“A man who does not think for himself does not think at all” - Oscar Wilde

Do you ever just stop to think?

I have a confession to make.  I have a bad habit. It’s called thinking. Well okay, it’s not really a bad habit, but I sure do a lot of it these days. I used to just take everything as I “knew” it to be.  Now, I’m constantly thinking - thinking about how to improve my life, improve my thinking.  Everything I do originates with my thoughts so improvement must start there.

Last week after writing my last post on the realities we create for ourselves and after attending the last lesson of another SFT seminar simply to hone my skills, I went into deep thought and decided to conduct an experiment.  I began to think about how we all view the world from our own set of rose colored glasses.  This can be good, bad or neutral.  Every time we see something or someone, every time an event happens or we hear about something we don’t actually see it as it is.  In other words, we don’t just see the facts. We add our on “stuff” - thoughts, opinions, experiences to the facts and it actually becomes different to us than it really is.

This led me to conduct an experiment with myself.  I decided that for two weeks that I was going to work at only seeing the facts in every thing, event, story, and person - or to see it for what it really is.  I decided to try to remove all thoughts, ideas and opinions of my own and just observe things as neutral.  Realizing I have a choice as to whether I see everything in a positive light or negative light, after these two weeks I was going to then purposefully attach a positive meaning onto everything.  I have come a VERY long way as far as removing negativity from my thinking, but still I saw room for improvement.

I had many purposes for this experiment or things that I wanted to gain from it.  Among them were:

To do a mental cleansing.

To finish removing all negativity, filters and preconceptions from my thinking and see things objectively.

To become a better listener.

To see people as they are at the core - as God intended them.

To make myself even more aware of the choice I have to see things as negative or positive.

Some results of the experiment:

This experiment started out pretty good.  I did start to see things very different and be more open.  I worked hard to only name the facts about everything.  That was good and it did open my eyes.  One problem was that sometimes I would recognize a thought and change it to a more accurate thought, but sometimes I would just try to ignore it.  Tension collected in my jaws and shoulders as a result of the ignored thoughts and feelings and not dealing with them.

I was exhausted.  Normally, all my thoughts are just automatically mixed in with the facts.  It took MUCH concentration to ONLY name the facts or to see things only as they were.

Some conclusions from the experiment so far and some things I learned:

I decided the experiment could be conducted in a better way.  These are just some of the ways I observed that it could be better:

* Instead of simply trying to see the facts, it seemed better to simply separate the facts from my thoughts instead of just trying to ignore my thoughts.  It seems to work better if I ask myself,

“What are the facts here?” and then ask myself, “What are my thoughts and feelings?”

“Are these neutral or accurate thoughts?”  If not, “how could I make them accurate?”

If someone else is involved, “What are their thoughts and feelings?  Based on their their experiences and reality (or what their reality could be), what do they mean or what could they be saying?”

“How can this be good? (or what is good about this?) and what can I learn from it?”

(Some of these questions may not apply to everything.)

What else did I learn?

It’s good to pause and then think if at all possible.  I learn a lot that way.

I must replace things and thoughts that are not good with ones that are good!  It’s a powerful lesson we teach in SFT Awareness and I was reminded of it’s importance first hand.

I was reminded of the importance of determining a mindset for life ahead of time.  I was reminded of the importance of having a humble, positive attitude at all times always seeking truth and good.  I learned Jarrod’s post on awesomeness first hand:  When you seek to see things as they are you experience awesomeness automatically.  (It’s a must read.)

Experiences were given to us for a reason - to learn a lesson from them and to draw good from them and use them for good.  This was not anything I didn’t already know, but was reminded of it’s importance.

I see things much more objectively and listen better.

* To learn more about negative thoughts to avoid, take a look at the thinking error series.  You can access all the thinking error posts (that I have blogged about so far) from this post about maximizing and minimizing.

What about you?  Have you ever conducted an experiment on your thinking?  Did you learn anything from my experiment?

Photos by:  buildscharacter and ARTS

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