Mind

5 Tips for Thinking Your Way to Success

The only place where your dream becomes impossible is in your own thinking. – Robert H Schuller

Let me ask you a question...What are the top 10 things you think about every day? Work, family, bills, social media, relationship (or lack thereof), nutrition, home life, what's left on your checklist for the day and so forth? I wish you could insert the answer right here because I'm genuinely interested in your response.
 
I'm consistently speaking to people about their thoughts. I've noticed that most people who are unhappy, stressed out, depressed, worried, discontent, experiencing anxiety, sad, angry, defensive, disheartened, hopeless - and unsuccessful - think about the same few thoughts over and over all day long, dwelling on them like the world will fall apart if they don't place a huge mass of their attention on them. 
 
Studies show we have approximately 50,000+ thoughts per day and 95% of them are repeated from the days before. That's astonishing! So, we're regurgitating thousands upon thousands of the SAME thoughts every single day? Yes. No wonder thought patterns are so difficult to break.
 
When we don't learn how to control our thoughts, we naturally remain stuck in a rut - it's Groundhog Day, we're trapped, being held hostage, totally controlled - until we become aware and then decide to break the cycle (by the way, I just got tense in my chest...I'm proving my own point and stressing myself out just by thinking of such entrapment). 

 

You cannot have a positive life and a negative mind. — Joyce Meyer

 
So, now that you're aware of how many thoughts are controlling our lives, let's chat about some tactics for breaking the habit and stepping into thought transformation:

 

1) Understand that your limitations are in your mind. This can be a particularly difficult truth to come to terms with because it requires us to take self-responsibility for our own failures, setbacks, fears...and limitations. Most of us are much more comfortable creating external excuses for why we aren't able to reach the success we desire. When we finally end this victim-mentality, we open up space to realize it is possible to create something great out of nothing.

 

2) Let go of the past. For some reason, this seems like one of the impossibles for far too many of us. It's as though we find comfort in the pain of the past, the anger of harping on something we can never change and holding onto things as a means to get revenge on the perceived culprit of our pain. Rarely do we realize we are the true culprit of our own pain every time we circle back to the thoughts that keep us feeling anything other than gratitude, positivity, abundance and success. 
 

Pain will leave you, when you let go. — Jeremy Aldana

 

3) Don't worry about the future. A great percentage of the things we worry about will never happen, so why do we waste so much of our lives trying to control something that doesn't even exist in the first place? As I said above, we are the true culprit of our own pain every time we circle back to the thoughts that keep us feeling anything other than gratitude, positivity, abundance and success. This includes thoughts of worry, anxiousness, fear and any other negative thought that holds us in a pattern that won't allow greatness to easily flow into our sphere. 

 

4) Knowledge is power. Think beyond knowledge as "smarts" but rather go deeper and think in terms of unlocking your mind. By learning more about our brains, epigenetics, psychology, thought pattern manifestations, metaphysics, universal laws, and how the ancient civilizations managed to achieve miraculous feats with very little outside resources, we can begin to learn what resources we have available to us through deliberately adjusting habitual thought patterns. One great example is through affirmations...because a belief is merely a thought we tell ourselves (or somebody else tells us) over and over, we have the ability to change our beliefs about anything that's blocking us from our success simply by changing what we tell ourselves and replacing limiting thoughts to create a new pattern of beliefs. 
 
5) Empty your mind. I know it seems contradictory that emptying your mind will allow you to think your way to success, but as with any overstimulated machine, our brains need to be cleared out and given a break from all their daily hard work thinking 50,000 or more of those insanely repetitive, absolutely unhelpful, ridiculously absurd thoughts from yesterday (and about yesterday...and nonexistent future of all the things that won't be happening) circulating around like a spinning wheel taking up all of our thought time and taking away from our amazing, one of a kind, brilliant ideas that could otherwise randomly and miraculously pop into our minds if they had the space, freedom and invitation to do so. Long story short: meditate. And if you try, feel unsuccessful and give up before meditative mastery, you aren't steadfast enough to be successful anyway so who cares what tactics you use?...I'm just sayin. 

 

So many of us desire an abundance of happiness, success, prosperity, health, love and freedom but most of us won't take the time to do the inner work...If you truly want to be successful, begin with your mind. As Muhammad Ali famously said, "I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was."  After all, if you can believe it, you can achieve it, right?

 

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