Control Your Thoughts To Achieve More
This time I’ll write about how to achieve great results by controlling your thoughts.
Thoughts generate feelings, feelings drive our actions and actions create results. So if you want to have great results, it is inevitable to be able to control your thoughts. I’m not going to write about some mind control voodoo. In fact I am a very rational guy, and this will be a very simple cause and effect analysis.
Let’s start with an example
Imagine a scenario, it’s the middle of the night you are in your bed trying to fall asleep in the dark. You hear a noise coming from the front door. You think OMG it’s a burglar (thought), you get scared (feeling) you get up from the bed to check the source of the noise (action). Now. You see a guy in mask standing in front of you, standing in the dark. You think, OK I’m gonna die now (thought), you feel anxious, scared (feeling) and you try to run away (action). Maybe it wasn’t even a burglar, just your flatmate arrived home after a party and it is cold outside so he was wearing protective headgear. But you wasn’t even thinking about that. You see it’s all about the thoughts.
Awareness
Like in many areas of life the first step is awareness. You should focus on what you are thinking, why you are thinking it. Most people are totally unaware of their thoughts. People tend to say, life just happened, I don’t know why I acted this way. They often blame the circumstances. In fact you are not in control of circumstances, you are not in control of other people. But you are in control of your actions and reactions. It is your responsibility, you can’t shift the responsibility and blame to anything else.
You should be aware what you think, how does it make you feel and how you react to that feeling.
For example you have many negative thoughts for instance about your body. You should acknowledge these thoughts, and observe how these thoughts make you feel. How you act if you feel in this certain way? Many people tend to eat more, as a reaction of negative feelings coming from negative thoughts of their body image. This will result the counter effect.
Choice
You should be responsible for your actions no matter what. To be a successful adult you should be able to control the actions you take. To be able to do that you should be aware of your feelings. Unfortunately most people fail at this point. This takes lots of practice, this means you should let yourself to feel in a certain way. Yes, I’m telling you to feel the negative feelings as well. If you don’t let yourself to feel the negative feelings, they will be stored in your unconscious mind, and they’ll still affect your actions. Allow yourself to feel bad. Allow yourself to feel anxious. Observe these feelings. Most people don’t even know what they feel, they don’t have the knowledge about what feelings do exists and what they feel. This takes lots of practice and learning.
The next stage is to acknowledge these feelings are triggered by certain thoughts. You should observe these thoughts, and see how they make you feel. Again, I’m strongly disagree to force yourself to think about some nice happy thought once you realise you have negative thoughts. It’s not the solution, they will be part of your unconscious mind and they will direct your life without you being aware of it.
Imagine you are sitting next to the highway, and cars are passing. You observe these cars, don’t try to stop them, or turn them around, because they would smash you. You just observe and let them pass. It’s the same with your thoughts. Just observe them, being aware is the cornerstone of being in control.
There are different stages of control. You always have a choice, and it is all about realising you have a choice. If you are aware of your actions and you take full responsibility over them, you can choose to act in a different way. If you are aware of your feelings, and you know what kind of actions will they trigger, you have the possibility to make the choice even earlier. It will grant you a greater success rate to control your actions and achieve better results. If you are aware of your thoughts and you know what feelings will they cause and those feelings will result a certain action, you have the chance to gain control early on at the thought level. This will give you the chance to decide you want to feel the certain way and act a certain way or don’t.
This is all about you having a choice.
You are not your thoughts. You are the one who are observing your thoughts. You are not the little voice in your head. Well, this might have been weird, but if you are still reading this, there is a great chance you know what I mean here. It’s thought management, being able to direct your own life. Once you become aware of your thought and feeling patterns, you’ll have the chance to change how you act or react in certain situations. This is the key of changing the behavioral patterns.
You should accept the fact in this life every change we make, every action we take is driven either to move away from pain or move towards to pleasure. These strong feelings are controlling our actions. These feelings are generated from thoughts in your mind, you imagine a scenario which grants you the feeling of pleasure so you take action to make it happen.
There are many things you can’t control in your life. Other people, your past, etc. But you have control over how you think about those things and what those things mean to you. You can control your thoughts, feelings actions and reactions in order to change.
