Your Thoughts Create Your Future

The way you choose to program your brain every day, with the consistent thoughts you think, is what you will most readily do. If you are continually filling your mind with negative self-talk or you allow yourself to constantly focus on the penalties of failure or all the things which could go wrong. You are far more likely to infuse your daily performance with those penalties and mistakes. When you are constantly filling your mind with thoughts of all the things you should not do, you are effectively giving your brain a whole stream of instructions of exactly what it should do. You are instructing your brain to search your environment for information and resources to support all the challenges you want to avoid.

Have you ever decided to buy a new car and for example, you choose to buy a Jeep. Don’t you find it astounding that, all of a sudden everywhere you look all you seem to see are jeeps? What changed? Has everyone all of a sudden gone out and bought Jeeps, just because you made the decision to buy one? No, you have programmed your reticular activating system or RAS to look for and find Jeeps in your environment and that is exactly what it is doing.

Exactly the same thing happens with the constant stream of thoughts, that you fill your brains with every day. You have something similar to a Google search engine in your brain. This RAS (see explanation below) is programmed by your prevalent thoughts and is the info it delivers is based on your most dominant thoughts. It goes about finding info, resources and everything you need to support those thoughts. Your brain gives you exactly the information you program it to give you.

Our bodies are bombarded with billions of bits of information, but our brains are only able to process a few thousand of these each second. It is for this reason that we have a neural net of nerves at the base of our spine, called our reticular activating system or RAS Our RAS sorts through all the clutter and only allows us to consciously receive and process a few thousand bits of info per second. This is a wonderful system and is very effective at sorting through everything and giving us only what we ask for with our most prevalent thoughts.

The challenge with this system is that it does not know if the thoughts you are thinking are positive thoughts, because you want info or resources related to that subject. Or whether the thoughts you are constantly thinking, are negative thoughts about something you want to avoid at all costs. Our RAS is just like a Google search, the only difference is that your RAS is programmed by your predominant thoughts and with a Google search, you get to choose the item you want to search for, by typing the search on your keyboard.

If you type stink bomb into a Google search, it is extremely unlikely that Google will supply information on all the sweetest smelling perfumes available. Your brain is the same, if you are constantly programing your RAS with negative thoughts about everything that could go wrong or you constantly focus on the penalties of failure. You can never expect your brain, your internal search engine or RAS to search your environment for resources and opportunities to support success? Your brain will be giving you exactly what you are asking for, namely info and resources to support challenge and failure.

The secret to learn to program your brain correctly is to consciously think thoughts about exactly what you want, rather than thoughts about the things you want to avoid. Concentrate your thoughts around telling your brain what you want. Avoid thinking about or concentrating on what you don’t want or on what you should not do.

It is for this reason that when you set goals, you must ensure that they do not contain any negative sentiments. For example if someone wants to lose weight, they must not state their goal in the negative as “I want to lose 5 Kg” They must rather identify their perfect weight and then state this as their goal “I come alive at 95” fo example. This positive statement allows your mind to be positively programmed, so that you look for ways to reach 95 Kg, rather than negatively looking for ways to lose something.

Your brain cannot focus on a double negative or an idea in reverse. Losing weight reminds the brain about what you want to avoid or lose and stores a self-image of overweight, rather than a picture of what you will look like at your ideal weight. Your brain works best, when you have the image of what you want. Focusing on the Kg’s of fat you want to lose creates a negative picture in your mind. Whereas giving your brain a positive picture to focus on allows your brain to figure out a way to deliver that image to you. Stop looking at your life through the rear-view mirror, always looking for what is wrong and must be changed. Rather focus on the picture of what you want and where you want to go.

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za