Journal Entry

In this activity, you’ll be writing a conversation with your Inner Guide, a critical thinking skill that empowers you to become your own best coach, counselor, mentor, and guide through challenging times. This practical application of critical thinking greatly enhances your self-awareness, helping you take greater responsibility for making the wise choices necessary to create your desired outcomes and experiences. In the box below, write a dialogue with your Inner Guide that will help you revise your self-sabotaging scripts.

Have your Inner Guide ask you the following 10 questions. After answering each question, let your Inner Guide use one or more of the active listening skills to help you dive deeper:

• Silence (demonstrating that you are paying close attention to the speaker)
• Reflection (expressing in your own words what you think the speaker is saying and feeling)
• Expansion (requesting examples, evidence, and experiences)
• Clarification (asking for an explanation)

Ten questions from Your Inner Guide:

1. In what area of your life are you off course?
2. What self-defeating thought patterns of yours may have contributed to this situation?
3. What different thoughts could you choose to get back on course?
4. What self-defeating emotional patterns of yours may have contributed to this situation?
5. What different emotions could you choose to get back on course?
6. What self-defeating behavior patterns of yours may have contributed to this situation?
7. What different behaviors could you choose to get back on course?
8. What limiting core beliefs of yours (about the world, other people, or yourself) may have led you to adopt the self-defeating patterns that we’ve been discussing?
9. What different beliefs could you choose to get back on course?
10. As a result of what you’ve learned here, what new behaviors, thoughts, emotions, or core beliefs will you adopt?