Posts Tagged ‘positive thinking’

Wouldn’t it be much better to pay attention to possibilities rather than focusing on deficits? What could be and what is rather than what is not?

Your mind uses thoughts to create the way in which you interact with reality. Your thoughts can be used to build or destroy. They are powerful.

People from all areas of life who are ready to acknowledge that life involves problems and are willing and ready to get busy to do the hard work collaborate with me to help create solutions and permanent positive change. Working together, my clients learn to recognize their thoughts or pictures they are making as a powerful force for change and how to use them to create the future they desire. The kids I work with are especially quick to get this technique and use it to their advantage.

Acknowledge the storm
Your mind can be like a wild, out of control storm. It will do what it has rehearsed or has always done which is often not what you intend. If you are spending a lot of your energy just trying to control the storm, how much does that energy really benefit you overall? How can you change the comforting pattern of doing (or thinking) the same thing over and over again? (Hint: you can’t.)

The mind—our monkey mind, as one trainer calls it—jumps all over the place. One thought leads to another and soon we’ve forgotten our original goal. The question is, how do we tame the mind? One way is to develop possibility thinking. I know, I know. Many of us have gone to every workshop or Tony Robbins training, or read every book or watched the Secret many times, and still we think we haven’t been able to control our thinking.

All the information learned from these sources is helpful, however, if you haven’t gotten your life under control or in a place that is suitable or comfortable to you, it may be that you have had a lot of negative circumstances or situations in life that haven’t been resolved. If you have taken one or two seminars or trainings in positive thinking and 30 years of anxiety or depression or trauma, what do you think is going to win? What is your brain paying attention to—the superhighway of negativity or the one-day of positive training?

In working with individuals or in teams via my workshops, I always discover that folks wouldn’t even be seeking me out if they were able to consciously change their thinking or behaviors. And also with advances in neuroscience, we know we have to change the negative superhighway that is actually now observed and recorded in the brain.

There are many factors that prevent people from achieving their full potential. Fear is the biggest deterrent I see. It comes in many shapes, forms, and sizes. Fear paralyzes and destroys. It can creep into the deepest core of human potential and freeze creativity. Then it can generalize and get rooted in and through thoughts and action.

It is my life’s purpose to help as many people as I can to embrace change. The current wisdom truly is all we are is changing. By embracing personal growth and making life a true adventure offers an awakening of your full and total potential. Getting unstuck from anything negative and moving towards and bright exciting future by shaking old beliefs loose to develop your unique self is empowering.

Ask yourself , how would your life improve if you could focus on what you want? What is your higher purpose? The only limits I see are if you are committed to staying stuck in your old thoughts and beliefs and thus patterns. There are many ways to change. You can start by realizing you are far more than you think you are and may have been led to believe.

Ready to move forward?

Is it really possible to change how we think? There are so many self-help books out there telling us we can alter our thoughts to change our brains. I have many friends and clients that buy and read every self-help book there is but they still can’t seem to change their lives. They have done everything and yet nothing seems to work to undo years of negative thought patterns.

Many of you know that I have dedicated my life to finding ways to solve the problem of anxiety and depression. In the ’60s and ‘70s there wasn’t much help for these symptoms and often doctors thought you were crazy if you exhibited symptoms of anxiety. I was personally treated terribly by friends, family, doctors, teachers and therapists who all thought they were helping. As I look back on it, my condition was not really understood, so everyone thought I was making it up. I hear it in my office today from many clients who have family and spouses that think they are making it up, that panic and anxiety are not real. But, these are real conditions with real symptoms that stop people from having full and rich lives.

So, can you change the way you think? Can you really change automatic negative thoughts?

Understanding more about your brain/body connection can be helpful. You are born with a fight or flight mechanism that allow us to protect ourselves in dangerous situations. When a person senses danger, the body prepares itself to either fight (defend itself) or flee (run away from the situation). The body’s fight or flight mechanism causes the heart rate to increase, the eyes to dilate, and the body to prepare itself for a dangerous situation. Even though these effects are intended to be a good thing, sometimes the body misunderstands a situation and believes that there is danger when in reality there is not (e.g., taking a test, giving a speech, meeting someone for the first time).

The part of the brain that triggers fight or flight is called the amygdala. The amygdala is trained to remember the thing or event that triggered the fight or flight mechanism (the test or speech). This part of your brain is keeping track of all things that might cue danger. You can see how this can cause much unnecessary anxiety. The brain has to be retrained to stop reacting in flight or flight to something that is not actually dangerous.

Part of successful retraining includes using guided imagery, hypnosis, NLP, HNRI, Brainspotting or EMDR. Finding a personal development coach that is trained in the some or all of these therapies is critical to success, too.

Change the way you think to positively affect your life!