Master Your Thoughts to Master Your Life

One may ask, ‘how do my thoughts influence my life?’ well my friends sit back and listen up. An Individual’s thoughts will influence how they feel about a specific event or task, which will lead to impacting your behaviour.
                                   Thoughts --> Feelings --> Behaviour
If you show up to work everyday and think to yourself, ‘I can’t stand coming here anymore’ eventually that thought process over time will be reflected in your behaviour at work. If you want to take control over what goes on in your life, it starts with what happens between your ears (spoiler alert it’s your thoughts).
Avoid Negative Self-Talk
Thoughts are a powerful intangible asset or can be a liability. They have the ability to steer you in the right direction or the wrong one. For example, a daily battle that I experience with negative self-talk is on the fan bike at the gym. About half way through when I get tired, mentally I am trying to rationalize why I should stop putting myself through this agony and just go sit in the sauna instead. But once I’m aware of this negative self-talk I remember, ‘beach season is just around the corner’. If you become aware of your negative self-talk cycle, you will have the opportunity intervene. One study looked at the effectiveness of self-talk interventions with endurance athletes and they found that each intervention group, no matter what the intervention was, increased performance. So you can either listen to me or you can see read that article and see for yourself, it’s just science.
Forgive the past
Dwelling on the past and playing the ‘what if’ game can be a slippery slope. In fact, if you think about that all day long, how much time are you working on bettering your future? So what you made a bad business decision or you forgot to wish your dog a happy birthday (you’re a monster), people make mistakes and the main thing is to learn from those mistakes in order to grow. Unless you want to stay the same person for the rest of your life and make the same mistakes (hopefully not), cut yourself some slack and learn from your past.
Expect nothing appreciate everything
In Gary John Bishop’s book called Unfu*k Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and into Your Life, he talks about expecting nothing from anyone yet appreciating everything you receive. When I read this, it really resonated with me because I feel like a lot of us will expect certain things from others and while most of the time we do not receive it, we are constantly let down. This is a very applicable skill to everyday life and is powerful in regards to your daily life satisfaction. If you expect you’re going to get drafted to the NHL and it doesn’t happen, you’ll be let down (I’m still waiting on the call). When you expect nothing to happen and something does happen (i.e. get drafted) it is an unexpected reward that you will have an appreciation for.