Cultivating positive mind sets

Do you know that you really don’t have the mind set you would like to have? Would you like to change that? Cultivating positive mind sets is not as hard as you might think. I’ll give you three steps on how I like to do this!

Read

I read a ton of books on positive thinking, motivation, and life change. I can always feel a lift and sense of change after I read one of these. Now this isn’t the only thing I read, but it is the majority.

What do you read? Just like watching TV of the movies, if all you read is the newspaper and murder stories, you are filing your mind with all that negative stuff. You get involved in those stories and your emotions block your thinking mind and allow that stuff to filter into your subconscious mind. You subconscious mind does not judge or reason. It just accepts and recalls. If you have put all that negative stuff in there then that is what your subconscious will recall as reality.

Pick up a book on something positive. The first book I read was Think and Grow Rich. Click on the title and download that for free. Since then I have read so many I don’t remember them all. You can go to the library and ask for books on motivation and self help and find tons. Go to Amazon and do a search for the same subjects. You will have more books than you can read in a year!

Podcasts

There are lots of podcasts out there that you can listen to. Most of them you can download and listen to on you iPod or MP3 player. Go to iTunes and do a search for positive thinking. I have a podcast here on this site that I encourage you to listen to. It’s free information and it gives you a chance to cultivate that positive mind set!

The nice thing about a podcast is that you can listen whenever you want. I do yoga in the morning and used to listen to them while I did my practice. Now I usually listen during my lunch. You can listen while you commute to work or while you take a bath. It is pretty easy to find time to learn new things.

Positive Affirmations

I use, and many people use, positive affirmations. What are they? Positive affirmations are statements that you say to yourself. We all have what some call mental dialog all the time. You mind never stops and there is a constant mental dialog going on in your head. The question is, what is that dialog saying?

It may well be that your mental dialog is feeding you negative information. It might tell you that you are a loser or that no one likes you. It might tell you that you are going to be poor for the rest of your life. It is all stuff that the subconscious mind has stored from years of learning and then it is fed back to you on a never ending loop.

In the reading section I mentioned about emotion and how that affects the subconscious mind. If you say positive affirmations to yourself that have no emotion linked to them, you conscious mind may well be filtering what gets into the subconscious.

Let’s say you are using the affirmation that you are an assertive person. If there is no emotion, no faith, or joy, or love, then the conscious mind says, “No you aren’t! Don’t you remember when this or that happened and you just took it? Don’t you remember how that cashier talked to you and you didn’t say anything? You aren’t assertive, you’re a wimp!” The subconscious feeds the memory and the conscious makes the judgment.

If you use emotion with the affirmation this tends to short circuit the conscious mind and it gets fed into the subconscious. Then when recall takes place the affirmation is there as if it were reality. Soon you find yourself being assertive without forcing it. It is embedded in your subconscious mind!

You can do it!

Cultivating a positive mind set is not impossible. Does it take some work? Yes. Are there techniques that make it easier? Yes. If you want it bad enough, none of them are so hard that you cannot do it. Let your life be what you want it to be!

Here’s to You!

P.S. Here is a post I did yesterday on a book I just finished. A Review of The Think Big Manifesto

If you would prefer to have your own personal copy of Think and Grow Rich (I recommend that you do, I own two of them) here is a link to amazon (affiliate link).