How Thought Shapes Our Lives

What you think shapes your life. That’s because what you think shapes your behavior, which indirectly controls the way your life unfolds. Thought creates feeling, feeling creates action, action creates the state of our lives.

If you think you’re unlucky, for example, then not only will you not take any chances, but you might also actually miss opportunities that appear. You’ll focus on things that go wrong, and this will make you feel worse about yourself. Usually we do not even realize we are doing this because it’s the subconscious mind in control.

Actually, the only thing really that’s ever wrong is that you think there’s something wrong, because the role that thought plays in our life, it’s like thought shows up as if it’s reality, creates feelings in our body. But it’s only when we act on that feeling that thought becomes a reality.

If you think you’re bad at your job, you won’t speak up in meetings, you’ll keep your head down, and you might even be less prone to power dressing! Here again, our subconscious mind “protects” us from failure by keeping us from doing the risky things that push us forward.

Most personal development interventions work somewhere between feeling and action outcome. So what can you do when you’re feeling a certain way? Well, often what we do is we go into the world around us and we self-medicate. We might self-medicate with overeating, alcohol, other unhealthy behaviors. ‘I’m in a funk today, I’ll have a snack. I’m feeling really anxious, I think I’ll have a drink. I feel like I need to take a breather, I’ll have a smoke.’

And so what we’ll often do is we’ll self-medicate from the outside in, and then we build up strategies, coping strategies if you will, to help us cope, things we do when we need to be okay. Subconscious mind always has a positive intention in this way; it’s trying to make you feel better, feel safe, feel calm, even though the behavior is damaging and unhealthy.

And so almost every behavior that anyone will ever exhibit is because their subconscious mind is working to fulfill a positive intention that they’ve learned as a way of coping. So nobody overeats because they’re blissfully happy. Nobody drinks a bottle of whiskey a day because they’re blissfully happy. Nobody gets stressed and anxious and worried because they’re blissfully happy. Those are all coping mechanisms, coping strategies, that our subconscious mind creates in order to help us to be okay.

In the case of a thought like ‘I’m always unlucky,’ you now know that you’re only unlucky because you think you’re unlucky. Likewise, you’re not afraid of what you think you’re afraid of; you’re afraid of what you think.

You can try to use positive affirmations in order to improve your state. These are statements you repeat to yourself like ‘I’m a successful and positive person.’ Now, the only problem with that as a way of working is, first off, that while doing logical, conscious things makes sense, it’s not how our brain works.

You see, we don’t have that element of control. We don’t have as much control as our model suggests that we do. For the most part, I’ve found that you can make all the plans you like, plan, plan, plan, plan, plan, set goals forevermore. But as soon as emotion creeps in, those plans go out the window.

There’s not a single human being that knows what they’re going to think next. You can’t control your thoughts. Largely, they’re governed by what’s going to happen around you.

But you can change your relationship with thought. And as soon as you change your relationship with thought, your life changes. If the only thing you ever manage to do is change your relationship with thought, you’ll fundamentally change your life.

A Change In Thought can change your life.