How to Upgrade Your Life by Improving Your Thought Life

Barb Nangle
Curious
Published in
18 min readOct 23, 2020

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Some frameworks to improve your internal dialogue

Mountain and sky scene with Emerson quote that says, “You become what you think about all day long.”
Photo credit: Samuele Errico Piccarini

Managing our thoughts and our minds is the most powerful way to change our lives. We’ve been taught what to think and why, but not really how to think. When we let our mind go on autopilot, the results can be disastrous. In this article, I illustrate several ways for how to think, and especially how to change your thinking. These frames for “thought work” take very little effort, with monumental payoff. What you think, you become.

A metaphor for the mind.

Imagine the reservoir that provides the water supply in your community being dosed with poison 10 times every day for 20 years. That’s 730,000 doses of poison! Now, imagine you find out that you were the one poisoning the reservoir! Would you stop? Of course! In fact, not only would you stop, you’d probably add an antidote to speed up the purification process.

This is a metaphor for how our minds work. If you’ve been thinking negative things for the last 20 years, you’ve poisoned the reservoir of your mind. If you only had 10 negative thoughts per day (likely a very low estimate), that would equal 730,000 negative thoughts over a 20-year period. That’s a lot of poison!

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Barb Nangle
Curious

I’m a boundaries coach who works with women who focus on what others think and neglect themselves. I've coached hundreds using my exclusive BUILD framework.