What do those three things have to do with each other? It’s what I’m calling the “Do Loop.” I put it together this way to show how our thoughts and actions – and the energy behind them – ultimately create our reality.
The “Do” Loop
Since starting this blog, I’ve been struggling with how to incorporate some life coaching principles into what I know about creation from a scientific and spiritual standpoint.
I’m a huge fan of life coaching and I know that the principles work. But there are a few things that just don’t sit right with me. Like taking massive action without any mention of connecting with who you are first. I think some of it is hidden in the teachings, but I believe it’s incredibly important to highlight and address that piece out loud. Because to me, knowing yourself – the real you – is the most important thing.
So I took Brooke Castillo’s life coaching model and infused the scientific and spiritual principles into it. The result: the do loop; a graphic depicting the relationship between the four main elements of our everyday lives – circumstances, thoughts, feelings, and actions – and where we as creators influence each of them.
The Self-Coaching Model
Castillo, a wildly successful life coach and master coach instructor, uses what she calls “the model” to help people work through their problems. It’s her profoundly simple yet incredibly powerful tool that helps people see how their thoughts ultimately produce the results in their life. As Brooke says, she didn’t “invent” this model – she just put it together as a way to succinctly capture how it all works.
Here’s the short explanation: Circumstances invoke Thoughts, which generate Feelings, which determine Actions, which lead to Results. The results you get in life then become your new circumstance. For an in-depth explanation from her, check out The Life Coach School Podcast.
I like this model a lot. I use it almost daily to work through the brain fog that comes up as a result of living. Her model breaks up what can feel like an overwhelming amount of mental chatter into a single thought and paints the picture of what that thought is doing for us. Ultimately, we get to see how our reality stems directly from the thoughts we have about it. Super powerful.
My Mods
Whereas Castillo’s model is a practical tool to use while coaching yourself, think of the do loop as a tool that provides insight into what’s going on inside your head and how that shows up in your life.
In my hours of burning brain energy over this, it finally dawned on me that what’s missing from the model is being – the whole focus is on doing. We’re human beings. In an effort not to neglect being, I called it the “do” loop to highlight that it depicts the doing part of life – a very important piece, but not the whole picture.
Why the loop? I wanted to emphasize how reality is always looping, yet it’s always happening now. Now is what we have to work with. We’re always in the flow of now – a lot like a movie film, where each individual image is flashing so quickly our eyes aren’t able to detect that what we’re actually watching are individual frames. Our experience is the illusion of a moving picture. What we experience as reality is a series of “now” moments.
Time is an illusion.
Albert Einstein
How It Works
The Brain Perceives Circumstances
Circumstances are neutral facts. They’re individual pictures of a moving film. Circumstances are what make up the shapes, smells, and sounds around us that our brain interprets.
This is great news because it means that we don’t have to worry about this part. It just happens.
The Brain Generates Thoughts
You then have thoughts about your circumstances. Your brain sifts and sorts through its vast arena of memories and beliefs and you make your circumstances mean something.
The Body Produces Feelings
Feelings are feedback; they’re part of our guidance system. They let us know whether our thoughts are helping us get where we want to go.
Quick nerd sidetrack — Feedback is one of the most important elements of any control system. It’s what keeps the system up-to-date on what’s going on so it can make the next best decision. Think of GPS. Where do you think you’d end up if your GPS receiver never got updated information on where you are? Probably not where you want to go.
Our feelings are just that. Navigational beacons that let us know how our thoughts are helping us get where we want to go. Negative ones probably aren’t the fastest way to get there — Woah, I feel terrible, don’t act on me or you’re probably not going to like the result!
They’re there to teach us things about our thoughts and belief systems so we can get in there and clean them up!
Watch Out for the Thought Loop
I included a dashed line back to thoughts from feelings. This mini loop is called a thought loop, and it’s quite easy to get trapped in – happens to me a lot. I’ll think of something, it produces a feeling, then I have a thought about the feeling, then the thought produces another feeling… round and round we go.
All this does is burn energy generating fog in the brain; all the while inspiring actions we are likely unaware of. I wanted to highlight this loop so you can keep an eye out for it. When I catch myself in a thought loop, the best way to get out of it is to stop thinking. Quiet the mind. I watch the thoughts and they eventually subside.
The Brain Directs Action
The loop “concludes” with action! This is what ultimately seals the deal and declares confidently to the Universe, “This is who I am, and this is what I want!”
How Do We Influence It?
Here’s where things get fun.
Thoughts and Actions are the conscious entry points into the Do Loop.
This is where we have the ability to change things. You can choose to have whatever thought you want about a given circumstance. It sometimes may feel impulsive if you’ve reacted similarly to situations in the past; but when you’re conscious, you always have a choice.
Say we’ve had our thought about the circumstance. That thought has an accompanying feeling. Say the feeling isn’t so great… like anger. Acting on anger could end in violence, or at best saying something we’ll likely regret later (it’s like I speak from experience…).
If we’re paying attention, if we catch ourselves in anger, if we become aware of the fact that we’re angry, we have the opportunity to choose a different feeling to act on. We can stop ourselves, calm down, and act on a different – more pleasant, perhaps – emotion.
Being vs. Doing
Being. What’s that?
Before we tackle being, let’s define doing – doing is all our action verbs – like interpreting, thinking, feeling, talking, and acting. Our society is so wrapped up in doing that many of us have forgotten what being is. But it’s everything.
Doing is never enough if you neglect being.
Eckhart Tolle
Being is how you do life, filtered through your setpoint. It’s the energy you bring to life. It’s the animating force behind who you are and what you do. It’s the quiet stillness when you close your eyes and cease to think. It’s the awareness behind the thoughts, feelings, and actions. Being can’t be taught, only pointed to. It’s an experience.
I wanted to make sure this elusive “being” made it into our creation diagram – as it’s, what I believe, the single most important aspect.
In the do loop, doing is represented by the words and being is the white space that illuminates the words.
Being shines into everything you do. It energizes what you do. Being is the consciousness you bring to what you do, which ultimately determines how much control you have over your thoughts and actions.
Let’s play with this concept of white space and black letters. What happens when the words are written on a white board, as they are in the image? The words are very clear. I can clearly see how the loop runs, thought through to circumstance. But what if the words were written on a gray board? There’s less clarity, and the words are harder to see. What if the words were written on a black board? We wouldn’t be able to see them at all.
The board color here represents the different levels of being we can bring to our lives – how much consciousness we let through – how much awareness we have of our thoughts and actions, and ultimately our reality.
White space represents fully conscious. This represents the state of complete awareness, where we clearly see into our minds, what’s going on, and can make deliberate choices that align with who we are. Our state of being is primary.
Gray space represents partly conscious. This represents a quasi-aware state. This happens when we’re distracted, our minds are scattered, or trying to do too many things at once. We can kind of see into our minds, but many of our thoughts are likely running on unconscious loops. Our focus is mostly on doing.
Black space represents unconscious. This represents the state of unawareness. We have no conscious insight or input into our minds and our brains run on unconscious, pre-programmed do loops. We are completely focused on doing.
In this diagram, the white space is what brings the words into focus. Being brings doing into focus.
The more being we bring into what we do, the more clear what we do becomes.
Our thoughts and actions ultimately create our reality. When we allow being to shine through everything we do, what we do suddenly becomes clear and easy and fun – because it’s fueled by the energy of you.
Play around with the do loop. See how it’s working in your life. Let me know how it’s working for you!