I have recently been attending many business related webinars that have been geared to “changing your personal way of thinking”. This has been a fascinating topic for me. Not because it’s a topic I am not familiar with, but rather how much people do not realize how important this is. The way you see yourself and internalize yourself is important not only business but also with your personal life. If you are constantly focusing on your negative points and telling yourself you cannot do something, you will never achieve your future goals. By changing the way you think about yourself will also change the situation that surrounds you. Now of course I’m not going to babble about this with out actually putting this theory to the test.
I have always been a fan of Freud, for more reasons than I can count. However, for the topic of this blog I will tell you the one thing that I always valued about his theories and that is that he tested his ideas on his own children. This is a something that I have put to practice myself since my daughter was born.
How does this apply with changing your internal messages? I took one simple idea, from a recent lecture of putting up a post it note with the sentence “I choose…” rather than the conventional “I see myself…” Now I decided to test this theory not only with my daughter, but myself and husband as well.
First small background on my daughter, she is a naturally negative person. Not sure where she has gotten this from because for the most part my family is very positive, always seeing the “glass as half full,” or at least half. My daughter unfortunately has always just seen the negatives of the world around her, and now she is internalizing this. So for her I put something little on her note. “I choose to do well in school”. For myself I put “I choose to be a writer and share my writing”. For my husband, it’s rather funny and longer term, but it was his choice, “I choose to live in a scenic area”.
Now the point of this exercise is to read this note 20 times a day for 30 days. This apparently is how long it takes to internalize the thought and make it happen. I can only speak of the results for myself and my daughter, because my husband is more of a retirement goal.
For my daughter, who is struggling in school and is just barely getting by, has turned her C average to a B-. No dear readers you have not read this wrong. She has done a vast improvement in the past month that no one can believe.
For myself I have been writing up a storm lately. I have jobs that I didn’t even think I could get let alone accomplish and gotten positive feedback, which is always good for one’s ego.
This is my quest for all of you my dear readers. Take a page from Freud’s book and try this method on yourself and family as well. Start clearing your heads of all those negative thoughts of “I can’t”, “it’s not possible”, “I’m not good enough” and so on. Replace those with “I choose.” Choose to reach your personal and work related goals, no mater how big or how small they are.
