Create Change in your life

Do you know what happens when you think about bad negative things? It leads to an unhappy life. If you find yourself doing this, ask yourself just how bad is your life right now? For a lot of people (me included), even when their life isn’t that bad, they still chose to think that it is. Why do you think bad thoughts if there is nothing really bad about your life? Do you realize that you will get what you think about most.

Generating bad depressing thoughts will not get you where you want to be. They will make yourself and your life miserable. What exactly is so bad about having a good time that you chose instead to fill your mind with lots of depressing thoughts?

If the future you are thinking about does not inspire you, motivate you or fill you with excitement, you are thinking the wrong thoughts. Stop this, right now!

If what you are doing isn’t working, stop and do something else.

Why do people waste what could be an amazing life for something that is far far less?

Everything in your life comes from what you think about it. So if you are thinking about things that make you feel unhappy you will lead an unhappy life.

Take a look at your life right now, what have you got to be thankful for? List 5 things that are personal to you that you can be grateful for.

Now how does that list make you feel?

Slightly happier perhaps
A little less grumpy or miserable
Has it put a smile on your face

When you do start feeling low, stop and look around for all the things you can be thankful for.

Don’t dwell on the things that make you unhappy, get up, take a walk. Focus on what you have got and the ways you are going to manifest what is currently missing in your life, if indeed anything is.

admin Positive Thinking Beliefs, change your life, Positive Thinking

If you are on a path to create change in your life, then one of the things you are going to come face to face with is your negative or limiting beliefs. Of course it you don’t have any, then great, but if you do there are many ways to overcome them. A useful technique you might want to employ is called reframing (a NLP term). With reframing rather than ignore the belief altogether (a tough thing to do), you simply look at it from a different perspective. You can either break it down into smaller chunks, look at the strategy and sequence of the belief (explained below), reframe the context, reframe the content or look at the different outcomes that the belief will bring you, there are many ways.

In this article I will look at how you can alter your thinking about the belief by looking at how you represent the belief internally (the strategy and sequence of the belief).

I think the best way to describe this is with a couple of examples.

Take the negative belief ‘I’m too fat’, now this is a very general belief, it doesn’t say much. For instance ‘too fat’ for what exactly, but let’s get to work on it anyway:

Questions you could ask yourself and anyone else who has this belief include; How do you know you are too fat and not slightly overweight? How do you know you are too fat and not just fat? What is the real difference between the two? How will you know when it does not hold true? What will you see, hear and feel? How do you represent ‘too fat’ in your mind? Do you see a picture of someone who is large or a picture of yourself? And what exactly does it mean to be too fat? What are the consequences of being ‘too fat’? What can you not do, how does it restrict your life? Are all fat people ‘too fat’, or just yourself? Is there any example of when someone is fat but not too fat?

What lets you know that it is fat and not large or big? When does ‘big’ become ‘fat’? What is that trigger? What was it that happened that suddenly made you become ‘too fat’? What does this mean for your life? Are there lots of things you can’t do now because you are ‘too fat’, are you now unhappy with yourself because you are ‘too fat’?

Now what exactly is happening here? Well we a not trying to remove the belief, instead provide a different way of looking at it. By asking yourself questions like these you are essentially playing around with reality as you see it, you are able to make suggestions and offer advice to help yourself come up with new ways of looking at the belief / problem.

What about the following belief; ‘I’ll never be able to learn Japanese’.

Wow, never is such a powerful word, so never ever in the future will you be able to learn Japanese, not one word of Japanese for the rest of your life, if I told you a word in Japanese and you repeated it, would the whole negative belief come crashing down around you. What about counting to 10, will you never be able to count to 10 in Japanese? What about if you study counting from 1-10 every day for the next month, can we expect you not to be able to speak the numbers by the end of the month.

Does this just apply to Japanese, what about Chinese or German, is there something special about Japanese, have you ever tried to learn it? Where does belief stem from? How is this represented in your mind? Do you see yourself struggling to converse with 40 Japanese business men in a boardroom, all laughing at your pathetic attempts to speak their language? Or do you see yourself scratching your head reading a language book as you try to make sense of all these complex words? What about a picture of you learning 2 or 3 words a day for the next few weeks, would that be learning Japanese? Would the belief still hold true? How did you arrive at this conclusion? Do you see yourself not ever trying because of it? Have you known other people who have tried and failed which is where this belief comes from? Has there never been one person not born in Japan who has learned the language?

Again do you see what is going on here, we are playing around with the reality of the belief, making suggestions and generally trying to change the way you currently see the belief in a way that will potentially shift your thinking about the belief entirely.

When you need to use the strategy for a negative belief use the following questions to help
shift your thinking:

How did you arrive at this understanding and conclusion?
How do you know that you feel this way?
What lets you know that it is ‘this feeling’ and not ‘this feeling’?
How do you represent this belief?
How will you know if and when it does not hold true?
What comes first? What comes next? How do you code each part of the belief internally?
Are you sure you don’t have this in any other format?

Play around with the reality – Ask questions, make suggestions, offer advice and attempt to link up with other understandings. Have fun with it.

For more information on negative beliefs, check out this site.

admin Mind Beliefs, The mind

We all have an identity, like a persona when we are out and about that defines who we are and how we act. In everyday situations, when we are out and about, or at work, who we believe we are or what we are capable of serves us well most of the time. We normally don’t change our identity, sure we change physical things or what we wear, new hairstyle, new clothes etc, but there are times when we sometimes need to change things on the inside as-well.

Identity only happens in the mind, it is why when you see a person for the first time, you can form an opinion of them or who they are, and this belief can be completely different to how the other person sees themselves. You may think somebody looks confident and self-assured and that they have they life together, but that same person may see themselves as a complete failure, and is quite negative about life.

We define ourselves whether we are consciously aware of it or not by the language we use. We all have beliefs about ourselves, I am a ….He is … They are … This is the way it is for most of us.

Many people don’t believe they can change who they are (at least on the inside). What we believe about ourselves doesn’t have to remain a belief forever. But it frequently does for many people, they are who they are and that is that. If everything is fine in your world and you are happy with your life, great, but if you are not then things need to change.

We live in a world where nothing remains the same, buildings crumble, cliffs erode into the sea, species die out etc. Look at the world we live in today, everything is changing, and at a fast pace, the atmosphere, the weather, society, nothing lasts forever and nothing will and this can include what you believe about yourself. You can change your identity, and it is done simply by the words you use.

Why is it that some people have no problem at all believing all the negative things about themselves but struggle to believe anything positive? Beliefs only exist in your head they are not real and you can change them to serve you better.

For example, most people are aware of the quote “if you think you can, or if you think you can’t you’re right”,

When we form an identity about ourselves, this becomes a frame which will govern all our thoughts, emotions and actions. If the identity does not serve you well then you might want to consider changing it so you can have a more positive identity to work from wherever you may be.

For example when you form beliefs about yourself and you capabilities you might want to consider asking yourself a few of the following questions:

What have you identified with here?
How have you identified with this?
Why have you identified with this?
Does it serve you well?
Does it empower you as a person?

Check out the following beliefs;

‘I am not clever enough to become an accountant.’
‘I am never going to become a public speaker; I am just not that type of person.’
‘I feel that because of who I am this won’t work.’
‘I am fat and destined to remain single forever.’
‘I’ve never done this before and so it is twice as hard for me.’
‘I cannot act; I’ve never done it before.’

How are these people seeing themselves, are they making it easier for themselves or harder? Some of these beliefs will have a real detrimental effect on the person’s life. The words you use are incredibly powerful, however for most people they are just words, but they have such a powerful effect on your mind and therefore your reality that you might want to start choosing them a little more carefully.

‘I am clever enough to become an accountant.’
‘I will become a public speaker, I am determined to do this’
‘I can make a go of this, there is no reason why this will not work.’
‘I may be overweight but I have many other qualities that I can offer someone.’
‘Although I have never done this, I enjoy challenges and I’m confident I’ll find a way’
‘Everybody can act including me, even though this is my first time.’

It is important to dis-associate from any negative self definitions you have about yourself. In life you will be faced with situations where based on the perception you have of yourself, you will either succeed or fail. Make sure you set it up (in your mind at least) that you win each and every time.

admin Mind Beliefs

Do you spend time being negative? Looking at things in your life in a negative way? Do you think negative thoughts about your life and your future life? Do you sometimes feel like just giving up, or giving up on yourself? When I think negatively I don’t think about my goals in a very positive way at all. Negativity causes me to cloud my thoughts in a bad way and think too much about what won’t happen or hasn’t happened in my life. Not a very useful to state to be in, I’m sure you’ll agree.

I mean what’s the point to this?

It is pointless and stupid to do this, all you are doing when you do this is allowing your mind to focus on negative things which of course it will do. The mind will focus on whatever you want it to focus on.

Instead of thinking of all the plans I have and dreams for the future, when I think negatively I immediately lower my sights of what I think is possible for me. Instead I dwell on my limitations, think of my past in a bad way and think that my future will turn out like my past or maybe even worse.

Negative thinking will crush you, it will take your life to exactly the place you don’t want it to go.

Of course it’s easy to talk about negativity but what do we do to get rid of it? After all we all feel down sometimes don’t we? Certain events can trigger off a string of bad thoughts about ourselves. We are human, sometimes we find ourselves at the mercy of our thoughts. But we shouldn’t, we shouldn’t let this happen, we shouldn’t let our thoughts control us like this, it’s useful to remember that when you are on a path of self development, the mind is there for you to use anyway you want. Your mind is capable of taking you to the highest highs; it is also equally capable of taking you to the lowest lows.

Make sure yours doesn’t take you to the latter.

Negative thoughts taken to the extreme can be seriously bad for your health ie suicidal thoughts. What is really happening here? It is you thinking such hopeless thoughts for the future that you don’t perceive that there is anything worth living for. Perhaps you harbor a belief somewhere that you don’t actually deserve to succeed, that you are only worth a miserable existence and that is all you will ever have. Hey! We are all worth more than we already have and everybody deserves a shot at something better. Stop hating yourself and thinking this way.

If this is something you can identify with, what do you do to break out of it?

Negativity is like a poison that can ruin the human spirit and suck the life right out of you. Negativity comes from living in your mind far too much, either in the past or the future and feeling powerless to do anything about it.

There is only now and that’s all there ever will be. If you find yourself thinking negatively take a look around, breathe deeply and realize that none of your negative thinking is real. It only exists in your head. Like beliefs it’s all in your mind.

Too much thinking in itself is not a very good thing to be doing. It is certainly a factor where negativity is concerned; this is certainly something I have found.

Be positive about the path you are on, it may not be easy, however it doesn’t take much to change your life around and one way to help yourself is to stop negative thinking, treat it like a bad habit that you need to quit.

admin Random Beliefs, change your life, Positive Thinking