Your emotions are caused by your thinking.

You can change your thinking.

Rational thinking exercises can help reframe negative self-beliefs and emotions.

If you feel shame, recognize that no one else can shame you; only you can make yourself feel ashamed. Only you have the power to create your emotions—positive, negative, helpful, or unhelpful.

Hundreds of years ago, the Greek and Roman Stoics advanced that insight.

In his treatise the Enchiridion, Epictetus wrote: Men are disturbed not by the things that happen but by their opinions about those things.

In his Epistles, Seneca stated: Everything depends on opinion. Ambition, luxury, greed, all look back to opinion.

Cicero, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, Shakespeare, and many others throughout history have all echoed similar sentiments.

If, for example, you........

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