Are you checking in on your thoughts?
Your thoughts affect your outcomes
I have always been more of an optimist than a pessimist. I would qualify that further and say I am an realistic optimist.
From an early age I was imbued by positive values and beliefs, it is my default setting. I see the good in most things. But I am realistic about the other side of good too.
Having lived and worked in many countries from a young age, I love travelling to new places and immersing myself in the culture. I look at all the potential things to do and see.
I recently helped a friend plan her trip to a city I had been to. She was about to venture there on her own and wanted some advice. I was happy to furnish her with everything I knew about the city.
However, I could not answer some of her primary questions. Her main questions were about safety and security of the city which I had never thought of before. In fact, it is not on my primary list of questions when I do my research about a city I plan to visit.
Travelling solo has its advantages and disadvantages, male or female, but if you find yourself going solo, you make the most of it. Or that is my policy anyway.
I have travelled solo in many parts of the world. Upon completing work assignments in new cities, I always made sure I caught the sights and sounds of the city often venturing beyond the city limits.
My advice to my friend was that all major cities have the usual dos and don’ts as visitors and that if she stuck with the common-sense principles, she would be fine.
My friend embarked on her trip and I tried to keep in touch intermittently with her during the trip but got the details only when she returned. She enjoyed her trip but cut it short because she did not feel safe in the city. She heard of muggings and robberies whilst she was there and decided she did not want to become a victim.
I was bewildered. I had been multiple times, once alone, to the same city but never gave much thought to the crime statistics. All cities have their issues, but it was not my focus.
Which brings me to the point of this article, our thoughts and their outcomes. Two people with two different foci of the same city, with two different experiences. We both were keen to enjoy and absorb everything about the city but with two very different outcomes.
Was it the focus of our thoughts that steered our outcomes? My work over the last two decades in leadership and self-awareness show that our perception directly affects our outcomes.
Just as in the case of my friend and I having two different experiences of the same city. With all other components remaining equal in the equation, she had travelled solo before, she enjoyed travelling, liked experiencing new things, our respective perceptions was the only difference.
So, if our thoughts affect our outcomes, how can we become more aware of our thoughts? I love meta-cognition, thinking about our thinking. I stop several times in a day to check-in on my thoughts.
We are autopilot creatures, we often go through the day without giving much thought to our thinking.
But if we consciously check-in on our thoughts intermittently throughout the day, we become more aware of our thoughts. Then, if we feel some thoughts do not serve us well, we can replace them with thoughts that serve us better.
And this applies to our emotions too. When we feel an emotion that is not serving us well, we can learn to replace that emotion with another more helpful emotion.
Whatever the thought or emotion we think or feel, remember we have the power to observe and navigate them. That way they have less control over us. If our thoughts affect our outcomes, should we not pay more attention to our thoughts?
I would love to have your thoughts or experiences on this, leave me a comment below.
