Getting your thinking under YOUR control

The key to working with the LOA is to become an instant expert in monitoring your thinking – not easy when you have about 60,000 thoughts a day flying through your brain!

There are a number of small steps you can take to become conscious of your words because they are your thoughts made manifest – “in the beginning was the word”. And this article offers you one.

Choose a small word, such as  but, not, can’t – those little negative words that we all use all the time. Whenever we use them in conversation your mind then says “you want but, not, can’t? I can get them for you!!” and does, repeatedly, year in, year out.

The first step in this process is to hear yourself. Now most of us aren’t even aware of what we’re saying until it’s tripping off the tongue – and tripping us up! So, how can you do that? You can CHOOSE to listen to yourself – to hear the words before they’re out of your mouth. This implies taking a step back from yourself – in other words, observing yourself – as you think and speak.

Once you’ve chosen a word to focus on, simply decide that you wish to eliminate it from your thinking and speaking or change it for a positive one. In fact, what you are aiming to do is to lose the negativity of that word from your mind completely.

And that can sound tricky – and it may be at first – however, like all learning, it gets easier with practice. I bet you can’t remember starting to  talk when you were tiny. You started by speaking exactly like your parents – that’s how Scottish people sound different from Welsh people, for example. And it’s not just the accent  that you made your own – it was the actual words themselves, with all their attendant emotional content. Learning to speak a foreign language can be a revelation as the words don’t have the same emotional charge as they do in your mother tongue. Very freeing!

Many years ago I belonged to a group which taught self-awareness – the “word game” as we called it, was one of the first exercises we did. As I was living in Paris at the time, we each had to do it in French and our own language! Even now, I occasionally catch myself using the outlawed word “but” and make myself follow the prescribed procedure of stopping what I’m saying and then starting the sentence again without ‘but’ in it. This simple game acts as a mind-click to remind you to observe yourself, your words and your thoughts. Even to this day, after 25 years, I don’t often say or write  ‘but’ – so it does have a long term effect.

If this seems difficult to do alone, you could ask a friend to signal to you that you have used whichever word you’ve chosen to cut out of your vocabulary. The beauty  of doing it in a group setting was, for me, that we were all doing the same thing – we were all in it together, supporting each other to become aware of ourselves. It may be tricky for you to alert your friends that you’re doing this – after all, not everyone is as interested as you are in this ‘stuff’. Another way of approaching someone to help you is to work with a coach. This is what I do here at LPAT – the programme is designed for telephone and email, so distance is no object. To find out more the details are on the blog.

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