The moment you start thinking about any personal problem as a thinking problem, you start changing it. As I was thinking about our thinking and about things that we need to change in order to start doing different thinks and bringing different things into our life (I know I sound like Dr. Seuss:) I came up with an acronym AIDS. That’s right. Easy to remember. You see, there is AIDS and there is “aids”. AIDS means a horrible disease that can destroy life. Yet, we want something that aids us to achieve our goals, to get what we want.
And the truth is that we have problems and we liberate ourselves from our problems by having the same four thinks about things.
A – Attention. Thinks that select things we pay attention to. At any moment our brain selects from a vast ocean of experiences a handful that we pay attention to. If you pay attention to all the bad things – you feel stuck, you feel overwhelmed and stressed and it is difficult to find a solution. When you pay attention to things you have, that you can do, that you want, that you love etc. – you start finding motivation, determination and new solutions.
I – Imagination. A special kind of thinks that create new things. We can spend our time imagining all bad things that may happen and feel bad. And we can imagine other things, which are more pleasant such as our goals, our dreams. We can imagine so many things we can accomplish. And we can imagine so many pleasant, loving things and feel good. When we use our imagination to motivate us, inspire, cheer us up, drive us forward and when we look at tings from different perspective, we start finding solutions and inner strength to implement them.
D- DO – Thinks that make us do things. We can chose to sit and worry and eat comfort food and toss and turn in bed thinking about our problems and how miserable they make us, or we can start studying people who successfully solved the same problem and start doing things they have done in order to reach their goals.
S- Say – Thinks that create voices that say things inside our heads. We can say some pretty nasty things to ourselves or we can become our own best friend and start reminding ourselves about our accomplishment, comfort ourselves, cheer ourselves up and use our inner voices to generate good feelings . Changing the way we talk to ourselves can have a profound impact on our level of confidence and help put ourselves into a mind state that is more positive, productive and more useful for finding even better thinks for even more exciting and useful things.
So at any moment in time you can either have AIDS or aids. You can have something that destroys life or something that aids your life. Most importantly, if you want new things, you have to practice new thinks. And the more you practice new thinks the more you start using your brain to move your life in a new direction, the more you transform yourself from a victim of our own thinks into someone who thinks things through to be more glowing, loving, flowing and free.