We often give little thought to how we’re thinking even though we get involved in what we are thinking.

Your rational mind knows that much of the time you are just using your imagination, but somehow you still believe it as true. Becoming aware of how you are thinking is skill that will change your life and understanding how your subconscious thought patterns influence whether your life is easy or like swimming through treacle will give you the skills to shape your future exactly how you would like it to be.

Every time you think and talk you are also giving your subconscious mind instructions on how to act whilst programming the filters that allow in or block out information.

If you think in a negative way, your subconscious brain is taking instruction, for example, if you think in terms of ‘I don’t know how to …’ or ‘I can’t because’ or ‘I will never …’ you are basically telling yourself not to even bother trying because you have already decided it’s not possible, therefore it is a self fulfilling prophecy.

What if you swapped every one of those statements around into ‘I need to find out how to …’ or ‘how can I ..’ or ‘One day I will …’ ?

Immediately you have given your brain a positive instruction that you want to know the answers to those questions or set an intention for the future, you’ve given your amazingly powerful super conscious something it can do and it will make you happy.

What about self sabotaging statements like ‘I have to make sacrifices’?  It could be seen as positive on the surface, but if you tell yourself and believe you are making a sacrifice or giving something up, you are operating in a negative context that reveal more about your subconscious thought patterns than you may be aware.  Sacrifice and giving things up creates a resentment that you don’t need in your subconscious, maybe not immediately, but what you do want will override it at some point or another.

Dieting is a great example of this, people who yoyo diet typically focus on what they can’t have, they focus on the foods they really enjoy that they have to ‘give up’, inevitably falling off the wagon and bouncing back to a former unwanted weight when they start eating those things again.

Smoking is another example, people who lapse think of it in terms of ‘giving up’, people who stop permanently think in terms of stopping, not giving up.

In both cases focusing on what you have to gain – confidence, health and vitality and imaging yourself as you want to be and will be when you’ve achieved your goals is far more likely to give you the success you’re looking for.

But there is a more sinister undercurrent to the negative introspecting about the past and that’s depression.  Focusing on what you can’t have or what you had in the past that you can no longer have are typical thought patterns that lead to depression.

This is why it is so important to understand the consequences of how you are thinking, not just get involved in what you are thinking and remember to switch thoughts around into positive instruction for your superconscious of what you want.