Practical ways to change people with your thought
ways to change people with your thought
Does your self-talk ever sound like this? “I can’t do anything right,” or “I’ll probably just fail again, so why bother trying,” or “I’ve done so many bad things in my life that I don’t deserve to succeed.” If so, you’re not alone. Here’s the good news! When you change your thoughts, you change your life.
According to the National Science Foundation, an average person has between 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day. Of those, 80% are negative and 95% are repetitive thoughts. If we repeat those negative thoughts, we’re thinking negative thoughts much more than we’re thinking positive thoughts.
Negative thinking is what holds most people back from achieving any real measure of success in life, because our thoughts create our reality.
If you think you can, you’re right. If you think you can’t, you’re also right. When you believe you’re capable of doing something, you’re much more likely to be successful. When you believe that you can’t do something, you’ll more than likely fail.
The good news is, when you change your thoughts, you can change your reality! The thoughts you choose to focus on will determine how you experience the world.
Become more aware of your thoughts, paying attention to the things you frequently say to yourself. To get started, choose a day and set a timer for every 15 minutes throughout the day. When it goes off, stop whatever you’re doing and briefly jot down what you’ve been thinking for the last 15 minutes. This will help you increase your awareness of your thoughts.
Reframing involves changing your perspective on a given situation to give it a more positive or beneficial meaning to your life. Reframing can be used to help remove limiting beliefs, to help appreciate positive moments that you might otherwise miss, or for letting go of negative thoughts and replacing them with positive ones.
A dramatic example of reframing comes from Victor Frankl’s book, From Death Camp to Existentialism, where he writes about his three years living in four concentration camps, where he survived starvation and torture. He lost his entire family and observed most of his fellow prisoners die. Despite all this, Frankl kept his mind active, planning the lectures he would give after his release, using the material from the death camps to illustrate points he wanted to teach. As a psychiatrist and devoted teacher, his careful and deliberate planning of his future lectures, as well as his optimism, kept his spirit and body alive in horrific conditions. He survived the death camps and went on to realize his vision of using his experiences as a great healer.
Your perception of reality is what creates your reality. The key to changing your reality is to practice realistic optimism by shifting your focus. Tell someone your life story or a life experience as if it were a tragedy, emphasizing all the terrible aspects of that experience.
Now, tell the same story as an uplifting and delightful experience, focusing on all of the positive aspects of that same experience, without denying the facts.
Notice how your perception of the same story changes by shifting your focus. If you’re unhappy with how you see life, shift your focus and it will change your perspective so you can view your life through a different lens.
Whatever you focus on, that’s what you’ll get more of! In order to focus on what you want you must be willing and able to let go of thoughts that keep you focused on what you don’t want. To support you in doing this, limit input from negative people in your life and limit what you read, see and hear in the news since most of it is negative.
Your language or self-talk is a very important part of this process. When you stop saying BUT and replace it with AND, you’re ready to shift your focus. Here’s an example:
I hate my job, BUT I don’t have time to look for a new one.
OR
I hate my job, AND I’m actively seeking new ways of putting my talents to good use.
