We hear a lot of talk about positive thought and it often seems the message that comes across is “think positive and your life will be all wonderful and great”. I am a big fan of thinking positively but I do not believe that thinking positive alone has too great an impact on the quality of one’s life. The reason I say this is because I do not think it is possible for positive thought to be sustainable as a mindset without gaining a true understanding of the deeper beliefs that we hold. We create our lives depending on our dominant beliefs and I believe it is the improving of the quality of our dominant beliefs that improves the quality of our lives.
How do you present yourself to others? When you find yourself conversing about love, career, money, or world views what do you say? Do you look at your relationships and say people can’t be trusted and will eventually do you wrong? How about your career and money? Do you talk about all the reasons you cannot do work you love or that you can never be rich because it doesn’t matter how hard you work there is never enough money to go around? Do you find that you become most passionate when talking about types of people that are wrong and the cause of all the bad in the world? What you say when talking about these kinds of topics is a good indicator of the core beliefs that govern your life.
If you want to bring more happiness and positivity into your life it takes evaluating these core beliefs to determine how you developed them and how to change them if they are holding you back. Usually if your beliefs revolve around feelings of lack, fear, judgment, envy, and doubt, they are holding you back. So how does one change their beliefs and train their mind? It is much like developing a fitness training program.
First you must make the decision that you want to go into training. Your willingness is crucial to make change of any kind happen. Then you must decide the kind of program you want to engage in. Do you want to hire a trainer and go into it full steam or do you want to develop your own program and have more control in choosing the pace? Be honest with yourself about how self-disciplined you are. Are you the person who won’t work out unless you go to the gym or do you make your mind up you are going to work out at a certain time doing certain exercises and keep like clockwork to your schedule?
Either way changing your beliefs is going to require doing exercises on your own because it is the repetition of replacing old harmful beliefs with new helpful ones that makes the shift happen. Finding a life coach, therapist, or counselor (trainer) will be helpful to get you in touch with the beliefs that you hold and evaluating whether they help or hinder your happiness. They will also be helpful in keeping you accountable for doing the necessary exercises at home because they will ask you to talk about the work you are doing out of session when you meet.
The exercises that help change your beliefs include: Saying affirmations, visualizing, educating yourself, and learning thought replacement strategies. I will go through each of these individually.
Saying Affirmations: Affirmations are a statement you make that uses positive language in the present tense that states what you want to be true for yourself. Once you identify the belief you want to work on changing you can develop affirmations to help you replace that belief. Affirmations are something you want to say every day at least once if not more. They are to be read out loud so your whole body can vibrate and resonate in the words you want to become your internal truth. A quick search for affirmations on Google will provide you plenty of examples to help get you started. Some examples of affirmations include:
“Every day I am becoming more aware of what I prioritize and tend to focus on. I prioritize my goals. I focus on all I have to value”
“Only I choose what is true for me. From now on I release any belief that is toxic or dishonoring in any way”
“I am increasingly confident in my ability to create the life I desire”
“I am creating my life according to my dominant beliefs; and I am improving the quality of those beliefs”
Visualizing: We all visualize all the time. That mental movie you play in your head when you plan out a conversation you want to have with someone or activities you plan on engaging in at some point in the future, are visualizations. They are actually quite powerful. We know from science that the same regions of our brain will fire when we think about an event happening as when we actually experience the event. So when you are upset with your partner and you are playing over in your head the argument you are going to have when you see them later, that actually causes your body and mind to respond as if you are having that argument. This causes those negative vibrations to circulate through your body and sets you up to hold on to that negativity and most likely argue with your partner later when you see them. Think about the idea of the self-fulfilling prophecy, what you think it shall become. This is the heart of visualizing. So if you instead play that movie in your head to show what you want to happen in your life, you fill your mind and body with those positive vibrations and set in motion your creative power to bring your visualizations to reality.
You can and will do this both consciously and unconsciously throughout the day. However, taking time to quite yourself and do focused visualizations will allow you to be detailed and purposeful in developing a clear mental picture of who you will be and what life will be like with your new, helpful beliefs.
Educating Yourself: Living in the technological era we have access to vast resources that provide volumes of information to supplement our self-improvement efforts. I watch youtube video’s all the time and have yet to run out of informational videos on topic’s of which I am interested. I find books for pretty cheap on any subject I am interested on Amazon. Just using a search engine like Google or Bing on a topic will lead you in the direction of finding information. The key is to understand everything you see/read on the internet is not necessarily true. But you can usually find out how credible a resource is by doing another search about the author or organization. I highly recommend checking out some videos or purchasing some books on topics such as: The Power of Thoughts, the Law of Attraction, Prosperity Consciousness, etc.
Learning Thought Replacement Strategies: A big part of changing your thought processes is learning to catch old unwanted thought processes in action and being able to stop and replace them. It requires some discipline to raise your awareness so that you become effective at stopping these thoughts so be gentle on yourself if it takes some time to develop this skill. Be aware that it is a skill and like any other skill takes practice to develop. The idea is that whenever you notice you are thinking unhelpful thoughts, stop and tell yourself “thank you thought for your concern but you are not helpful and I dismiss you”. Then immediately reframe the thought. If you were thinking “I am too unqualified to get the job” say instead “ I have many strengths that make me a great candidate and I can learn anything I need to once I have the job” Or something like that. Another strategy is to think of your thoughts like a movie that is playing. When you find you’re having a negative thought visualize taking a scissors to the movie reel and cutting out that negative bit and then play the movie without it. Working with a counselor or therapist can be very beneficial to gain assistance in learning to replace negative thoughts.
Now that I have emphasized the importance of evaluating your beliefs and training your mind to change your beliefs to better suit your desire for a happy and healthy life, I would like to say a word about positive thinking. By all means think positive! It is good for you to think positive thoughts and will make you feel good. My point is that to be able to sustain having a happy and healthy life your belief system has to support that desire. Your life is your masterpiece. Create a beautiful one!
