(continued from 12 Great Ways To Make Your Dreams Come True)

“…While I was learning (and believe me I still am) I read and I thought about what I was learning and attempted to put it  into practice. As I have mentioned numerous times ‘we become what we think about,’ then I realized (and I still do over and over again) that I am what I have already thought about.

Whether this is true in actuality or not I decided to take responsibility for everything I have and for what I don’t have and all that happens to me.  I realized that for me to be successful in life or my career I had to make some drastic changes.

I began to view myself as the creator of myself and my world. Again, I am not saying there may not be outside forces, obviously there are, but in order to gain control for myself, I decided the mental attitude I would adopt.

I began to realize that everything IS a result of my perceptions and my attitudes and that I make myself happy or miserable regardless of what the outside forces bring. The notion ‘if it is to be it is up to me’ began to make more and more sense…

We create our experience. If our experience is to change we must first change ourselves then our experience will change. We have to change what is within our control.

If ‘we become what we think about’ then right now we are experiencing the results of our previous thoughts. We create out future world from our present. This means what we experience now we created in our past. The choice becomes obvious. We either continue to perpetuate it by thinking similar thoughts or we change our thinking and consequently our future results.

Remember the saying ‘if you always do what you always did you will aways get what you always got’. The definition of insanity is ‘doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results’.

We either keep going on and on as we have been but hoping for it to be different, proving we are quite insane, or we change what we are doing so as to get different outcomes. This hit me in a big way.

I AM already what I HAVE BEEN thinking about all along. My present IS the result of all that I was thinking previously. The present results I have in the real world indicate what my thoughts are and what they were inside my head. The current situation reveals to me what and where my thinking has been as I traveled in life.

This became a powerful way for me to begin to think about what I had created around me and for me. No, I don’t mean I create the birds and the fish and all the physical reality as we commonly think about the creator. That is not part of this discussion at this time.

The world reflects what is going on in the inside. ‘So above So below’, ‘what is inside is on the outside’, ‘ying yang’ and all the many concepts which seem to state the same obvious thing. We are our results.

I will say that again differently. We are, our life is, the result of our thinking. All the results we experience in our lives we first create on the inside of our heads. It begins with thought.

For most of us this is haphazard as few of us are in charge of our own thinking. Yet, some of us do recognize that we are deliberate creators and that what we design on the inside IS what we get on the outside.

Some of us take time to create what we want on the inside and then go about making it happen on the outside. The important principle to remember is that EVERYTHING first begins with a thought. Success starts within!

Since there is no one inside your head but you the ultimate responsibility and accountability for what you create resides with you. No one else runs your brain (unless of course you let them).

Actually, we are very much influenced by the thoughts and opinions of others. We have adopted their values, beliefs, attitudes, and preferences without even realizing it much of the time. While we may give lip service regarding the influence of others we have no true idea of just how pervasive it is.We have been taught how to think, act and feel by others, who we well meaning, but may not have offered us the best notions to make as our own. We have co-opted what the majority tend to think.

It began at a very young age. We developed habitual lines of thought, our self esteem, what we think about the world, others, ourselves and our abilities as we grew. We grew up thinking mostly what others fed to us. We adopted these as our own and we keep thinking these.

Today, we tend to think the same thoughts we thought then. Researchers have stated that we think in excess of 60,000 thoughts a day (how they actually count those I have no clue) and that upwards of 60% of the thoughts we think today we thought yesterday. This means most of our thoughts are the SAME thoughts. WOW!

We have patterns of thought that keep us the same. We don’t evolve much because the mechanism is on auto-play. Since our thoughts our on auto-play it rarely occurs to us to that we can take control and change them. OR if we do consider it other thoughts come in stating it would be too difficult or not worth the effort and on and on.

So the first issue, the first big mistake, is that many of us have never taken charge of our thinking. If we aren’t in charge of our own thinking then we aren’t fully in charge of our lives. We live accidentally, we drift through life dealing with whatever the circumstances are. Sometime we are happy sometimes not. We don’t know where we are going and we don’t set a course. Just like a cork bobbing in the water or a ship adrift at sea we go wherever the current takes us. We don’t operate from our own power. We should be the captain of our ship but many of us are not. If you want success in life you mist predetermine where you want to go in life. You must choose!

The second issue, the second big mistake, is a big one too!

Here is a big problem for many of us. We create our world by what and how we repeatedly think.  We create our world by our thinking AND if we don’t like the results we get then we focus on those less than glorious results and our bad feelings. We put our attention in precisely the wrong place. This is part of our previous conditioning growing up. It is as if we are trying to drive forward by looking backwards. You can’t be looking in the wrong place and expect to get ahead. Sadly, though that is what we do. We focus on the wrong things!

We blame others, we blame the world, we blame circumstances, we blame anything and everything OUT THERE as the source of our difficulty or disappointment. We even blame ourselves but mostly in the fashion that we are unable to do anything about it differently. We aren’t smart enough or good enough or strong enough or others or circumstances prevent us. ALL of the blame is misplaced. It keeps us from being who and what we can be because we keep missing what we need to actually change to have different results.

When we blame we are stating we have no control. Frankly, we ARE blaming people and things and situations WE can NOT control. Who and what we can control is ourselves and our thoughts feelings and actions. SO if we want to change things in our world we must first change ourselves. We have to recognize where the control actually exists and claim it. Sadly, most of us don’t and not because we are bad people or stupid but because we have been conditioned most of our lives to not ever actually consider it. We don’t know any better.

I have discussed this before but will mention it again here. There is a principle called a ‘premature cognitive commitment’. A PCC means we make a mental decision prior to all the facts being collected. In my workshops and talks I explain iall of this more fully but here is an example, a real life example.

IF you wanted to train fleas (some do apparently) get an aquarium and some fleas. Put the flees in the aquarium and put a glass cover over the top so the fleas can’t hop out. The fleas will hop and hop and hop into the glass cover again and again. Within a few days you can remove the cover and most of the fleas will remain in the aquarium and not hop out. Why?

The reason for this is they make (in their little flea minds) a premature cognitive commitment that the boundary of their world allows them to only hop so high. They keep hitting the glass repeatedly for numerous attempts then they alter how far they hop. Soon it becomes as far as they try to hop. The make a decision about their known world that influences what they do and what they try. They give up. They don’t leave the aquarium. Obviously, new born fleas don’t have these conditions so they would hop out but the rest remain inside.

Must I make the obvious comparison that we operate much like fleas. You can find other examples of this – a fly trapped inside a closed window, a bee in your car and others. The point is the fleas don’t know that the glass plate will, at some time in the future, be removed. When it is they don’t know it because they stopped jumping that far already. They assume those boundary conditions still exist when they do not. Even though the fleas are free to jump higher and escape the aquarium they do not. They gave up before the situation changed.

We are a lot like flees. We don’t have to be and we can change it but we have to realize it first.

Awareness is the key that opens the doorway to exploration. We need to recognize our mental boundaries and the be willing to go beyond them. We need to notice when we are paying attention to the wrong things and correct it. When our attention is in the wrong place we don’t get better results we only get more of the same.

Sadly, we focus on what is wrong when we should be focused on creating what we want instead. We focus on the problem, the issue, the disappointment, the bad feeling instead of what is right and what is working. We think if we focus on the problem (like a math problem) we will solve it. Einstein said ‘No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.’ He stated it another way as well, ‘We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them’.

I like Einstein so I will provide another that I think is significant:, ‘Nothing happens until something moves’. This is such an accurate statement because we remain the same until we do something to alter it. We will stay the same unless we stop and do something different. We will keep hopping but we won’t hop as far as we could unless we recognize that the limitations, we thought we there, have been removed.

We will even keep hoping but we won’t hope as far as we could unless we recognize that the limitations only existed in our thinking.

If we want a better life then we must change our thinking. We must control our thinking. We must take charge and steer it in a positive direction.  We must be as the captain at the helm of a ship and navigate it to where we want to go. We must know where we are headed and then do whatever is need to get there.

The reason we miss everything and don’t change much is because we focus in the wrong place. When we focus on the result we got our attention is on the outer world (our creation from the past) and not on what we need to presently focus on in order to produce a better future. Our attention is misplaced.

Yes, you may take results as an indication of whether you are moving in the right or wrong direction but more than that is pointless. You must focus on what you can actually control.

You CAN control your thoughts, your thinking process and the ability you have to create when you learn how to. You can gain control your thoughts when you apply yourself and make the effort to master this skill.

In the midst of any and all the crap and turmoil going around you it is important to recognize that YOU got yourself there. ‘What you focus on is what you get’. ‘We become what we think about’.

I got myself there. I looked at where I was and recognized that good, bad, right or wrong, successful or not I was responsible for exactly where I was in that moment. I am responsible for exactly where I am in this moment. I created all of this.

At this point it is critical not to blame yourself or suffer because ‘life sucks’, but to change yourself to make it all better. Blame only furthers the problems and solves nothing.See my previous posts about how to stop blaming and move ahead productively.

HEREIN LIES THE RUB!  Here is where most people give it a try and then give up. Here is where they stop hopping.

‘For everything there is a season’. What is a season?

A season IS a period of time when certain things occur. There is a season to plant when it is conducive to putting the seeds in. Then there is the growing season where under the cover of darkness the seed sprouts and takes root before breaking through to the light of day. Growth continues until the harvest season begins and then that which is planted is gathered. The harvest CAN be bountiful because seeds multiple their output. One seed may produce one apple tree with hundreds or thousands of apples in its life time AND one apple produces many seeds. The return is greater than the investment.

BUT here is where people get derailed.They think, ‘Okay I gave it a try it so bring it’. They expect immediate results mostly as a part of our conditioning in various media. They think, ‘okay I’ve sowed the seeds’ and then voila’ magically everything is instantaneously changed.

NOPE!

At least not obviously.

Yes, everything is changing for the better the second, the instant, you make that decision to think positively and get positive results! In that second everything changes! The moment you take charge EVERYTHING begins to change. A new creation direction begins the moment you decide but this is the planting season.

The seed is planted and now it must grow and be nurtured. It grows in darkness and the results won’t be obvious for awhile. SO what is there, that you may notice, is what you already have. It is your current situation. Your present is the same and may appear to be the same for some time while the seeds grow in darkness. This is so important to understand!

Things ARE changing BUT YOU can’t see it YET.

Things are changing and growing!  You made the decision, you planted the seed, now it must germinate, and be nurtured. When it finally sprouts may be way off in time.  When it is ready to harvest may be further down the road. You can’t expect to have things now when there is a time they come to fruition.

If you focus on how things are crappy or how they remain the same, or are getting worse, or are not changing fast enough you are killing off the seeds you have planted. You are withholding the nutrition the seeds need. You are too preoccupied with what isn’t happening yet, with the crap that is still there, and you are missing the boat entirely. Your focus is in the wrong place!

YOU MUST focus on what you want to create and think about how you will create it EVEN WHEN there is no evidence of it coming about. THIS IS THE LAW! This is what is required of us. Have faith in the creation process and know, that since you planted it if you nurture it, you will get it. Our task is to nurture it along AND keep the faith.

Yet, this is where most people drop out and then claim it does not work. They decide to change but then focus on what isn’t changing and give up. They hop up against that glass plate and decide it is pointless to keep trying. They decide to quit and give up because they don’t know that if they just keep at it the limitations will be removed. The act on limited information. We all do all of the time. The important point to understand is you must not give up!!!  Success is yours when you follow through NO MATTER WHAT. SO I will repeat:

You must not give up.” Rex Sikes

We will continue this in the next blog post. Meanwhile make some decisions that sever you well today. AND make the decision to have a remarkable day today too! Enjoy!

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