You Are What You Think

I’ve had another busy and fun week culminating in a really excellent training day in Leicester. On Wednesday I spoke at a Rotary Club in Derby and I still get the same enjoyment from presenting my Mental Resilience presentation to these groups as I always have. It is fun to eat a nice meal then be introduced to deliver my talk. On this occasion I had a lot of questions from the members to answer which was very stimulating.

One thing I am very aware of is mindfulness – being in the moment and having gratitude for the simple things around me. I am very grateful that I have a career just developing at the age of 61 to inspire and improve the lives of many people. This has come about after a long and fruitful career in sport and business. I have discovered a great way to keep calm and stay peaceful even in the midst of the storm. A phrase I use a lot with my clients is “If you can do something about something then do it. If you can’t then don’t think about it.”

What I mean by this is if you can take any actions to move towards a solution then take them but if there is nothing in your control about any situation in your life then don’t give it another thought. This is clearly more difficult than it sounds but I have had many moments when I first set up my business almost 5 years ago without a single client where I didn’t know how I was going to pay my mortgage at the end of each month. If I spent all my time worrying about this I would have made myself ill and would have been depressed and probably wanted to pack it all in. I will cover the area of stress and how this can devastate your health in future blogs. I will of course give suggestions on how to handle stress.

So I used several NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) techniques to keep myself in a positive frame of mind and motivated; including visualisation, re-framing and developing a positive inner voice. These helped me greatly and I still use these as I continue to build my business. What I do believe is if you are generally negative and emotionally low you will perform much worse than if you maintain a positive mindset. There is some evidence to show that you attract whatever you put out emotionally.

It is such a privilege to witness people having that light bulb moment where they suddenly discover something that they weren’t aware of before and it changes their life forever. I can’t believe that I am moving into this arena so late in my life but I do believe that it is at exactly the right time. I have a vast amount of experience across many industries and this serves me very well as I share the very best of what I have with people I come in contact with.

This week I want to focus on re-framing thoughts and how to change the way you respond to anything negative. We are all faced with many negative things hitting us on a daily basis and it’s how we respond to these things which determines how our day/week/month goes. One thing we do have control over is how we respond to things You may think this is not the case but there are many outstanding books written on survivors of prisoner of war camps or victims of rape or child abuse who have chosen how they respond to the horrors of what they experienced and are living (or lived) healthy happy lives as a result.

The power of our mind is unbelievable and as the great Henry Ford once put so eloquently “If you think you can or think you can’t you are right.” What he meant by this was if you believe you can do something you will have a go and maybe succeed, but if you believe you can’t then you won’t even try and you will have failed before you even start.

Experts say that awareness of something is the beginning of change and if today in this blog I have made you think about your ability to choose how you respond to the negative situations which you experience every day then maybe you will consider that there is another way.  Changing the way you respond to these negative situations could start you on a journey which will improve your life beyond measure.

Whatever negative things you experience this week, work on getting into a positive state as soon as you can – I’ll share more on how to do this in future blogs.

Have a fantastic Easter weekend and if you are a Christian then this is a very special weekend for you.

Warm regards

John