achieve a happier personal and professional life
Written on Mar 7, 2024
By Jessica Salerno-Shumaker, OSCPA senior content manager
Examining your thoughts might sound like a tricky exercise but it can actually lead to genuine insight and improvement in your life, said one business consultant.
“If we start learning how to be more aware of our thoughts, then we can possibly find new thoughts that can create different feelings,” said Leslie Graf, founder and CEO of L.F.G. Consulting and Coaching.
Graf will present at the July Women, Wealth & Wellness Conference, covering “the coaching model,” which is a model based on cognitive behavioral science that suggests our thoughts impact feelings, which impact actions, which ultimately impact results.
Graf worked in public accounting for nine years and said she often thought if she could wake up earlier that would be the key to helping her get more done. That thought made her instantly feel tired, she said, as she was already working hard to do as much as she could. So instead, she started thinking about how she could rest more so she could be more productive at work with the time she did have.
“When I started thinking that I started to feel more excited and motivated,” she said. “So, the actions I took were exploring ways to feel rested.”
To start implementing the coaching model in your own life, Graf suggested pausing a few times a week to take a couple deep breaths and examine some of your thoughts. Ask yourself how thinking this way makes you feel and how changing some of those thoughts could alter your actions.
A key part of this is remembering to give yourself grace, Graf said. Our brains are wired to seek out pleasure and avoid pain, so constantly berating yourself for not executing perfectly on every task or goal you set is not helpful. It’s good to make mistakes and take time to rest and reconnect. Altering your thoughts to acknowledge that can help you focus on the things that do matter.
“Changing our thoughts and becoming more aware of them can help us find new believable thoughts,” she said. “It can help us balance our lives, which just makes us happier people. We can be more rested, more at peace, more productive, more successful in all aspects of our lives, not just our careers.”