Unlocking Your Powerful State: Self-Care Isn’t Selfish Webinar (WFWP USA)

Written by: Myrna Lapres

For our March "Self-Care Isn’t Selfish"Zoom webinar, Liisa Freystaetter led the presentation on the “Emotional Guidance System” based on her training with David Bayer as a Certified Mindset Facilitator.  We had a total of 25 participants. She began by telling us how this system has helped her to create clarity and self-guide herself. Anyone can use the Emotional Guidance System to self-coach ourselves. Liisa stated that there are only two states of being which we go in and out of through the day.

1. Powerful State: includes emotions that feel good like joy, creativity, excitement, compassion and peace.

2. Primal State: includes emotions such as stress, anxiety, being overwhelmed, impatience, anger and jealousy—ones that don’t feel good.

The key to creating everything that we want in our lives is to spend as much time as possible in a powerful state. In the primal state, we are trying to survive, and we cannot access creativity and infinite intelligence. In the powerful state, we are thriving and we are connected to a power higher than ourselves, to God.

How we handle and react to our experience become patterns of thinking and beliefs. The book Feeling Good, by David Burns, lists ten thinking errors that cause negative feelings. 

1. All-or-nothing thinking
2. Overgeneralization
3. Mental Filter (focus on the negative)
4. Discounting the Facts
5. Jumping to Conclusion
6. Magnification and Minimization
7. Emotional Reasoning
8. Should (Must/Ought to) Statements
9. Labeling
10. Blaming

Using the Emotional Guidance System, we can begin to recognize when we are entangled with thoughts that are not aligned with the TRUTH OF REALITY which moves us into suffering. We can become aware that our thinking is off and simply not true. As humans, we have a unique intelligence that is like a lie detector, a built-in emotional guidance system. However, we must pay attention and acknowledge that we have moved into suffering, which is a sign to us that we need to do something different. The next step is to make a new, empowering decision that moves us toward what is true and find evidence of that in our life. We begin to train our brains to quickly see the unintelligence of our negative thinking. This can make an immediate shift, moving to the powerful state.

Liisa guided us through the process, emphasizing that when we first begin to practice this process, we need to be patient with ourselves and practice, practice, practice.

1.    Think of a recent experience that was emotionally upsetting.
2.    Notice what you are thinking!
3.    Ask yourself: Is it true what I was thinking? Is it not true?
4.    If it is not true, what is true?
5.    Make a new empowering decision about this.
6.    Identify the evidence I have that my new decision is true?

After a time to write and reflect, participants discussed their realizations in small groups in breakout rooms. Then Liisa guided a participant through the process mentioned above to identify erroneous thoughts tied to emotions and to be empowered by the truth.