The Steps
By the time you finish the book, you will feel better prepared to harness the power of your feelings and thoughts, channeling them into value-aligned actions. Through some honest self-examination, instructive exercises, and good old-fashioned practice, you’ll be better prepared to achieve more of the outcomes you want, and you’ll do so more often.
An important conceptual underpinning of FTC is the importance of disengaging your mental/emotional “autopilot.” Bearing witness to thoughts and feelings you may never even have noticed you were having makes room for some critical reflection. The general idea is to start to narrow the gap between your perceived self (who you believe yourself to be) and your authentic self (who you actually are).
With patience, you’ll find your thoughts and feelings can begin to work for you, rather than against you. The activities at the end of each section are designed to support the immediate integration of what you’ve just learned into your daily life. With each chapter, you are one step closer to positively impacting your environment, your relationships, and most importantly, your peace of mind.
Let’s look at the specifics.
FEEL. In this step, you’ll learn how to recognize what moves you. We can all remember a time when we acted impulsively because our emotions seemed overwhelming, right? Identifying whatwe are experiencing, and howit impacts our decision-making changes everything.
THINK. We’re constantly taking in new information, making judgments, categorizing data, etc. If we don’t stop to check-in with our decision-making system, we can get reallystuck. The lens through which we view the world can restrict, or expand, our ability to generate choices. Having more choices is almost always better than having fewer! This step is designed to introduce you to the ways granting yourself permission to be flexible, re-prioritize, change your mind, and fact-check (both yourself and others!) changes everything.
CHOOSE. When the time comes to choose, you will have gained a better understanding of what you’re feeling, and how you think about it through your work in the first two steps. Armed with this information, you’ll turn your attention to creating a robust framework for decision-making, a kind of mental scaffolding. Choosing translates feelings and thoughts into value-aligned decisions. You can finally feel confident your decisions are grounded in your own unique balance of honesty, acceptance, and compassion. When you feel, think, and choose, in that order, it can literally change everything.