How to Overcome Your Unhelpful Thinking Styles

Learning about my unhelpful thinking styles was a complete eye-opener!

Justine McGrath
3 min readMay 18, 2023

--

Image courtesy of Psychology Tools. The link is below in the article.

I am currently finished the first quarter of another year of learning and study — that’s the way I like it! This year I am finally getting around to qualifying with the International Coaching Federation — the Gold Standard (in my view) of executive coaching.

Boy, am I learning a lot! In a recent one-day workshop we looked at Unhelpful Thinking Styles. There were 10 listed on the sheet. As I read down them, I felt my stomach sink into my boots — too many of them sounded familiar and I recognized repeated patterns of unhelpful thinking. The trainer asked us to note our top 3 unhelpful thinking patterns. That took me all of about 10 seconds.

The beauty of having spent some time reflecting on them is now I can make positive changes. So dear reader, I am going to share all ten styles with you and invite you to reflect on which ones may be your Achilles heel.

This list is thanks to http://psychology.tools.com

The examples, additional content, and explanations are mine.

  1. All or Nothing Thinking — Sometimes called ‘black and white thinking.’

--

--

Justine McGrath

ICF certified Executive Coach. Specialist in EI. Author ‘Conversations with my Father — Jack Kyle,’ and ‘The Elephant Crossing.’ http://proactivecoaching.ie