“Thinking about what you think about is crucial in life.  Your thoughts are the beginning and ending of anything and everything in your life.  You’ve got to develop a process for assessing what you are thinking about all the time so that you can develop the skill of…using the present moment to create a better future for yourself or experience the present with higher intentionality instead of using the mind for negative thoughts…or wishing the future was different.  See that drifting into those thoughts is where you get in trouble,” Rob Dyrdek.  Simply said, we get to choose our thoughts.  This might be a new concept for some of you, especially my fellow ADD people pleasers.  Often the world seems to move pretty quickly so the idea of controlling let alone choosing our thoughts takes a little more effort.  But this is an amazing exercise in slowing things down.  We can’t choose our thoughts if our minds are spinning too fast to grasp on to any of them.   

 I’m an overly anxious preparer most of the time so that coupled with ADD is a perfect storm of swirling thoughts that move faster than I can follow them.  In general, it’s hard to control our thoughts at times because we have constant stimulation and distraction.  Also, our brains are wired to follow the path of least resistance so the thoughts we think the most are the thoughts that continue to pop up.  With multiple forms of constant stimuli, we are essentially fed our thoughts in so many ways that we are out of practice with slowing down to consider, really think, or choose what comes next.  But when we take Dyrdek’s words and put them into a bigger concept, it changes the game.  If we don’t think about where are thoughts are going, how are we going to get them where we need them to be?  How can we achieve a goal if we are consistently working on different things?  If we aren’t intentional with our time, how can we know if our actions are producing results toward our purpose?

I don’t claim this is an easy practice by any means—I’m not sure there’s anyone out there who would say it’s easy.  However, understanding the why behind the concept makes it easier to digest.  It’s simple, energy flows where focus goes; but we all know simple doesn’t mean easy.  With that being said, perhaps the goal simply needs to be that we are more intent on listening to where our thoughts go.  When we become more intentional and understand what our thoughts are, we can more easily guide them when needed.  Breaking patterns becomes the goal and learning to change even one negative thought can change the course.  We aren’t going to rewire our entire mind in one day, one night, one week, one month, and maybe not even in a year for somethings.  We are talking about breaking down lifetimes of thought patterns in some cases.  But having the intention to break those thought patterns will be enough to start us on the path of recognizing where we need to adjust those thoughts.  Thinking about what we think about puts us on the path of thinking about where we want to go—and intentionality is how we get there.  Change our thoughts, change our course.  It all starts with the mind.