What are the words that you live by? Are they positive or are they negative? Sadly most of us walk around with monkeys on our back, constantly plagued with negative self-talk that makes it extremely challenging to achieving anything successful in life. And did you know that 80% of our thoughts are negative and 95% are set to repeat? Sounds a bit depressing huh? But what if there was a way to start shifting our internal dialogue from negative to positive? Let’s discuss this further …
We see this out in society really don’t we? 98% of the population doing the same things and therefore garnering the same exact results. Typically it’s 2% of the world’s population who are wildly successful. Now some of us may be defeated right there. But what if there was a way to hack the system’s algorithms and be a part of the exclusive 2% Club? It’s all done with our thoughts. Now I’m not a Psychologist so this is in no way advice of any sort, however the best way to start making a change is to start actually noticing our thoughts. Now like Esther Hicks says in “The Secret” – we’re not meant to be monitoring our thoughts 24/7 because that will make you crazy. But start with carrying around a small notebook and pen and every time you have a negative thought, write it down. Keep the notebook for a week and at the end of the week, go back and see not just what those thoughts were, but what was the recurring theme. Was it something along the lines of “I’m so stupid” or “I’m ugly” or “I can’t do anything right”. I can pretty much bet there will be a predominant thought.
So let’s look at that further. The next thing to address is where that thought actually originated. And there’s no need to spend a huge amount of time on this. They “why” isn’t really important. It’s more a case of if we can identify this came from hearing it a lot as a child, then we can start to do the repair and replace work. Most often our internal beliefs come from things that occurred or were said to us at around the age of 5. It’s an exercise worthy of some time to sit down and just recall back to anything that occurred at around that time. And this is not about making anyone else wrong. The thing is that around that age we start to make sense of the world. And how we do that is by making certain words, scenarios and people into stories. Great Uncle John was a creep because he did something in particular. So then he was always a creep to you. When quite possibly he wasn’t, but you made up a story about Great Uncle John that just stuck. You formed a belief and that belief became a habit that becomes pretty challenging to break. When you can pinpoint a time that these beliefs began, you can start to challenge the belief.
The final step (and yeah I get that I am oversimplifying this – this is certainly work I do with my coaching clients over a 3 month period) is to replace the belief with something that will actually serve you. Great Uncle John is a loving and caring relative who is especially interested in how I play football. Start replacing the belief and not only will you show up differently around Great Uncle John, Great Uncle John will also start showing up differently. And once that happens, you create a new story and belief that will stick. You see we all see the world as we are not as it is. We all have rose coloured glasses. And if you don’t believe that, go and look at some accounts of car accidents to see what I mean. Exactly the same incident, two completely different stories of what happened. Are either story wrong? Not at all – they are very true and real in the eyes of the person telling the story. Even stories our parents’ tell us are not necessarily fact. We just grow up accepting that what our parents’ tell us are true because our parents’ are God when we are toddlers.
Start today by replacing simple things in your language. Eliminate words such as can’t, problem, should, need, frustrated, try and suppose. Getting rid of words that don’t serve us or uplift us can be a great starting point when it comes to shifting beliefs and telling new stories. Find uplifting and inspiring and positive words to use in your every day conversations as using those words more often will well and truly lift your energy and therefore emotional state. And our only and most important job in this life, is to be in an emotional state of joy as much as we possibly can. That’s it. Sounds crazy simple but it’s absolutely true. It sounds crazy simplistic but for me, life is either pure joy or a learning opportunity – what is it in this very moment. And that starts with your language. What you tell yourself and how you converse with others. Anything negative you say, replace it with positive words instead and watch how the Law of Attraction will go to work on you.