Date: Fri, 7 Mar 1997 12:24:00 EST From: "What, Tink?" Subject: EXERCISE: Values (Self-Discipline and Moderation) #5 [Based on the book "Teaching Your Children Values" by Linda and Richard Eyre, ISBN 0-671-76966-9] (p. 107) "Physical, mental, and financial self-discipline. Moderation in speaking, in eating, in exercising. The controlling and bridling of one's own appetites. Understanding the limits of body and mind. Avoiding the dangers of extreme, unbalanced viewpoints. The ability to balance self-discipline with spontaneity." General Guidelines: 1. Teach by example. Create a personal example regarding the value of discipline and moderation in all areas. 2. "Count to Ten" Stop before striking out/speaking out and think. 3. Maintain a regular schedule. 4. Use the words discipline and moderation frequently and positively. 5. Set up "deals" -- set objectives, discipline yourself to achieve them, and reward yourself for getting there! Some observations/games... (p. 112) "discipline is when you are strong enough to make yourself do what you should" What if you had a "work before play" award--what incidents would you cite where you did that needed to be done before what you wanted to do? When you see something that needs to be done, do you do it, or do you try to find someone else to do it? Can you remember a time when doing what you wanted to do first just wasn't nearly as much fun--because that awful, nasty thing that you knew you had to do was waiting? Is waiting for and anticipating something part of the pleasure? Could the discipline of saving before getting it be more fun than impulsive splurging? The key here is understanding setting and reaching goals, along with being realistic about the "little daily tortures" that result in reaching our goals. Always praise your successes more than you "crack the whip" over your failures. Make decisions in advance. You've probably participated in fire drills and other disaster preparations--do the same for your life! Think through what you are going to do when you run into hard times, and make plans for it. Be specific in describing scenarios and mentally rehearsing exactly how you are going to respond to them. Think about guidelines and standards for your own discipline and moderation. It's much easier to "toe the line" if you draw it first. Try out some daily planning methods. One possibility: At the top of a page, list one priority for the day for work, family, and self (or school, friends, self?). Put a line down the page. On the left, list the things you need to do today, including the three priority items, by time. On the right, as the day goes by, pick up spontaneous or serendipitous things that are better or more worthwhile than you had planned on. Try to do your three priorities plus at least one or two spontaneous things every day! That covers the material they have. Self-discipline and moderation...I'll bet we can think of something to write about those! Let's start by picking a number from one to ten. 1. All-or-nothing thinking: You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure. 2. Overgeneralization: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat. 3. Mental Filter: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors the entire beaker of water. 4. Disqualifying the positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting they "don't count" for some reason or another. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences. 5. Jumping to conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion. a. Mind reading. You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don't bother to check it out. b. The Fortune Teller error. You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already established fact. 6. Magnification (Catastrophizing) or minimization: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else's achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow's imperfections). This is also called the "binocular trick." 7. Emotional Reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: "I feel it, therefore it must be true." 8. Should Statements: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn'ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. "Musts" and "oughts" are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment. 9. Labeling and mislabeling: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: "I'm a loser." When someone else's behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: "He's a goddam louse." Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded. 10. Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for. (p. 42-43, from Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David D. Burns, M.D., 1980 Avon Books, ISBN 0-380-71803-0) There you have it, a perfectly good cognitive distortion (a warp on the mental horizon, so to speak). Take your pad in hand, and think of at least five different specific examples of this kind of thinking. Dash them off quickly, just enough so that you recognize the example you thought of. [Having trouble? Roll a die, and pick a number from one to six: 1. Physical appearance 2. Weight 3. Social relations 4. Contribution to... the world? friends? family? you decide! 5. table manners 6. courage Okay? Think about your cognitive distortion in relation to this characteristic. Does your character believe they are the fattest person in the world?] Now, let's take a few characters. I'll leave the number, sexual correlates, and other characteristics up to you, but don't forget that three is a pretty good number for exchanges...one pro, one anti, and one tossed and turned in the midst. Next back off and pick the best two or three examples from your list. Our hero(ine) needs to be afflicted with these problems, really tied up and grappling with themselves over how to deal with life. Other characters, the setting(s) and such should help get the poor soul into the (mental) tree and make sure the lions, tigers, and bears are pacing well at the foot. So start sketching that plot, and think about how your three examples might be put in order and shown to the reader. But (the gentle reader reminds us) what happened to self-discipline and moderation? Well, the answer is that our pro, agonized by cognitive distortions, is going to apply grit, grimaces, and healthy doses of self-discipline and moderation to...at least get through the day. Again, you are going to have to decide just what happens when the values meet the distortions, and all the world waits on a resolution. Speaking of waiting, let's try this one to six: 1. rain 2. sunny 3. snow 4. tornado 5. fog 6. drizzle Take one cognitive distortion. You may have a topic of concern. Mix well, and then shake with the atmospheric condition. Try to avoid the sympathetic fallacy but feel free to use the atmospheric disturbances as metaphor, refraction, or whatever helps you. The next step, incidentally, is one testing your self-discipline, as you take this little exercise and begin to write. Then rewrite. Then revise. And polish. And...that's writing! [so your tale will start with an incident intriguing us into reading farther, and posing the question--will John master himself or not? It will proceed through some little controversies showing us the problem, and making John consider the costs in detail. And then comes the finale, the crux where our John learns whether the preliminaries have stripped him down to the point of cracking, or whether he really will master life, liberty, and the pursuit of harpies...something like that, anyway. Can't wait to read it!] tink