The most transformative topic I’ll write about all year (honestly)

Have you heard the expression: You become what you think about most of the time?

It was popularised by Earl Nightingale in his 1957 personal development classic, The Strangest Secret.

It’s enormously powerful. It explains how you get in life what you think about – how things can get on a roll when momentum is working for you because your thinking is focused on all the good that is happening and it explains the negative spiral of things going from bad to worse as we get into fear-based thinking.

I’ve been learning new perspectives on how we can handle our thoughts and emotions. Stick around!!

Everyone has had some mental wobbles this year – how can you not have given the amount of suffering or new challenges that there have been around the world and, frankly, in most of our own homes? The pandemic has highlighted how we are fooling ourselves if we think that we have total (or even a lot of) control over our lives.

It’s not even realistic to believe that you can control every thought in your head and be 100% positive all the time. Everyone has doubts, fears and whacky thoughts at times. The perfect role model with all the answers is now a thing of the past. Thankfully.

So now I’ve stated what you already know, what’s helpful to you?

1.    Your feelings are simply a measure of what you’re thinking about right now. NOTHING MORE!

Your feelings are not a reflection of your entire life. There is a colossal difference here.

It was the seventeenth-century poet John Milton who wrote: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.”

You don’t have to let one moment’s thinking get on a ‘train’ of thought that then charges into old stories that reinforce unempowering messages you may have told yourself such as “I don’t fit in”, “My partner always derails life when it’s going just fine”, or “I don’t deserve that kind of success anyway”.

There’s a great line in Michael Neill’s book The Inside Out Revolution from a client of his whose epiphany was: “ I don’t always see it in the moment, but just knowing that I’m feeling my thinking and not my life makes all the difference in the world.” You no longer have to overreact, pour a drink or over-eat.

Some people – you – can resolve long-standing problems if you want to when you realise that they were never really there to begin with. Your feelings were real but the way you were seeing your life was not. What do I mean?

Neill explains it by comparing it to your ‘view’ of life from the different floors of an elevator.

On the ground floor everything looks real even if some of it is just your thought about it.

On the lower floors, you have a slight separation from your personal thinking and objective reality. You have a slightly different lens to look at things. The world influences you, but you have some control. However, your internal experience of life is still a reaction to outside circumstances. Stress, fear and difficulty are still the primary forces acting on you.

On the higher floors,  Michael Neill explains that “instead of trying to explain why we think what we think by looking for evidence in the world or in our upbringing, we recognise the mind is not so much a camera as a paintbrush and, consciously or unconsciously, we are the artist.”

Significant change is possible here. You become less reactive to your thoughts, less of a victim and able to respond more thoughtfully to changes in your circumstances.

One example might be the businesses that have looked for the opportunities during lock down rather than hunkered down and/or become fearful. Rather than just react to all the negative news, they have chosen different thoughts and painted a different canvas. One friend of mine switched her entire business from making ties and shirts and being 90% down from 2019 to making face masks and being 50% ahead – all in about four months.

On the top floor is where miracles happen – which, while unusual, are more frequent than we acknowledge. This includes connecting more to the world of spirit, remembering that all things have taken 13.8 billion years to get to this point in time and that all things created started out as a thought (such as you and the device you’re reading this on!)

On the most basic level, what I’m learning is to put our thoughts in any given moment in PERSPECTIVE. And that I can dismiss any thought I want to if it doesn’t serve me and remind myself that remarkable outcomes are always possible.

2.    You do not experience a person or a place. You experience your thinking about that person or that place.

For example, right now my wife is feeling really good about her life partly because she got a new promotion. I’ve been getting all kinds of compliments and acknowledgments. Her thinking about me at the moment is very positive because she is in a good mood. But when she is a bad mood, she experiences different thinking about me, I become less divine and have more in common with the bad guy in the Bond films who’s hell-bent on destroying human civilisation!

Your day does not have to create your mood.

Your mood creates your day.

So how do you change your thinking?

a)    Don’t repress the negative thoughts because then you unwittingly hold onto them inside – sometimes forever and that will have a negative physical impact on you at some point (ulcers, irritable bowel, acid reflux, back pain, headaches)

b)   Let them pass through your head

c)    Do not entertain these thoughts! Do not get on this ‘train’ of thought. Let them pass.

d)   Know that you are one thought away from a very different experience of being alive

3.    A potentially life-changing paradigm is to understand that great feelings such as love, and inspiration as well as difficult feelings such as fear and stress all come from within us.

Traditionally we attribute falling in love with a particular person and so think we have no control over it. But you were born with well-being, happiness, love and self-worth. You can generate these feelings yourself. “The only thing that can ever take you away from them is a thought.”

If you’ve ever heard someone extoll the value of a gratitude practice – better yet – if you’ve got one of your own, over time the small practice of appreciating all the little and big things you’ve had or have in your life, the feeling spreads – and it comes from the inside. I can speak personally to this.

It took a lot of endorsements from others before I was willing to stick with a gratitude practice. When a billionaire such as Oprah Winfrey talks about the habit as life transforming, it’s silly not to pay attention! It took a long time doing it before I sensed a strong positive difference but rewiring our thinking generally does take quite a bit of time. I’ve been listing 5 things I’m grateful for twice/day for many months (about 75% of the days) and it does get easier to notice the many, many things there are to be grateful for. It becomes an enjoyable experience that overflows into the rest of the day ever more easily. How can that do anything other than create more positive experiences?

All these feelings and thoughts come from the inside. They do not depend on outside events. I can much more easily generate feelings of love and inspiration now. I can more easily avoid getting on the stress train of thought when events feel stressful.

So what does all this mean? To me, it says don’t take your thinking so seriously. Realise the liberating notion that you have nothing to lose by pursuing the most exciting path if your birth-right qualities of well-being, happiness, love and self-worth will be with you regardless of the outcomes. We have learned this year more than any other that we cannot control many of our outcomes and it’s inspiring to know that we can choose whatever trajectory we want. Bad things will still happen and that’s part of the journey, but it doesn't mean these things have to dictate our future.

Give your thoughts a lot less power unless they are supporting you to do the remarkable and start painting a new picture of what you really want your life to be and create that.

Yes, fine, not everything works out how we want it to, but what if a remarkable future  still lies ahead waiting for you? Live from a place of inspiration and far more good will come from it.

Copyright Matt Anderson 2020.