Turning Negative Thoughts Into Powerful Tools
Your mind can be your greatest ally or your biggest enemy.
Turning Negative Thoughts Into Powerful Tools
Your mind can be your greatest ally or your biggest enemy. Those thoughts that take place between your ears are what will lead you to success or put you face-first in the dirt. The ability to manage, control, and use what goes on upstairs in a positive way is what separates those who perform to their highest ability from everyone else.
These high performers are often looked at and referred to as special, which they may be, but not in the way that most think they are. The preconceived ideas are that they have no fear, don't feel pain, or are genetically gifted. None of these are actually true. What people are seeing is someone who has learned to manage, control, and use their subconscious thoughts in a way that improves and fuels their performance.
No matter who you are or what you have going on, the constant stream of thoughts and visuals are always going to be there. Some positive, some negative, and some just purely distractions. When not managed, these will cause you to perform well below your capabilities. This subconscious stream is always there but grows loudest leading up to those defining moments. Think back to your wedding day, a job interview, a sporting event, or a big presentation; fear, self-doubt, and distraction were dominating your subconscious, doing their best to keep you from taking a risk or making a change. Remember, your body wants to maintain homeostasis, stay in its comfort zone; taking risks is something to avoid.
Unfortunately, risk is necessary to progress and grow as a person. This makes it a necessity to learn to manage, control, and use that stream of subconscious thoughts and visuals in a productive way.
One of the first things to begin working on is your self-talk. Self-talk is not the stream of thoughts racing through your head; those are thoughts. Self-talk is conscious. You want to learn to talk to yourself in a way that silences those thoughts. For example, when that thought creeps in telling you that you can't, you need to consciously tell yourself, "I can." The conscious self-talk is the first step in managing your thoughts.
Visualization is such a powerful yet underutilized tool. Many people feel like it has no place in their lives and that it is only for the elite. This couldn't be further from the truth. I was first exposed to and learned visualization as an athlete and had amazing results. This led me to explore it in all areas of my life, and I had equally great results. I used these personal experiences to expand my coaching tools and began asking clients to use visualization for weight loss, nutrition changes, and really anything and everything they were looking to accomplish.
There are many ways to go about visualization, and there is no one right way. Just find something that works for you. The key to your visualizations is to make it as real as possible. Incorporate small details into the bigger picture. If you are working towards losing weight, start visualizing what it looks like stepping on the scale and seeing that goal number pop up. What time is it? What does it smell like? Who is there? What will others say? What will you say to yourself? Then work backward: How did you get there? What did the process look like? The more detailed you make it and the more you go through this process, the more you will burn that future success into your mind. Once you can see something happen, the easier it will be to make it happen. Once the 4-minute mile was broken, which was said to be impossible, within the next year, it was achieved over and over again. Use your visualization to allow what you once felt was impossible to become possible.
The last thing I want to touch on is a combination of the two: using the negative subconscious to spark motivation. Typically, your subconscious will be full of past experiences, some real and some imagined. Through your self-talk and visualizations, you can start to build your own story of proving those past experiences wrong. Start to let those memories that have built your subconscious fuel you to go beyond what you once believed you were capable of. This is what the high performers are doing with that constant stream of thoughts that freeze and destroy so many dreams. This is what you can be doing to become the best version of yourself.
