We have two systems of thought. We have the System 1, which is your automatic, unconscious, immediate thoughts and impulses that come up from your body that usually your brain is saying, “Hey dude, we’ve thought through this before,” or “Hey dude, we’re trying to protect you.” It’s running at a baseline easy energetic level.
Part of becoming a more mature, conscious, enlightened person is to better take control of our System 2, which is the conscious dashboard on our mind, our ability to more directly work, control, generate, and create our own thoughts and behaviors in the moment, not relying too much on just the things that come up for us.
But the people who achieve the peak amounts of success, the highest performers in the world have said, “You know what, I need to discipline my mind to support me even when it comes up with an automatic immediate thoughts, I want those to be positive, buoyant, confident, and strong, something that leads me to healthy decisions for my life not just things that protect me.”
So, I think we have to learn how to do that. One of the simple ways to do that is this framework to understand how thoughts develop into strong and automatic thoughts in our lives.
RWID – Relative Weight of Importance and Duration
People who often have negative recurring thoughts and feelings in their life, the reason those keep coming up is because at some point in their life or continually, they are giving those thoughts, the negative ones, more attention than necessarily any other thoughts.
We can give positive thinking, positive questions, and positive approaches to life a lot of importance in our life and a lot of focus. Focus on them and give a lot of duration to them over a period of time and they get sealed in the brain as well, and now the brain says that’s easy, and automatically thinks about positive things.
Leveraging RWID Helped (Attention, Duration, Sensation)
The first thing you have to do, in order to improve your mind is to take total control of your attention and notice: where are your thoughts right now?
First awareness, understanding, and the consciousness to what’s going on, but then the ability now to be self-directed to choose what we want to focus on. So first we’re attentive to it and then redirect it.
Visualizing that positive thing and assigning a high amount of importance and duration to it. Meaning, making that thing important to us by giving it a sensation — that’s how you make it important. You feel that thing. You sense it. You sense what your next step would be. You sense how it would feel if the outcome would be better. How would it feel emotionally, psychologically, spiritually for that thing? Allow it to have a lot of emotion. Pay attention to it with your eyes closed. You see that thing, you feel it and sense a different step, you know what you’re going to do, you pay attention to it and you keep focusing on that over a period of minutes.
How to Reprogram My Mind
Create a sheet of two very simple things. Write five questions down that you’re going to ask yourself three or four times a day. Five questions that are positive for yourself that you’re going to ask everyday.
- What can I feel incredibly grateful for right now?
- How could I surprise or flirt with somebody right now?
- How could I have fun right now?
- How could I demonstrate love or excellence right now?
The second thing on the sheet of things you can do is to come up with three words that describe your ideal self.
- Present
- Excited
- Bold
Last thought, our unconscious and our mind is incredibly programmed not just by thought, which is what I’ve been talking about –Relative Weight of Importance and Duration– focusing our attention on what questions we would ask ourselves, what positive alternatives can we create for ourselves? What labels can we create for ourselves to support us? But our mind is also incredibly conditioned by action, behavior.
Your actions condition your mind as much as your recurring thoughts condition your mind. So be a person of good positive thinking. Be a person of good positive action and suddenly, one day you’ll wake up and be like, “I feel amazing, extraordinary, positive.” And that’s what it feels like to live The Charged Life.
* Source: Brendon Burchard – How to Reprogram Your Mind for Positive Thinking