Managing Your Mind to Create the Life You Dream About

I’ve seen a lot of people on Facebook and Instagram talking about what a *hit show 2020 has been.  It’s so easy to agree with them. We have faced extreme challenges that the majority of us have never encountered in our lives. In fact, we never imagined them as a possibility.

The frustrating thing about this is that it keeps us in really low energy! We are constantly worrying about the future and feeling like we can never make a decision, so we stay stuck. The good news is that there’s a better way!

I’ve put in a lot of work to build the skill set of managing my mind. This has served me well over the years. It’s especially useful with all of the recent world events. Today, I’m going to share with you exactly how to manage your mind so that you can go from feeling stuck to back in the driver’s seat!

Getting Real with Myself about Owning a Dog

My senior year of college, it felt like all the girls were getting married. I was longing for a long-term relationship too, so I decided to hop on a dating website. My first and only date was horrendous and hilariously funny (now looking back on it). I honestly was out of practice and so excited to go on a date that I missed a lot of red flags. And I was too polite to tell him to take me home sooner!

We spent 8 hours together. Who spends 8 hours together on a first date?!

When I got home, I felt distraught. When my dad asked me how the date went, I immediately burst into tears and said, “Dad, I don’t want a boyfriend -- I just want a dog!”

For the next few years, all I could think of was owning a dog. I mean… they’re perfect! They are handsome, give you lots of kisses, and are a girl’s best friend, right?!

At this point of my life, I wasn’t quite ready for a dog yet. I was recovering from a concussion and just learning how to adult. But I knew I wanted one.

Learning to Manage My Thoughts

Over the next few years, I enjoyed dreaming about what kind of dog I would have. I thought about how nice it would be to have a dog. I used it as motivation to help me achieve adulting goals that felt way less exciting. Focusing on having a dog eliminated my thoughts of having a boyfriend.

Then, I met my husband, who was the best boyfriend ever and now the most loving husband. We decided together that we weren’t going to have pets at the beginning of our marriage (well, except our sweet beta ;))

It was then that thinking about dogs wasn’t so helpful anymore! The more I thought about owning a dog, the more I felt kinda low because I knew it wasn’t time yet. I had to decide whether I was going to choose to keep thinking about dogs, researching different kinds of dogs, looking at cute puppy photos, or give it a break.

In the end, I decided that giving up thinking about dogs was the way to go! I’ll know when my husband and I are ready to say “yes” to having a dog that it’ll be the perfect time to invite back all my thoughts about dogs!

Your Thoughts Create Your Feelings

Now this is a real story, but it’s supposed to be lighthearted and make you laugh. Obviously, thoughts about dogs are not the most consequential. However, this is a simple illustration of how essential it is to learn how to manage your mind because your thoughts create your feelings!  And your feelings can have a HUGE impact on your life.

This includes thoughts that you hear from other sources: your mother, your best friend, the mailman, the news.

Some of those thoughts build you up. They motivate you. They inspire you. They help you chase after your dreams. You feel warm inside when you hear them. They make your heart expand.

And some of these thoughts? They tear you down. They make you feel depressed. You start believing things that aren’t true - like you’re lazy, or you’ll never make your dreams a reality. They feel heavy in your body. They make you feel utterly exhausted.

There are messages all around us. You don’t have to even roll out of bed before getting a slew of thoughts: all you have to do is turn on your phone and open your news or social media app. There are thoughts on the TV. Thoughts on YouTube. You don’t even have to leave your house to have hundreds of thoughts come your way!

I’m guessing, if you’re like any normal human being, that sometimes these thoughts can be extremely overwhelming. They may even be paralyzing you with the current circumstances.

HERE ARE SOME WAYS THAT YOU CAN LIMIT SOME OF THE MESSAGES THAT YOU DON’T WANT TO HEAR:

So what do you do about this? Believe that 2020 has just hit the fan? “Oh, well. There goes another year of ambitions and dreams? Maybe next year will be better?”

Well, you could. But I’m sure that’s not really how you want 2020 to end. So I have good news for you! There’s another way! A way that I think is much much better.

You have the ability and the responsibility to manage your thoughts. When you learn to manage your thoughts, you change your results.

Remember my silly story about wanting a dog? There was a time when thinking about owning a dog really served me. It made me feel happy. I even used it as a motivation tool! But there came a time, when it was necessary for me to manage my thoughts about owning a dog. In order to maintain my joy, I had to say no to thinking about a dog for now.

You have the same option with your beautiful brain. It’s yours. Like a garden you keep. You get to decide what flowers you put in it (thoughts). You also get to decide that the weeds don’t belong there and that you’re going to put in the work to dig those suckers up!

Learning to manage your mind takes work.  It’s not an overnight success kind of thing. In fact, you may even need to hire some help. Just like you might decide to hire someone to do landscaping for you or weed killing.However, there are ways that you can start the process NOW.

Let’s say that you’ve been feeling overwhelmed about your schedule since COVID-19 started. You’ve been feeling so out of control. What you want to experience instead is feeling like you’re in the driver’s seat again. 

SO HERE’S WHAT I WANT YOU TO DO…

Get out a piece of paper.  Write down all of the sources that you may be receiving thoughts from on a day to day basis. Is it Instagram? Facebook? The News? Your cousin? Write it all down. 

Now, next to those sources write down how you feel when you are exposed to those thoughts. Are you uplifted? Do you feel totally drained after an hour of scrolling on Facebook and reading about COVID? 

Once you get super clear on where you’re receiving your messages (thoughts) from and you get super clear on how those thoughts are making you feel, you’ll be able to see how these thoughts are affecting your mood every single day.  

In this case, perhaps you realize that your feeling of being out of control has been coming from reading the news every day! You realize that you’ve been feeding your brain with thoughts about how everything is changing all of the time due to the constant updates from the CDC on COVID and all of the legislative changes. This has been making you feel uncertain and feeling like you can’t commit to a decision because you don’t know what’s going to happen next!

And then, you get to do the hard work. Make some choices! If you found that having 24/7 access to your news app is making you feel out of control, then you can decide how much you’d like to interact with your news app going forward. Perhaps, you decide that it’s not helping you at all, so you decide to delete the app completely. Or maybe, you realize that you want to stay updated on big announcements made by your local or federal government, so you change the notifications and you decide that you’ll only be checking your app once a week.

You can also do this for positive influences! You can decide to increase engagement with the sources that are building you up and moving you forward. Win, win!

This process is going to look different for everyone. You are the only one who can make these decisions for yourself. But, the good news is that you can make them!

Let’s just experiment shall we? And see how much more energy you gain! Let’s see how much more light you feel!

Need help with managing your thoughts?

Book a call below and let’s chat about how you can manage your mind, create feelings and achieve your goals!