As soon as you recognise that you are feeling a negative emotion, you can ask yourself some questions to help change your perception before it gets worse. Usually when you experience extreme negative emotions, such as anger or depression, it is because you fed them when they first started rather than finding a way to dispel them. Feeling negative on an ongoing basis is a barrier to your success, so it is better to pull out the weeds in your thinking before they take over.

If you have a more enduring problem, you may want to sit down with paper and a pen and ask yourself questions as a brainstorming session. You may find that your perception is wrong (and this realisation will help you to change it next time), or you may come up with a creative way of solving your problem.

Some questions that you may want to ask include:

• Are there any other ways of looking at this situation?
• Are there any alternative meanings to this situation that I may have missed?
• How might other people perceive this? (Consider people who are and are not directly involved.)
• Is my thinking flexible, or am I only seeing shades of black and white?
• What is the opposite of my perception, and in what ways may it be true?

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