I have been holding Personal Development Seminars for nearly sixteen years and even now, after all that time working on my own mind, I get out of bed some mornings niggled by stupid thoughts – or the little rascals come hunting for me as the day progresses, when I least expect them. However, I really should expect it because, sadly, the adult human appears to be intent on confounding our desire to do our best during the course of our everyday lives.
Over seven decades of study in the field of psychology tells us that the average mind is bordering on a a hand grenade. And you need look no further than your workplace, your football or golf club or the local paper for all the evidence to validate all that scholarly research – to say nothing of what you’ll find going on on the world stage! Normal crazed people are forever misbehaving themselves and they seem unable to stop it. Of course, if you take all the research as a given, we are unable to stop it – because our minds are pre-programmed to pay previous little attention to reality and plenty of attention to all the nonsense that simply isn’t going on at all. If we go looking for a culprit, the useless thoughts in our head would be the prime suspect.
We are plagued by approximately fifty-thousand random thoughts each day – and that’s while we’re awake, so we’re not even looking at a full twenty four hours. Many of these thoughts are simply silly – like ‘I wish I was out playing golf or lying on a sun-chair than stuck at this boring meeting’ – thinking that you’d like to be somewhere else won’t change the fact of where you are! However, quite a few of our random thoughts are a little more dangerous. I’ve no doubt that you’ve got your own list but here are a couple examples of those toxic thoughts. ‘I’m so shy I’ll never be able to talk to her/him.’ (Delete as appropriate!!) ‘I would like to be more assertive and not let people get the better of me.’ ‘I’m never going to get that job.’ ‘I’ll be happy when I’m three stone lighter.’
The issue with these thoughts is that, first of all, they confirm that, if your life is not-too-bad, that’s good enough. It isn’t! The second problem is that this type of thinking enables (and that’s clearly the wrong word) your subconscious mind to pay attention to all the nonsense that it learned about you when you were young and impressionable. These are the things – and don’t forget that the mind has a habit of tending towards the negative – that you currently believe to be true. They are the things that are holding you back.
Don’t misunderstand me. Your mind will never stop being plagued by useless thoughts – as I’ve said, that’s the way we’ve been built. But you can decide whether or not you will pay this nonsense any attention. You must realize that you have a very real alternative to wasting your time, or your life on all that garbage – you could decide to devote your attention to the reality of the here and now. And, if that reality involves enduring that mind-numbing meeting, you could find that paying more attention to what’s going on might make you that bit more efficient, more productive and happier – the things that most of us search for from life.
