Supercoach - Michael Neill [37]
At our best, we all handle life remarkably well. We know what to do and tend to do it when it needs to be done. We follow our common sense and our wisdom and just naturally make the best decisions we can based on the information we have. But unfortunately, we don’t always live life at our best. In fact, for many people the times spent in the comfort and care of their own wisdom and well-being seem far too few and far between.
What begins to give you control of this process, turning you from an apparent victim of circumstances back into the creator that you truly are?
Here’s a corollary to the secret of emotional well-being:
Your day doesn’t create your mood;
your mood creates your day.
When your mood is low, the world looks bleak; when your mood is high, you feel as if you can take over the world.
When your mood is high, your partner is the most wonderful person in the world; when your mood is low, they’re a complete bastard.
The difference is, as always, not in the world, but inside you. And a deeper understanding of how it’s being created will give you a whole lot more options about what to do about it.
Why Not Just “Think Positive”?
“The quality of the emotion equals
the quality of the thought.”
— Roger Mills
Since your emotions are a direct response to your thoughts, logic suggests that the only thing that will change them is to change your thoughts. So why not just think positive all day long, carefully weeding out all the negative thoughts until your garden of positivity is lush and you can live happily ever after?
Well, first off, have you ever actually tried that?
There is a famous episode of the television program I Love Lucy where Lucy Ricardo gets a job working on the production line at a chocolate factory. She’s supposed to wrap each chocolate as it passes by, but once one gets by her and she tries to catch up, all the other chocolates start to pile up until she and the factory are a big gooey mess.
That’s what usually happens when we try too hard to monitor the activity inside our heads. It all goes swimmingly until one thought gets by and then everything goes to hell.
This is why I’ve always liked the expression “train of thought,” because it so accurately describes the way each thought that passes through our head invites us to travel with it. One thought of a childhood friend can lead you on a pleasant journey all the way back down through your youth; one thought about an argument with a loved one can carry you into paroxysms of rage or daydreams of escaping into the arms of another.
Yet our thoughts are simply internal conversations and mental movies that have no power to impact our lives until we charge them up by deciding they’re important and real. And if we “empower” the wrong thoughts, making our negative fantasies seem more realistic than our external reality, it’s like boarding a train to a destination we have no desire to actually reach.
That’s why the important thing to realize about your thinking, particularly your “unhappy” thinking, is this:
It’s almost never the 1st thought that hurts—
it’s the 5th, or 50th, or even 500th that inevitably
comes when you follow a negative train of thought on
its rambling journey to destinations unknown.
This raises an important question: if you’re never quite sure where a train of thought will lead you, how do you know which thoughts to engage with and which to let go?
The answer lies not in our thoughts but in our feelings. When you’re feeling good (not “high” but happy, loving, comfortable, easy, well, etc.), that means your thinking is healthy and will probably take you in positive directions. When you’re feeling bad (angry, frustrated, stressed-out, uncomfortable, unwell, and so on), chances are that your thinking is unproductive and whichever thought you might engage with will lead you somewhere