A Dollar for Your Thoughts

William “Bud” Hart, of Haverhill, shares “Success Principles”—ideas for living a greater, better and more accomplished life, and building habits that stick. He also coaches clients to incorporate strategies for boosting their mental and physical performance during everyday living.

William “Bud” Hart, of Haverhill, shares “Success Principles”—ideas for living a greater, better and more accomplished life, and building habits that stick. He also coaches clients to incorporate strategies for boosting their mental and physical performance during everyday living.

Recently I had a conversation with a person who was abruptly told they were being let go from a job they had for many years. I spoke with this individual shortly after being told their services were no longer needed and they were not expected to report to work the following day. In that conversation I remember noting how much of this person’s thinking was dwelling on the past, obsessing about mistakes made, battling guilt and worry and constantly focusing on negativity. I remember pointing this out and suggesting a more positive thought process would be helpful for moving on quickly, imagining a great outcome to this event and finding a new job.

Most of us (me included) are often awash with negative thoughts, even ones we think are positive are sometimes riddled with doubt. Research suggests that each day the average person has more than 50,000 conscious thoughts (could be significantly higher for deep thinkers). I’m guessing no one can really pinpoint how many reflections we do have that we are aware of, but the point is we all think a lot of thoughts. And studies have also shown that the human brain is primed to go with negative thinking unless we do something to rework this built in tendency.

According to Rick Hanson, a psychologist, senior fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, the human brain is neurologically primed to label experiences as frightening and threatening. Our brain uses about two-thirds of its neurons to look for bad news. Once it finds negative events and experiences they quickly get stored in memory. In contrast, positive events and experiences usually need to be held in awareness for a dozen or more seconds to transfer from short-term memory buffers to long-term storage.

What this means is none of us need to worry about the fact that we’re having negative thoughts, they’re pretty normal. What we do need to do is whatever it takes to increase our awareness of any and all negative and bogus thoughts and fix them.

All of the greatest thinkers throughout history assure us that our thoughts create our reality. In other words it benefits us tremendously to think consciously to minimize threats, maximize opportunities and utilize all of our resources to achieve this in everything. And we might be far more willing to learn to do this if we employ a game I learned long ago and exercise with my own daily thinking.

I simply practice training myself to be aware of what I think. And I imagine that every positive thought that I have and every negative thought that I can turn around to positive thinking makes me one dollar. In contrast, every hard to shake negative thought that I allow and don’t immediately shake off loses a dollar. Consider that on average I have upwards of 50,000 potential thought opportunities to bank or spend a dollar that can amount to substantial benefit (or deficit) at the end of every day. You might want to try this thought awareness game for yourself.

I pointed this out to the individual I spoke with in hopes it would help. In the words of Pablo Picasso, “Everything you can imagine is real.”

William “Bud” Hart is a certified “Mindset” Coach, Accountability Partner and Business Consultant. Visit Hart Group, www.hartgroupma.com for more on coaching.

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