How’s life? Had any positive thoughts lately? You know, the kind that make you feel good! If you have read our earlier posts you will know that what you think, the things you keep in your mind, will determine how you feel: happy or sad, excited or flat, motivated or bored. That’s how simple it really is: think upbeat thoughts and the rest will follow and good things will come to you.
What’s preventing you from doing this all the time? What comes between you and the positive thinking? The things that happen in your life? Your partner was grumpy, your boss yelled at you, the mirror in the bathroom was more honest than you wanted it to be? Come on, you wouldn’t let petty little things like these get you down and allow your thoughts to stray from the path of power, would you? Truth is, there is always stuff going on around us that seems to have been designed to make life harder, more complicated and more of a drudge than it really should be and all this stuff doesn’t make it easy to stay positive and upbeat.
It’s as if we’re riding a bumper car and we know exactly which way to go in order to live a happy and fulfilled life but there are all these other cars that keep bumping into us, and boy, does that make it a challenge to stay on course.
Anything that happens around you (including the bumper cars) is received through your five senses. Your brain takes this information and converts it into a picture for you, adds some sound and feelings and presto… you know what’s going on! Get a taste of it: think about a time when you were extremely happy, a specific event, let’s say you just won the lottery (having won the lottery you are reading this lying in a hammock on your own private tropical island of course): what’s the picture that comes up? Are there any sounds? Any feelings anywhere in your body? You can play this with any event in your life, real or imagined ones and you’ll always get that mix of picture, sound and feeling.
Everyone gets different pictures, sounds and feelings, even about the same events, and everyone’s pictures, sounds and feelings have different qualities, like TV sets whose volume, colour and brightness controls are set differently.
Depending on how the controls are set on your TV you can watch the same movie and yet get a totally different experience of it: add more colour and volume and you’ll get excited, drain the colour, reduce the brightness and turn the volume down and you will barely be able to stifle a yawn.
Besides owning the biggest and most expensive Plasma TV you can imagine you are subscribing to all the cable channels available on the planet as well. This means that in order to focus on the channels that actually count, such as the sports channels for example, you have to get past all the noise such as the history and celebrity drama channels. Your brain is taking care of this for you: it uses filters to narrow down the number of channels you are watching on your TV. This adds to your personalized experience: if you are watching a game on ESPN and your friend is watching the same game on Fox chances are that you will have different versions of the same events to tell the next day over coffee.
Seizing the remote control of your TV gives you the power to direct your experience so you can control the other bumper cars and keep them from throwing you off course: next time something frustrates you grab the remote and adjust the size and location of the picture you get in your mind, the volume and location of the sounds and the size and location of the feeling in your body. While you’re at it change picture from colour to black and white or the other way around. How do you feel now? Has the feeling of frustration changed? If not, keep turning the control buttons: the quality of your experience, negative and positive, is regulated by the way it is represented in your mind. If you change that representation your experience changes too.
Can you see how you can make anything in your life bigger this way? Every sad, upsetting and annoying incident can be more remarkable than it really is. Every happy, exciting and motivating experience can be turned into a more exceptional one too. You really can make a mountain out of a mole hill. You are holding this power in the palm of your hands, or more specifically, right between your ears.
The other element shaping our emotional state is how you hold your body. Ever tried to be sad and depressed while having a grin on your face? Go on, think about something sad and put your biggest smile on, put your shoulders back and look up to the ceiling (or the palm fronds swaying in the soft ocean breeze above you, seeing you have won the lottery…). How sad do you feel? You can’t feel sad while smiling? Well I guess that’s too bad, isn’t it?
Your experience of what happens in your life together with your physiology governs your emotional state, which in turn determines which actions you take and what results you get in your life. Everything you achieve in your life is right within your grasp, so sit up, take that remote control firmly into your hands and use it!
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