How to Control Your Mind and Change Your Life

You are the creator of your own version of reality. Decades of psychological research prove beyond doubt that how you think controls how you behave and how you behave creates your life. Your mood dictates how you feel about every situation and every person that you encounter in your life. Your mood dictates how you react to every perceived opportunity, threat, compliment or insult. And, unfortunately, at this moment in time, you are incapable of controlling your own mood because it is automatically dictated by your subconscious mind. And the bad news is that, left to its own devices, your subconscious mind will always focus on what a psychologist would call your “stored knowledge” – everything that you learned about how the world works and, most importantly, everything that you learned about yourself – way back during your formative years. In other words, your life today is entirely dictated by things that happened to you or for you years or decades ago.

All the way back to the 1930s, research has consistently proven that normal people are incapable of paying attention to what is going on right here right now. Sure, normal people really think that they know what’s going on, but they see everything through a fog of formative years programming. Yes, normal people really to think that they’re taking real action when, in fact, they are merely automatically reacting to how their subconscious interprets current events. And that interpretation is based on preconceived notions that are way past their sell-by date. Consider this for just a moment. If you knew how to act rather than react, would you get upset by something that will mean nothing tomorrow? Would you lose your temper with your kids and make matters worse? Would you annoy your boss who holds your career in the palm of his or her hand? Would you even get annoyed when someone pulls out in front of you in rush hour traffic?

More importantly, would you deliberately sabotage yourself with stupid and useless thoughts that you feel inadequate? Would you deliberately let an opportunity slip because you think that you’re shy? Would you collapse into a nervous mess when you’re called upon to make a presentation? Would you be lazy? Would you be stressed out? Would you crumple under pressure? None of these things make an ounce of sense – and yet that is where most of us find ourselves most of the time – no wonder the World Health Organization believes that stress will be the biggest killer of the 21st century.

Normal people – and that’s all of us to a greater or lesser extent – are completely out of control. If you’re not happy with yourself or your life, if there’s something that you would like to change, if you’d like to achieve more or be more relaxed, it has nothing to do with what is actually happening to you or for you – it has everything to do with a subconscious mind that is out of control. You might wish for or want for better times, greater things to happen, to be calmer, more assertive, more attractive or even have more money. But you know from bitter experience that life doesn’t work that way, that you’re not courageous enough or brave enough to take the leap. You’re wrong, you only think that life is what it is, that you’ve got to work hard to be a success, that certain things are beyond you. And those useless thoughts that tie you down and hold you back have nothing to do with real reality – they are a figment of a subconscious mind that’s lost in a past long gone.

You can’t control your life – nobody can. But you can greatly influence the course of your life if you take control of the one and only thing in life over which you can have absolute and total control – your own state of mind. You’ve got to drag (sometimes kicking and screaming) your subconscious mind away from its default obsession with the past. You’ve got to relearn how to pay attention to the reality of the here and now – something that you could do effortlessly as a child. You’ve got to consciously and deliberately set out to train your mind to come to its senses. A small commitment – perhaps only a few minutes a day on your part – will change your life utterly. Those few minutes each day need to be spent in relearning how to pay attention to what your five senses are actually telling you – without your warped subconscious mind putting its own irrelevant spin on things.

If you actually do go to the trouble of relearning how to be present – if you do actually bother to turn up to your own life – you will take control of your mind and create a reality based on who you really are, what you really feel, what you really want and what you can really achieve.