Mastering your state of mind

A recent episode of the Daily Calm podcast has inspired me to examine a commonly-held belief, that our state of mind is influenced – some would say determined – by the circumstances in which we find ourselves. But what if the opposite were true? What if – as quoted by Calm – Wayne Dyer was right when he said, “The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of your state of mind”?

I wondered, is this true or false? Most people would probably say “false”, and I know from my mentoring sessions with clients that I often hear observations such as:

• “I don’t have enough money/time/people”
• “It really is stressful around here”
• “My boss is such a jerk”
• “I’m not making it up, this stuff is real!”

These are sentiments we can probably all relate to, and as such, feed into the narrative that our state of mind is directly affected by our experiences. How else could it possibly work? I too thought this way for the vast majority of my life, and even last weekend was having an emotional discussion with my father, who couldn’t see it any other way.

But today, I know with absolute certainty that Wayne Dyer was 100% right and it’s been a total revelation to me. It’s akin to realising the world is a globe and not flat and, in this moment, EVERYTHING makes sense.

A couple of years ago a wrote a blog about ‘Creating our own reality’ which explores the connection between thought and experience. I wrote: “We have thoughts, believe them to be true, act on and react to them, and ultimately end up physically manifesting the thoughts and creating our own reality.”

Taking this a step further, I think it’s true to say that actually we don’t experience other people, events or circumstances – they happen yes, for sure, but we don’t experience them – but rather we experience our THINKING about them. Why else is it that some people can’t get enough of rollercoasters, but to others it’s their idea of hell? Two people can go through exactly the same situation and yet have polar opposite reactions to and feelings about it.

The thoughts in our head, the ones we pay attention to, the internal stories we listen to, create our state of mind and this in turn becomes how we see our state of life. And the miraculous thing is, that what starts off as just a formless thought in our head often becomes a physical reality when we act on or react to this story.

Developing this kind of self-awareness and training ourselves to reframe the relationship between thought and reality is incredibly freeing, energising and empowering. To quote Eckhart Tolle, “What a liberation to realize that the ‘voice in my head’ is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that.”

When working with clients, a good deal of my focus is on helping them to do this and understand how they can manage their state of mind more positively to create the kind of life they want. It applies equally to business as to their personal life too, and is a skill which they can pass on to their teams.

And what happens when we achieve mastery of our state of mind? As one client commented, “My personal impact on the business has been more effective, which has driven sales and the development of my team.” Or what we call Profit and Smiles.

Please drop me a line if you’d like to find out more about our mentoring services.