If you are a reader of my column, you are familiar with my advocacy of habit building and deliberation of routines that lead to fundamental shifts and growth. This is foundational to the belief, ‘we are what we do’!
Today, I am digging a level deeper beyond the deliberation of doing, to the level of our thoughts and subconscious. You would be familiar with the notion that our outer world is a reflection of our inner world. To me, this idea in continuum with the Do-analogy implies that ‘we become what we think (most of the time)’.
For decades, psychologists have worked to understand the functioning of the human mind. Across Freud, Carl Jung, Maslow and may others, a common conclusion has been that in every way, our mental programming, built on context and life experiences, plays a decisive role in the way we think, feel, act and accomplish through life.
Thought patterns
Programming manifests in our thoughts. The problem is that our mind is not always a safe place. Our thoughts often take a gravitational spiral towards self-doubt, self-denial, paranoia and mistrust. The truth is we give a lot of mind-space to what we hate and what we can’t do, when the anti-self reigns inside the head.
Psychiatrist and mindfulness expert, Dr. Daniel Siegel, who coined ‘anti-self’, advocates pause-breaks for deliberate self-reflection, a ‘time-in’, when we can check-in where we are at emotionally, understand the thoughts and choose how to behave and progress. To demonstrate, here are a few foundational interludes of time-in:
Do you believe that you are always moving in the direction of your dominant thoughts? In times of stress, have you ever stopped to assess the thoughts in your head?
In what way have your dominant thoughts attracted people? How about circumstances and situations in you life? Could a different thought have influenced outcome? If you get another chance, what will you replace these thoughts with?
Determine the three important habits or thoughts about yourself and others that you could develop to be more prolific and productive.
In the 2010 sci-fi Hollywood film “Inception”, written and directed by the visionary storyteller Christopher Nolan, the protagonist Cobb is a professional thief who steals information and commits corporate espionage by infiltrating the subconscious. As the plot thickens, he is offered a chance to have his criminal history erased, as payment for the implantation of another person’s idea into a target’s subconscious. This time, Cobb won’t be harvesting an idea, but sowing one. Should he succeed, it will be a new frontier in the art of psychic espionage.
If I just got carried away with the story there, it is because the premise of sowing a new idea to impact a desired outcome is dramatic. For me though, the real-life promise of inception of new, open thoughts into the mind is equally dynamic and empowering.
To infiltrate the mind, we have to know what inhabits it, in the first place. Reflection is an answer. Yet, to me, ‘you can choose another thought’ is advancement over reflection. What I am addressing here is mindful, deliberate thoughts by ceasing the flow of anti-self and sowing new possibilities.
Every time you sense a thought-overload, you pause in a time–in —‘What am I thinking?’ ‘What is that thought doing to me?’— akin to screening the worthiness of a thought loop. By questioning it, you will stop the flow and over time, you will learn to incept a new, curious, open and accepting thought. Dreamlike or lifelike!