For too many people, negative thinking is a habit.
When negative thoughts dominate your thinking, your subconscious mind (Reticular Activating System, Insular and Thalamus) receives that negative thinking as a directive. It then goes to work to build a life that will be in line with your negative thinking.
For example, if you are constantly saying to yourself, “I don’t have enough money to pay my bills”, your subconscious assumes this is something you desire. It will then go to work, behind the scenes, through intuition, directing your behavior and thinking in order to propel you towards a life of poverty – something you obviously desire, since you are, so frequently, programming it into your subconscious, through your self-talk.
Bottom line – negative thinking perpetuates a life of misery.
In order to put an end to this negative thinking Poor Habit, you must engage in positive thinking – you must reprogram your subconscious mind to be positive. If you do, your subconscious will direct your behavior in such a way that is in line with your internal self-talk.
Here are some tools that will help reprogram your subconscious from negativity to positivity:
- Meditate for fifteen minutes first thing upon waking up. Focus your mediation on your ideal, perfect life. See list item # 4.
- Create a list of positive things you desire. When you wake up after a night’s sleep, you are in an alpha state (the state between being awake and being asleep). Every night, right before you fall asleep, you drift into this same alpha state. Alpha state is when your conscious and subconscious mind are able to communicate with each other. Immediately upon waking and right before you go to bed, read your list of the positive things you desire. This will get both parts of your brain, your conscious and subconscious, working together in an effort to direct your behavior and thinking in a way that helps you realize the positive things you desire.
- Create a Gratitude List. This is a list of all of the things you are grateful for in your life. We all have things to be grateful for. Gratitude is the gateway to positivity. It shifts your thinking from negative to positive. Positivity, according to my Rich Habits research, is a prerequisite to success.
- Create a script you your ideal, future life, five to ten years into the future. One thousand words is all it takes. This creates an itch your subconscious will want to scratch. Your subconscious will then direct your behavior and your thinking in an effort to deliver to you the vision of your ideal, perfect, future life.
- Review Vision Board. A Vision Board is compilation of the photos/pictures, a visual, of all of the things that you desire.
- Write your obituary. Create an obituary that would make you feel your life had meaning. List all of your accomplishments, successes and the value you added to the lives of others, just because you lived.
Could you please clarify something you wrote in step 2 of “How To Program Yourself To Be Successful”? You mentioned that in alpha state your conscious and subconscious mind are able to communicate with each other. But you also mentioned that negative self talk programs the subconscious to attract what it thinks you want. In my way of thinking, I’m hearing that your conscious is talking to your subconscious when you a self talk during the day as well. In other words the communication appears to be going on all day, not just in the alpha state. I feel like I’m missing an important point you are trying to make about the alpha state. Could you please help me understand?
Negative self-talk is destructive when it becomes a habit. When it becomes a habit, your basal ganglia (part of the limbic system, which is part of the subconscious) reaches its long spindle dendrites into the conscious part of the brain (neocortex). When that happens, there is constant communication between the conscious and subconscious, even while awake. The best way to remedy this is to re-program your self-talk from negative to positive. This effectively co-ops the existing basal ganglia dendrite neural highway, which was being used to perpetuate the negative self-talk. A back door, alternative approach is to do the reprogramming while in alpha state – the state between conscious and subconscious.Ideally, doing both will accelerate this reprogramming.
Thomas C. Corley, thank you for this post. Its very inspiring.