I reckon that you do a lot of thinking, don’t you? The modern business world demands that we all do a lot of thinking. Planning this, planning that, reviewing this, reviewing that, our minds never stop. There is nothing wrong with thinking of course, and it is the quality of our thinking that usually determines our pay grade. The thing is that not all of our thinking is deliberate and purposeful and sometimes our thinking is a complete nuisance, I’m thinking of our worries, our fears etc. So, when is the last time that you actually paid attention to the thoughts that are cycling around in your brain? I mean, when is the last time that you really noticed what thoughts you are having and examined what they mean for you?
Let’s first of all distinguish between planned thoughts and unplanned thoughts. Planned thoughts are those that we orchestrate in order to achieve a specific objective. For example, planning what you are going to do today, deciding how you are going to complete a task, compiling an email, making a telephone call.
Unplanned thoughts are those thoughts that just spring up on us. For example, we may be happily writing an email and half way through a thought springs up that is completely unrelated to that email, maybe something like “I’m really resentful of how I was spoken to this morning by my boss.” Or “I really love my partner, we had such a great weekend and life is really exciting at the moment.”
We also have unplanned thoughts when we are doing things that do not require 100% concentration, for example when we are driving, when we are washing up, when we are trying to get to sleep etc.
They say that we have around 60,000 of these unplanned thoughts every day and that 95% of these thoughts are the same as the unplanned thoughts that we had yesterday. In other words our thinking is habitual. This is absolutely great if the thoughts that we are having are all positive thoughts, but it is not great if the unplanned thoughts that we are having do not support us.
Worry and fear are generally unplanned thought patterns that do not support us. If you spend your life consistently repeating worrying thought patterns, then you are not going to be living your life to the full potential, are you? Your thoughts also affect your mood, don’t they? If you are feeling particularly unhappy at any given moment it is probably because you have been repeating negative thought patterns in your brain.
The quality of your thinking actually determines the quality of your life. If you have 60,000 positive thoughts every day and no negative thoughts, then how good is your life going to be?
So, the question is, can we chose how we think? Can we choose to have unplanned thoughts that are positive rather than negative for us?
Yes we can! Thinking is a habit and our mind is a muscle. We strengthen our muscles by exercising them, don’t we? So, if we practice negative thinking, then we will predominantly think negatively. If we practice thinking positively, then we will strengthen that particular muscle and more and more of our unplanned thoughts will be positive.
The first think that we need to do is to pay attention to our thoughts. What unplanned thoughts are we having? Are they positive or negative for us?
The second thing to do is to think of your mind like a slidshow. Every thought is a slide. You get pictures in your head don’t you? These pictures are your slides.
The third thing to do is when you notice a negative thought, then just think of the opposite and change the slide. If you think, for example, “I feel really worried about going to work today.” Then think, what is the opposite of this? “I feel really excited about the challenge of the day. Whatever happens I’ll be ok. I’m going to enjoy the day no matter what.” Change the slide.
Practice noticing negative thoughts and change your slides. Do this on a regular basis for 21 consecutive days and it will produce magnificent results in your life.
Our NLP training teaches you many techniques such as this for giving you control over your thinking and inevitably over your destiny. Take a training with us today. Our NLP Training Online provides you with accredited NLP Practitioner and NLP Master Practitioner training courses.
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