*This is an unedited excerpt from my upcoming book, ThinkIT: The Mind Lab. How to Change Thoughts to Change Mindset.
Thoughts + Action = Results
What I’m about to teach you is not rocket science. It’s not positive thinking. It’s not New Age feel good fluff, or a cool slogan like mindset is everything, on a yoga shirt. This is common sense. You’re about to learn a logical process for training your thoughts to start getting what you want and stop getting what you don’t. In other words, this is HOW you change your mindset. I call it brain training, and you’re about to create your very own Mind Lab.
Just like every other muscle in your body, your brain needs training and regular workouts to stay on track and deliver peak performance. But most people are like I was in 2007, with no idea how to control all the conscious and subconscious unhelpful voices in their head. Yes, we all have them, layers and layers of voices telling us all kinds of crazy bs that isn’t true or beneficial to our mental or physical wellbeing. They say humans have on average 60,000-80,000 thoughts a day, that’s a lot of internal voices trying to tell us what to do, what to believe, who to be angry at and why, what to be worried about, how to feel about ourselves etc. It’s a lot.
Even though our brain is a muscle that needs to be worked, shaped, and toned to get desired results, most of us were never taught how to do this. There was PE (physical education) when I was in school, but no ME (mental education), and most of our parents didn’t teach us tools for controlling our thoughts either, so what’s a person to do? If our arms are flabby and we want them toned and buff, we know that going to the gym and lifting weights, or hiring a trainer, and/or changing our diet, will over time, likely result in our desired buff-ness. So, as a rule we know what to do about all the other muscles, how did the most important one get left out of our education? It’s not your fault, we didn’t know better, but moving forward we will.
When first I started trying to learn how to change my thoughts well over a decade ago, I did what most people do… I went out and bought a few books. I started with the ones Oprah recommended (because she is my guru!), the Lousie Hay, Esther Hicks, Eckhart Tolle books on Law of Attraction and the power of our thoughts… and I quickly felt very mentally deficient. I could not understand a thing they were trying to say! To me it seemed like they talked in circles, or in a foreign language, my brain could not comprehend, or translate anything I read into practical application in my life. And no disrespect to any of those amazing thought leaders, they just didn’t speak my language and I needed the concepts broken down in a way I could understand.
I quickly became frustrated because everyone was saying things like, just think positive! Or change your thoughts, change your life. Or positive vibes only. What even is that? The slogans and soundbite quotes were endless, but where was the HOW? I kept thinking, HOW do I think positive? Does it mean I just go around all day saying, “You’re fine. Everything’s fine.” Because that wasn’t working, it hadn’t solved any of my problems or changed how I felt. It was like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound, a surface solution at best.
I wanted REAL answers, real solutions, I wanted to know exactly what to do and when, so that things in my life would begin to change. And so, I hacked the system. I figured out how our thoughts work on my own, by breaking down the process into simple incremental, tangible steps that anyone can understand and use to get results. I tested them, coached them, lived them, and tracked their results both for myself and with my clients. My goal has always been to keep this simple, applicable and results driven. Even a child can use these tools. I’ve taught all three of my children starting at a very young age, how to talk to themselves and how to change their thoughts as they’ve gotten older, and I’ve witnessed the power it has given them.
And before your inner skeptic kicks in, let me say that I’m confident you’ve already used ThinkIT throughout your life to get things you’ve wanted in the past. Unknowingly of course, most people don’t understand the process they’ve unconsciously gone through to achieve a goal, or get a desired outcome, therefore they struggle to replicate it. But when we stop to analyze any past success, we will see that it always started with a thought, also known as an idea. Now you’ll have the formula, which you can cut and paste to get anything you want, or onto any thought you don’t want.
Our thoughts are the genesis of all action, and action delivers results. They are continuously creating future outcomes, both good and bad, positive, and negative, the process is exactly the same either way. I realized long ago that my negative thoughts looked exactly like my reality. The correlation was impossible to ignore. Everything I’d been telling myself for years, kept happening again and again in real life, that of course, created my belief system.
Wait, let’s back up a little and dig into the real source of our thoughts… our beliefs. READ PART 2: How Thoughts Become Beliefs
Ready to take your life, career, goals and yourself to the next level? Check out my life coaching options or take my online life coaching courses to get the results you DESERVE!
Sarah Centrella is a #1 best-selling author of several self-help books, a motivational keynote speaker, master life coach, Founder of VIVIAMO and podcast host.