Is What You Think – True?

I’ve got bad news.

Your brain – is lazy – but in a good way. It’s efficient. It conserves its resources and wastes no time on stuff it can automate. It’s like the best I.T. department ever and it’s in your head. All of which ought to be a good thing, but if you don’t understand how it’s running things – your brain can pull a fast one on you. And that’s bad news.

There’s hope.

The good news is that you can figure out the rules to the game and start to get the renegade department back under corporate control – and working for you.

Rule #1 – Separate the Situation from Your Thoughts About It

Here’s the deal. We think that our situations cause us to feel things. But between the situation and our feelings about it, there’s a thought. It’s our thinking about situations that causes us to have feelings. That’s important because our feelings drive our actions , and our actions are what create results. If you’re not aware of the thoughts you’re having, you can’t work with them, alter them or control them. So the first order of business is to get in the habit of separating out Facts from your Thoughts. To do this, start free associating, writing down random sentences that come into your mind. Do this for about two minutes. Now go back and circle the things that are facts. Ask yourself – would everyone agree to this sentence? If the answer is no, that’s a thought. It’s not a fact. Do this every day for a month and you’re going to notice something profound. There are not lot of facts floating around in our minds. We’re mostly tossing around opinions. This is good news because facts are really hard to change, but thoughts? Well, let’s just say we have some control over those.

Rule #2- Don’t Just Take What Your Brain Hands You

It’s disappointing, I know, but your brain isn’t actually spending a lot of time picking just the right thought for you in any given situation. Actually, it’s spending almost no time deciding what to think. David Rock, in his book “Your Brain At Work” did a great job hammering home the point that the ideas in our frontal cortex are a limited mix of whatever we thought most recently and whatever is emotionally charged. Basically, all that mind chatter you’ve got going on? It’s just random. These aren’t great truths about who you are. These are a convenient and easy-to-find mix of thoughts that happen to be quick for your brain to grab onto and toss into your conscious. I remember the day I first really got that. I was so angry to think I’d been treating all that negative and frankly, confusing, stuff like it was important. Those ideas in my brain weren’t important. They were just the things I’d thought most recently.

If you’d like to learn more about how to work with your mental chatter and get it singing in tune with your best self, sign up for a free 25-minute session. https://RockYourDayJob.as.me/free

Rule #3 – Follow Ideas Through to the Results Before You Decide to Believe Them.

If we confuse facts with opinions and attribute our feelings to our situations rather than to our thoughts, then we’re ceding control of our actions to our environment. In no way does that put us in the driver’s seat. If I think my boss is making me upset and hurting my feelings, then there is very little I can do about it. But if I acknowledge that it’s my thoughts about my boss that are making me upset, I suddenly have a lot of control. Ergo, it’s to my advantage to start to prove to myself that those thoughts I’m having are the cause of my feelings. Why? Because then I can get control of my feelings and if I do that? Well, then my actions are suddenly under my control and, because actions are what get me results…my results are in play too. A very good place to be.

We also confuse the random thoughts that pop up in situations with logically selected ideas. When I offer up my new idea in a meeting and everyone laughs, my knee jerk response is going to be to tell myself never, never to speak in a meeting again. But if I recognize that never speaking again is just what my brain handed me when people laughed at me, I can start to figure out if that tactic is going to get me the best result. It might be that even though people laughed, they did hear my idea and I might use that in my favor. But if I never get past “don’t speak in a meeting ever again”, then I won’t have any other, better ideas.

So, with any thoughts about subjects that are important, make sure you’re asking yourself if you are looking at a fact, or a thought. If it’s a thought, ask yourself what result this thought will get you and, if you don’t like that result, ask your brain to get busy finding you some better thoughts you can believe.

Now, who’s calling the shots? Not some guy in the Matrix. Not on your watch.

Next Week: How we know thoughts drive feelings.