With the arrival of this new year I think it’s fitting we start of with some fundamental material.

I’d like to look at a critical aspect of ‘thinking about our thinking’, and that is, thinking about our past. Just like present thinking, the way you interpret the past (even just 2 minutes ago) will impact your life now. The bigger the life event or story, the greater the impact. However, there’s also subtle themes I like my clients to become aware of, and that’s the little thoughts we have about ourselves all day long. These thoughts add up, and because our brain loves consistency….we tend to repeat a lot of the same thoughts and evaluations of what has happened.

Repeating themes or frames of reference that hold us back, or cause our life to progress in the opposite direction of how we want is very common, we have all done it.

Wondering how that’s even possible? Referring to what we know about the impact of worrying, you may  be aware of the negative effect of worrying. In the case of worrying, we are preparing for the worst by practicing with ourselves scenarios imagining an unwanted outcome. What happens when we imagine something, especially with frequency? When we imagine/rehearse/rehash thoughts and ideas, it focuses our mind on those imaginings, and this causes the mind to look for ways to create this goal. In other words, you’ll start to uncover ways you can make it (the thing you keep thinking about – a.k.a. imagining) to happen. You may say, “oh, but this terrible thing I keep thinking about actually did happen, it’s not my imagination”. That it happened in fact may be true, but is it happening in the present moment? Only in your mind, and only if you choose to. Stay with me here. Therefore if you’re thinking about it now, it’s technically a present-moment imagination of a past event. I am saying by repeating your thoughts on the topic, you’re imagining it now, even though it did happen at least once in the past.

Do you want to re-live terrible past events? Failures? Embarrassments? Most of us would say no. Yes, I am a proponent of being willing to fail and deal with life honestly, but re-living the same exact thing over and over is not useful. When you do this, you’ll be seeing things in light of whatever that event was, and potentially recreating it through your thinking patterns. I could go on about this for days, so take my word for it for now. If you don’t evaluate, learn from, or process the emotions of those things passing by, you will (unconsciously) restrict yourself going forward.

So, these daily thoughts are most definitely worth evaluating. Furthermore, all of us have thoughts going on that we don’t consciously realize (unless we think to do so!) This is the “magic”, so to speak, available by using your mind. If you direct yourself to evaluate and pay attention to your thinking, you actually can become conscious where you previously were on autopilot. The best part? You get to choose what to focus on!

Here’s some homework:

What do you say (to yourself or out loud) when you drop/spill/trip/break something? If you’re way more coordinated than me and rarely have that problem, look at errors with work you do. It could be work in your personal time, or work done as employment. The errors could be oversights/forgotten details, or things you knowingly neglected, or things you simply failed at. What do you say to yourself in these moments? Imagine the most recent occurrences, what were you saying about it afterward? Write those statements down. Do not leave out the mean ones because you think I’m going to tell you it’s wrong to think that way, it’s very important to be honest here. You don’t even have to share with anyone, so write like no one is looking!

What did you notice about what your thoughts were on these failures (for lack of a better term)? If you’re human, you’ll probably fall into 1 or 2 categories. You may be hard on yourself and/or you may blame something else – either a person or event.

Whichever the case for you, take a look at those statements and ask “are these statements absolutely the truth?” and furthermore, “do these statements help me focus on what I want to accomplish going forward?” Perhaps you (or someone else) did make a mistake, but what way are you categorizing that mistake? Many times we inadvertently consider a mistake as if it were a personal attribute, rather than an event. We’ve all likely done terrible things, but certainly we aren’t terrible…and that statement alone is merely an opinion!

Take some time on this, do you want to retain all of these thoughts? Cross off the ones you’re willing to discard immediately. For the others, maybe re-work them to not be such an opinion. Write your new re-worked assessment down. Turning something from “I am a total failure at spreadsheets no matter what I do!” into “I have made errors when working with spreadsheets”. This is simply a factual statement and doesn’t say that you’re a failure — which the latter sentences yourself to a lifetime of misery at spreadsheets, by the way. These small things may not be a big deal, but some of them are. They will be things that you are stopping yourself from learning from in many cases. As with anything we learn, go slow, step up gradually to the new way of considering these long held opinions and assessments. You deserve a chance to go after the life you want, what do you want to make the events mean along the way?