Please consider signing up for our free newsletter - Master Your Mindset, Master Your Life. It is currently a monthly newsletter that provides articles and or videos on the how you can master your mindset and your life, or help your child, student, or athlete master their mindset and life.

Repetitive Thinking and Your Mindset

by Simon Potter
(USA)

If you find yourself thinking repetitive thoughts and those thoughts are negative, meaning they have negative emotions attached to them and or negative beliefs attached to them - usually both, you are impacting your biochemistry. Holding onto negative emotions is not good for your health and certainly repetitively thinking thoughts that are negative is not only unhealthy but absolutely makes reaching your full potential far more challenging. Repetitive thinking of positive thoughts would most certainly be far more beneficial.

Mantras or reading short passages over and over are just two techniques people have used over eons to engrain positive thinking into their mind. It does work. They are two tools to use in training your mindset. Of course there are also tools to use to help eliminate the negative thinking. Meditation, prayer, mindfulness, and breathing practices are probably four of the most powerful and most common. They should be part of a mindset training program. They work too. Obviously, there are other strategies as well for doing both. Journaling and self-reflection are two other tools to both interrupt the pattern of negative thinking and potentially create a pattern of positive thinking. The writing process really is invaluable for reinforcing and even creating new thinking patterns. When you couple that practice with good language tools and questioning practices, you have added more powerful techniques that really help train a mindset.

It is very important to understand that negative emotions have a purpose. You need to discover and understand that purpose. It is that learning that we need to file away not the emotion. Learning a process for doing that is one of the unique things with our training. When we hold onto that purpose or the learning we are to get from the negative emotion and let go of the emotion we are capable of becoming the best version of ourself.

Because many of the patterns or strategies we run are unconscious, people often need someone to coach them through or give them a methodology for making those conscious. Once they are conscious, you can begin to use appropriate tools or techniques to interrupt the old patterns and create new patterns. Over time you can create a new you – a better version of yourself. What does it take? It takes taking responsibility for your thinking patterns and habits, creating discipline and structure, using what I term the HEAT method, getting the right tools including the use of synergy, and get a coach or mentor. You need to be committed. I can’t tell you it is easy, but I can tell you the outcome of feeling more in control of your life and better prepared to get back up after life knocks you down and having better health and well-being is priceless.

Clearing out negative emotions and limiting decisions from your past is quite profound. Learning the unconscious strategies you run can be quite enlightening and allow you to become aware and awareness provides opportunities to use tools to interrupt those patterns and create new more supportive ones. All of these things is about clearing the “ground” so you can build a new “structure” which is the growth mindset or mindset of a champion and that impact is far-reaching.

The building of the structure is about acquiring the knowledge of what should be part of this mindset and what skills are most supportive of success and then training the habits, emotions, and attitudes that go into the mindset you want to create. The process takes time and commitment which is another reason I am so focused on training teenagers and college age students. While it is never too late to create a growth mindset, which is why so many professionals in their 40s, 50s, and even 60s seek out the coaches like Tony Robbins, Jay Abraham, Brian Tracy, and Michael Gerber to name a few. Unfortunately, professionals have a lot more on their plate while for teenagers and college students their “professional” life is to learn. What is more valuable than learning to control your thinking and creating a mindset that prepares you for surviving and maybe even thriving through the storms of life.