As we head into the dog days of summer and speed toward the Labor Day Weekend and the final few months of 2013, Jay Block wants to know… what’s new with you?
If we are not creating anything new on a regular basis, we are probably heading in the wrong direction… and blaming others or finding excuses. If we are not consistently creating something new… we are destroying possibilities and potential.
New Mindset
Success, achievement, and happiness are NOT born out of negativity and pessimism. All too often we hear the cliché “maintain a positive attitude”… but simply pay lip service to it. When we are feeling unhappy or experiencing adversity, we are told to: “grin and bear it” or “make the best of a bad situation.” The problem is that we are not taught how to maintain a good, positive attitude in the wake of setbacks, obstacles, and unexpected circumstances that throw our lives into chaos.
It is difficult, at best, to create anything of substance with a negative outlook, self-doubt, pessimism, or an apathetic and indifferent attitude. So the first step to creating anything new is to manage our mindsets. We can do this by:
- Focusing on what we have, and all that we have to be grateful for (more than you know)
- Surrounding ourselves with positive people and avoiding negative voices of influence
- Exercising and living a healthy lifestyle because “motion creates emotion”
New Thoughts
New thoughts can be destructive and inhibiting only if our mindset is not functioning at peak performance levels. With a healthy and positive mindset, we can now create new, empowering thoughts.
It’s been repeated throughout history that you can’t fix a problem with the same mind that created it. No matter how hard we work or how committed we are to achieving our goals, if we don’t continually rethink what we think we know, the same thoughts will become old-thought gatekeepers; and no new viewpoints or considerations are possible.
New thoughts create new goals, new dreams, and a new life because new thoughts create new beliefs. New thoughts that create new beliefs have the influence to empower us to lose weight, stop smoking, repair damaged relationships, overcome life challenges, land new jobs, enhance business opportunities… new life opportunities. When we create new thoughts and new beliefs, we then create new habits. We can do this by:
- Asking higher quality questions such as, “what is possible for me that I current believe is impossible?” This is known as the Socratic methodology. The Socratic Method is universally recognized for being the single-most effective critical thinking process there is. New thoughts and new beliefs derive from asking ourselves, and others, high quality questions that lead to high quality answers.
So, hey… what’s new? Hopefully you won’t respond… “Same old same old.”
{Check back next week for part two of this series}
