I recommend reflecting on your experience with this chapter’s exercise before continuing. You can reflect about anything you found relevant, but here are some questions you may want to consider:

How did this exercise compare with writing your beliefs?

Were you able to separate your beliefs from the emotions they evoked?

Were you able to separate your beliefs from your identity?

How did you feel while thinking about the beliefs and emotions?

How did that feeling change over the course of the exercise, if it did?

Did awareness of the belief make the emotions stronger? Weaker? Different?

Where and how might you apply your experience in the rest of your life?

Data from Exercises

This exercise is to write beliefs that contribute to emotions you don’t like. It applies the skills of Write Your Beliefs and Write Others’ Beliefs to beliefs that are harder to grasp.
Emotions don’t appear randomly. They result from your perception of your environment, among other things, which your beliefs influence. Some that you don’t like feeling, like anger, suspicion, impatience, and disappointment, arise from inner conflict. Your emotional system makes you feel a way you don’t like until you fix the situation. Detecting beliefs that cause emotions we don’t like takes skill and practice because parts of our minds suppress them. I think of such beliefs as slippery. When you try to group them to understand them, the emotions they evoke overwhelm and distract you and they slip out of your focus.

What to Do

1. Carry something to write with for a week.
2. When you feel an emotion you don’t like, find what belief or beliefs contributed to it and write it down.
At the end, you’ll have a list of beliefs. You may have difficulty finding or accepting some. You may want to change them more than write them down.
For now the goal is to record them without judgment or evaluation. It may take a couple of days to get the hang of it, but if you work diligently, you will.