John Kenny uses a bicycle metaphor to explain how thoughts trigger emotions, reactions, and consequences in a loop, while past pain and core beliefs act as brakes preventing change. Surfacing that pain and shifting thoughts breaks the cycle, allowing healthier patterns to emerge.
Chapters
It's kind of the key concept behind interpersonal relationship coaching. It's the kind of the foundation for how I coach. So the first part is the front wheel of your bicycle, and I call this the TERC cycle. So it's T-E-R-C. It's the thoughts, the emotions, the reactions, and your consequences. Everything starts with a thought, and if you give meaning to something, then you're going to have an emotional response to that. And if you have an emotional response to it, you're likely to react in a specific way. Because if you have a thought that you have no meaning to, you're not really going to feel anything. So therefore, you're not going to really react to it. So if I have a thought that causes an emotion, I have a tendency to react, and then my reaction will determine the consequences. So if I have a negative thought about myself, I'm likely to feel negative. If I feel negative, I'm probably going to react in a negative way, and then my consequences are going to be negative. If I then have consequences that are negative, my thoughts are then likely to be influenced by those consequences. So then I'll have another negative thought, more negative emotions, I'll react even more negatively, and then the consequences are going to get worse. If the consequences are going to get worse, the thoughts are going to get worse, and I'm just going to go around in this cycle. So coming back To the back wheel, we have the 3 Ps, which are your past, your pain, and your perception. So your past pain will sit with you on your little saddle where your wounds are. So the wounds that you experienced as a child, or the wounds that you've experienced throughout your life, are like physical wounds. We carry scars, but we carry them as memories. So our wounds that we sit on, on our saddle, Can be triggered, and they will remind us of our past and the pain that we experienced at those times. We've formed a perception of what that means to us, and we've also— where we hold our little water bottle on our bicycle is where we keep our beliefs, because we dip into our beliefs all the time when we need to. They sustain us, our belief systems. So depending on how we perceive a certain situation based on our past pain, depending on what beliefs we hold based on our experiences, that will influence our thoughts. And if that thought is something tying into our negatives, then we will then likely to give it a negative meaning and start going around in the Turk cycle. We can change our thoughts to change how we feel, but if it goes against our beliefs and our perceptions, then we put the brakes on. And that's where the resistance comes in, because we want to change, but if it doesn't fit with our beliefs and our perceptions of ourselves or of situations in life, then we will continue to handlebars, go off in the same direction all the time, go around in the same cycle all the time, because we're not able to shift our thoughts because our brain's telling us, no, no, no, no, you can't do that. Actually, what it actually says is you won't do that because that doesn't fit with how you see things. You need to again come back to your comfort zone. You need to do what you've always done. You need to feel safe. You need to be in your window of comfort, and therefore nothing ever changes, and you keep riding off in the same direction of life. So what we need to do Is go back to the past. What is the pain you're still holding on to? What perceptions are you holding about life, yourself? What beliefs are you carrying? What are your core belief systems? What limiting beliefs does this lead to? And how does that influence your thoughts? How you see things? And then what meanings are you giving to these situations that give you these emotions, which then will lead your cycle, your bicycle, to go in the same direction?
