THE POWER OF THOUGHT

So how can you use your thoughts to your advantage to take control of your feelings, body and sleep patterns? You are already doing this to some extent. Can you relate to any of these examples?

• You tell yourself that you are not good at maths, so when you come to a maths problem in life, you instantly remind yourself that you are bad at maths and hesitate to answer rather than just getting on and doing the sums.
• You look at the clock at night, calculate how much sleep you are going to get and determine how tired you will feel tomorrow. Consequently when you get up the next day you are tired.
• You look at the clock in the morning, calculate how much sleep you have had and decide how tired you are.
• You wake up feeling tired, you get annoyed that you are tired or down. You then trigger the emotions of feeling down, which only add to the feeling of being tired, thus making you feel even more tired and miserable.
• On Sunday, you feel down about the fact that it is work tomorrow. You are miserable the next day – Monday – as you have already decided that Mondays are depressing.
• When you are confident about speaking in public, what do you tell yourself? Contrast that to when you do not feel confident.
• You complain to yourself in the morning about how tired you are and how much work you have to do. Your morning turns out to be a struggle and funnily enough you feel tired.
• Whenever you try something new your default reaction is ‘I can’t do this’ or ‘I don’t know how to do that’.

Do you get the picture? All these thoughts are examples of how we create our experiences of life with our thoughts on an everyday basis. With these thoughts going on, we are already creating our feelings and experiences. So we can consciously train our minds to create energising, empowering experiences.

I like looking at the field of sports for how our thoughts influence our learning. I attended adult gymnastics for a period and it was amazing to see the learning speeds. There were gymnasts who had been training for a while and reached a plateau while new, inexperienced people would come in and accelerate quite quickly.

I noticed that those who reached their plateau didn’t believe that they could improve any further. I remember one girl in particular, whenever she was pushed to do something new, would instantly say ‘I can’t do it’. Even when she tried to do a new move she did it half-heartedly and expected to fail. She had been at the same ability level for years just maintaining what she could do. I noticed the contrast with newbie gymnasts who just wanted to learn. They weren’t concerned with whether they could or could not do something; they just wanted to learn. Many of them surpassed the experienced girl. Successful people always start with a belief that they can do something; they have an intention to learn and improve.

These examples just hint at the mind’s capabilities. We could have more of these experiences if we let the mind do its job. So we know we are using our thoughts all the time.

Let’s look at what happens when we direct our thoughts and use intentions.