I want to get negative for a moment…

Most of you who have either heard me speak at conferences and seminars or have talked with privately know I talk a lot about mindset and how reframing a situation or circumstance can alter the outcome for us.

The reason for this is simple – one of the things I learned years ago when I started in real estate was to do with the power of the mind to interpret thoughts and ideas, it only deals in the reinforcement of an idea or a thought as a command.
Put simply, the mind doesn’t hear negatives.

This is because most of the information we have in our mind is stored in our subconscious – all our thoughts, feelings and memories are there, and it also stores our perceptions and our beliefs. These all get used to frame our perspective and our mind-set. More or less, it’s our auto-pilot and we operate from it reflexively and without any real conscious thought. We’ve all got some form of subliminal messaging going on constantly – it influences virtually everything we do.

That’s why advertising companies are obsessed with subliminal messages – t</span><span lang=”EN-US”>hese types of messages are also created by advertising agencies for the purpose of reprogramming your unconscious mind.

This is also important when we are setting goals as most of us can have a tendency to set goals from the point of what we don’t want, rather than what we do; making statements such as “I don’t want to smoke/have no money etc” (rather than reframing it as a positive instruction) influences our subliminal messaging – these negative statements get processed by the mind without the word “not” in them because the mind </span>looks for a feeling to focus on, and so builds with the thoughts it’s given so we’re actually pitting our wants against our internal, subconscious programming.

Talking about what you don’t want only brings up the negative feelings that the mind can easily identify – it is not naturally inclined to go looking for the feeling that is desired, so we’ve got to override that by feeding in the thoughts and feelings that we actually DO want.

 A better way to achieve our end is to frame them as positive statements – such as “I will be smoke-free by …” or “my income by (x-date) will be …..”
 Sure, it’s ok to recognise the things we don’t want to continue or to bring into our lives, but it’s what we do after that recognition which is important in the way we attract the things we want, and by creating these “desire statements” we start to program our mind into seeking out the behaviours and feelings which align with our outcome, and this starts to move us in the direction of them.

 Then if we bring in some short affirmations around these desire statements (say, 3 or 4 words at most), we push the subconscious into action and move us in the direction of our goals.

It might seem a little strange and a bit woo-woo when you first start and there can be a degree of discomfort with adjusting your thought patterns away from what you don’t want – especially if you’ve spent a long while thinking on the negative, but it can and does work.

 An easy way to start this process is to ask ourselves “What do I really want?” “What do I think would feel really good for me?”. Compile a list of the things you want to bring into your life; then focus on those and watch how your mind starts to work those into thoughts.

By framing our thoughts around what we want, we start to become more self-aware and as a result, we’re better able to see and manage any negative thought patterns, which moves us further down the path of achieving our ideal outcome.