How To Have a Good Life: Think Good Thoughts – Here’s How

Issue 7. January 13, 2023 ✨ Higher Power Coaching & Consulting ✨

Managing our thoughts and our minds is the most powerful way to change our lives. We’ve been taught what to think and why, but not really how to think. When we let our mind go on autopilot, the results can be disastrous. Here are several ways for how to think, and especially how to change your thinking.

Imagine your mind as reservoir and your negative thoughts as poison being dosed into the reservoir, day after day, year after year. Ten negative thoughts daily for 20 years = 730,000 doses of poison!

Stopping the negative talk will definitely help purify the reservoir of your mind. But you can dramatically speed up the purification process if you use an antidote to the poison. That antidote is purposeful, positive thoughts, i.e., affirmations.

Fortunately, the “antidote” is much more powerful than the poison and it won’t take 20 years to purify the reservoir of your mind. It will take repetition, which may be the most important part of thought work. As they say – consistency in small things is no small thing!

It doesn’t even matter if you believe the positive thoughts at first. What matters is that you say them, and that you say them regularly.

Here’s an easy process you can follow for turning around your negative thinking:
· notice when you say negative things to yourself
· stop saying those negative things
· replace the negative things with positive things

In the beginning, all I could do was notice. Then, as I started to see how frequently I was doing this, I made a plan for replacement thoughts. This is where thinking on purpose dramatically change things.

When we start taking charge of what’s going through our heads by purposely choosing our thoughts, we become proactive rather than reactive. It’s one of the most important ways we take control of our lives – by taking control of our minds!

I’ve written elsewhere about how I got out of negative thought loops and you can too.

Here are some other hacks you can use. 

In Mind Hacking, Sir John Hargrave called his negative thought loops “problem loops” and he equated them to computer programming loops. Doing that helped him to get out of his negative thought loops. He says our negative thought loops are limitations we put on ourselves, others and the world. Notice that these are not actual limitations. They exist only in our minds! What we consider possible and impossible are just ideas.

Hargrave challenged himself to think up the biggest loops he could and decided that an exponentially increasing loop would be best. His affirmation become, “My ability to bring amazing things into the world is exponentially increasing.”

The Life Coach School’s Brooke Castillo introduced me to a concept of “scaffolding.” It can be used when we’re trying to change our thought patterns from something really negative to something positive but have a hard time doing so. You don’t have to believe affirmations at first, but you do have to repeat them. If you won’t repeat something because it feels too far from the truth, there’s a way to get there.. Here’s how:

Start with a neutral statement as an affirmation (e.g., instead of “I love my body” say, “I have a body”). The likelihood of you making the leap to “I love my body” increases tremendously!

Louise Hay of You Can Heal Your Life believes that if you want to have a better thought life, you just have to change your thoughts. One of the most powerful notions I learned from her was that my thoughts aren’t necessarily true! Now I know that beliefs are just thoughts we’ve thought for so long that we’ve come to believe they’re true.
The two most important affirmation I say are
 “I love you just the way you are Barb”
and
“I’m just the right amount of everything.”

Thinking on purpose has a huge impact on one’s life, and thinking good thoughts is the way to have good life. What good thoughts are you thinking?