Are you thinking right?
Within your body you have seven octillion atoms that merge together to create the 3 billion base pairs of DNA that make you uniquely you. These pairs of DNA have built you into a truly magnificent marvel of science.
They have laid the foundation for a structural system of 206 bones and 230 movable joints. Around these bones flows a network of 100,000 miles of vessels that feed blood, oxygen and nutrients to the 650 muscles that enable movement. Around these muscles runs nearly 90,000 miles of nerves. Feeding information into these nerves, you have eyes capable of distinguishing more than 10 million colors, a nose that can remember more than 50,000 scents, and ears that detect changes in the pressure waves of air by moving less than a billionth of an inch so that you can hear.
You are truly a marvel of science. However, for all of the wondrous things that your body does, by far, the most fantastic and incredible aspect of you floats between your ears. A three pound organ that if it were a computer, could perform 38 thousand-trillion operations per second. By comparison, the world’s most powerful supercomputer can manage only .002% of that.
Through your mind will bounce roughly 60,000 thoughts each and every day. Over time, these thoughts will come to define every aspect of who you will become, what you will pursue and what you will avoid.
More than 2,000 years ago, Gautama Buddha, the wise sage whose teaching would later form the Buddhist religion said,
“What you think, you become.”
Your thoughts are the most powerful thing that you control. They will define every aspect of your life. Sadly, most people never accept responsibility for controlling their thoughts, they allow them to be random; some positive, some negative, some empowering and some depowering. These random thoughts do little other than confine a person to a life of mediocrity.
Why are your thoughts so powerful?
To answer this almighty question, you have to understand a little bit about how your mind is built. There are two aspects of your mind that play a critical role in your success. Understanding how they work, and most importantly how to leverage them, will make an incredible difference in the life you build for yourself.
First is your conscious mind. It is the part of the mind you are most familiar with. It is where you live every waking hour. It is the voice you hear when you talk to yourself (you can admit it, you talk to yourself all day long. As long as you aren’t hearing several different little voices up there, you’re all right).
It is in your conscious mind that you make decisions, hundreds upon hundreds of decisions every day. Everything from the clothes you want to wear today to broader things like what you want to do for a living, and if you want to get married and have kids. In your conscious mind you decide what you want to do. Yet far more importantly, you have to decide what you want to think.
In its purest and simplest sense, your conscious mind defines the goals and direction of your life. If the conscious mind didn’t work this way, the human race would never have survived as a species.
The second aspect of your mind is responsible for developing and executing upon the direction given by your conscious mind. It’s called your subconscious mind. Think of it like an architect there to design the blueprint for building your dominant conscious thoughts into reality. Your subconscious mind doesn’t work independently, it is ruled, governed and solely directed based upon your conscious thoughts.
So if you are consistently thinking about something, focusing on it, reflecting upon it, your subconscious mind has no choice but to lock onto that thought and figure out a way to manifest that thought into your reality.
Remember, “What you think, you become.”
This is true regardless of whether you are thinking positive thoughts or negative thoughts. You have within you the power to manifest either into reality.
So here is perhaps the most important question you will ever be asked in your life: Are you thinking right?
Are you thinking about who you really want to be in life? Are you thinking about whereyou want to be in life? Are you thinking about what you really want to accomplish? Are you thinking about what you would really like to learn? Are you thinking about how you can become better in everything that you do? Are you thinking about these things, consistently every day? Have you made these into dominant thoughts that your subconscious mind can lock onto and manifest into your reality?
-OR-
Are you thinking about what makes you mad? Are you thinking about the person who has hurt you? Are you thinking about what you don’t want to do? Are you thinking about all that you lack? Are you thinking about what you don’t like about yourself? Are you thinking about what scares you? Are these the thoughts that linger in your mind? Have you inadvertently allowed the negative thoughts to become dominant?
Over time, whatever you focus on most often will become your reality. More than 150 years ago, the great philosopher Henry David Thoreau said:
“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.”
In life, you don’t get that you deserve, more often, you get what you expect. You get what you think about most often. Positive or negative, our expectations, our thoughts, influence our actions and our actions dictate our outcomes. It is cause and effect.
Steer your life with conscious purpose. Focus your thoughts on what you want instead of what you don’t want. Think over and over the kinds of thoughts you wish to dominate your life.
You have within you, far more power than you give yourself credit for. You have the power to script your life. To guide it in the direction you most want. You have within you everything you need to succeed. It all starts with thinking right.
