Control Your Thoughts; Place Head In Cloud

Posted: February 15th, 2009 | Author: eetion | Filed under: reflecting, thinking, writing | 18 Comments »

I wanted to take a moment to consider the strategies/things/ideas/tricks which led to more controlled thinking. “More controlled thinking.” I’m not sure exactly how to word it so lets just go with the idea of focusing and keeping our heads in the clouds.

Influencing What We Think About

So, what things can be done to further influence what we think about? That is the question. The reason behind finding out what an further influence what we think about is because what we primarily think about can determine how we feel and else effect the things that we do throughout the day and the decisions we make. I think we can all accept that as true without throwing around any counter-culture or mysticism or religion.

1. Predicting – Target Practice:

Goals:

Goals, by definition, are supposed to stand out. If I review my goals regularly or even semi regularly, the whole idea of reviewing the goal helps to remind myself to keep it a priority in my thoughts. Setting the goal in the first place is the first step. I already know to see the goal as if I’m already there, I can see the start and the end, and I know to work towards the goal automatically while feeling as if I’ve accomplished it already and am living the goal. It’s like the whole “monkey see, monkey do” thing; or maybe the “you are what you think about” or whatever phrase you can come up with.

Looking Back At The Future:

Previously I made a post about this where I said:

One day I sat down and starting writing a journal entry, documenting how my day went and how great a time I was having in my current position. The catch there is that all of this stuff had yet to actually happen. I wasn’t working for the type of company I was writing about, I didn’t do the types of things that I was writing about, and so on. But, I wrote that journal entry down as if I had just got home from the job that I wanted and had done all those things that day. Doing this created the feelings I wanted to feel, the images I wanted to see, and brought my goal closer to me.

It works just like that. You write a review, journal entry, whatever, just as if you had just achieved your goal. You’re writing about how great it feels to have done this and that, and you’re getting into as much detail as you’d like. This little review might take up a couple of pages because it’s very enjoyable to succeed and feel like a winner, so have fun with this one.

2. Morning Prep:

When you wake up for the day, do you normally think about what you’d like to do during that day? Maybe you write out a to-do list, maybe you just visualize your goals or something along those lines. This is a good way to get our thoughts pointing in the right direction right off the bat. If you do NOT do this and start out the day anyway, you might miss a large portion of time where your subconscious could be helping move your focus to your goals.

It’s like when you never notice a certain type of car driving down the road very often until you start to look for it; you’re focus wasn’t there, so your subconscious never helped you notice it.

If you’re the to-do list type, and you get your daily focus from a list, it’s important to remember to do the right things, not everything. For instance, if you see yourself doing 50 items on your to-do list, and none of those items are bringing you any closer to your goals, then you might have just wasted your time. On the other hand, if you do three things today and all three of those things pushed you closer to your goal, you might gather that you’re using your time wisely.

3. Controlling Your Thoughts:

Feelings Check:

If you feel bad, a negative thought probably slipped by your tracking system. One you realize how you feel, you can take a time-out and feed yourself some healthy thoughts and bring your feeling back up to feeling positive. There are lots of ways that you could do this. You might try affirmations, meditation, or even just plain old fashion good music. If you’ve got an army of positive thinkers nearby (lucky you), you could use them. If you’re into NLP and have some positive anchors setup, you could use that.

Nip Negative Thoughts In The Bud

Just the moment when you have a negative thought, you all it out and refute it. Here’s a brief example. Negative thought: I can’t win — reaction: I can and will win – pushing farther: [take a moment to feel like you have already won and you’re living out your goal right now].

Negative Thought Brainstorm

A good opportunity to do this is when you check and notice that your feeling compass is pointing in the wrong direction. Think up all your negative thoughts again and write them down as you remember them. After you’ve written them down, just underneath them, write the adjusted positive thought you would like. This works, and is suggested, because it’s easier to manage big, ugly, shadowy negative thoughts when you put a clear face on them (text). Writing them down unmasks all the shadows and makes the thought more manageable so that you can immediately fix it. This process is like breaking an addictive negative though. Here’s how I usually writ it out:

negative thought: I’m afraid that I wont finish updating the drawings on Monday and I’ll be fired for not completing them in the time allotted.

positive replacement: I will finish the drawings on Monday. I’ve already done most of the hard work anyways, which was identifying what needed to be fixed.

4. Reflecting

Daily reflections help a lot. They help me remember the thoughts that I accepted consciously or blindly throughout the day and remind me where and how those thoughts led me. From there I an change how those past thoughts influence my future ones.

For this part, you could type out on a personal blog, write out a private journal entry, talk to your spouse about the day, chat about the day with a few people from your elite mind group, but the focus should really be reviewing your day, re-discovering all the things that went right, redefining and fixing all the things that went wrong, learning for the future, and feeling thankful for the opportunity. Yah know, all that great kind of stuff.

Physical Activity Is Not Where It’s At

In my experience, actions in and of themselves do not really help push my positive thoughts much. However, positive and negative thoughts do occur during and around actions at those glancing moments where I’m not completely focused on what I’m doing. If you have reached a state where you can consistently and constantly focus on the present action, you are a Zen master. Focusing on the physical activity at hand, without being distracted, is a pleasurable or painful experience and most of us have at least experienced it and know this.

It’s like when someone kicks you in the knee; the before, after, and surrounding thoughts that are reactions to the moment mean nothing in the face of the present where you felt the shock/pain to your knee. In the scheme of positive thinking, though, I can’t say that I’ve ever had a single isolated physical action in and of itself that’s pushed my thinking towards or away from a positive or negative outlook. Physical activity seems like something of a discovery process that we do, and that’s about it.

As I mentioned, where thought comes into play is before and around and after the physical action. Those thoughts are like re-actions that one might choose to have when looking through their own looking glass.

---