think happy thoughts. think happy thoughts. think happy thoughts...

life builds on itself. every day - if I'm doing it right - I learn something to help me grow from yesterday and the things I was trying to figure out. I feel good that today was one of those days. I got some solid answers about how to line up tasks and really saw everything working out for the best. And I see 2 more A's (or even A+'es) being added on to my repertoire...

Yesterday was one of those days too actually. The teaching at fellowship was very thought provoking and really rang true for my life. I can really see some concrete solutions to improving the quality of my 'lifespace' (a term I learned this week in Managing Change and Transitions).

So back to today! We were studying Coping Skills related to adapting to change and transition and the teacher mentioned a study she had seen about the internal monologue we have as we go through our day. Well you know that I pretty strongly believe that our life is formed in large part by our thoughts. So apparently there's this study that found that 90% of the thoughts we have in a given day about ourself, about the world around us and the impact we can have on it are NEGATIVE THOUGHTS. 90%. Dude. So pretend you have 500 thoughts a day. That's 450 negative thoughts. 50 positive (or just neutral analytical thougts every day. SJ, you mentioned the blue book. Those 450 negative thoughts imprison you inside a pattern of perception of yourself. Those 450 negative thoughts defeat you because you don't even try things you want to try, since those thoughts have convinced you that there's no point. You could never achieve that.

And actually it's controversial. From a very cursory bit of research I note that the average person has between 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts a day depending on if they are a 'deep thinker' or a writer. I daresay many of those thoughts are barely formed, some wordlessly made of images, some may be related to involuntary biological functions.

So say you had 11,000+ negative thoughts in a day. Some of those are angry thoughts. Some of those are thoughts about past failure. You are saying 11,000 nasty things about yourself every day. That's like 11,000 people each saying something crappy to you.

What would happen if you could train yourself to turn those all into positive thoughts? Oh my God. Just imagine how many things you would no longer be afraid to try? Just imagine how quickly your self esteem would soar into the heavens? Of course you know you can do that. There are techniques piling up out there on just how to do that. But you don't really need to spend money to learn them. Just have the courage to tell yourself to stop thinking that - and I mean this concretely, that for every bit of 'stinkin thinkin' you stop and correct it with a positive. Yeah. Replace it. Dude, imagine the things we can get done?