Staying on Top When Your World's Upside Down

“Like a gardener, you choose the specific thought-seeds you want to plant. Hypnosis helps you to care for and nourish those thought-seeds to grow and bear fruit. Your subconscious mind is your secret garden where the thoughts you plant grow to become your reality. This garden is more fertile than you may realize, so plant carefully!”
Henry Leo Bolduc: Self-Hypnosis

Your thoughts have a huge influence on creating your future reality. But you are not your thoughts. You choose whether to master them or to let them master you. To paraphrase what Winston Churchill once said about how we shape and are subsequently shaped by our buildings, we first shape our thoughts and then our thoughts shape us. You become what you think about. A mind full of fear of failure will increase your chances of failure. A mind confident of success will help make you a success. Obsession with the fear of poverty will create poverty. Confidence in your ability to create abundance will bring you abundance. Whether you see yourself as a failure and a victim, or as a competent and successful person experiencing a temporary setback, what you see is what you’ll get.

Over 3,000 years ago, a wise person wrote in the I Ching that every negative thought must be purged before it takes root in the garden of your mind. Buddha said that no enemy can hurt you as much as your own unwise thoughts. Your thoughts create your reality. If you spend your days with fears of failure, poverty, crisis, rejection, and disappointment, that’s what you’ll get. If you spend your days with images of success, acceptance, love, happiness, and fulfillment, that’s what you’ll get.

Researchers have shown that the human brain has an extraordinary capacity to rewire itself in response to both experience and thought. The technical name for this capability is “brain plasticity.” Using a computer metaphor, it is as if by changing the software you can actually have a transformative impact on the hardware. In other words, if you make a good faith effort to change your inner self-talk, over time you will actually begin changing the physiological structure of your brain so that negative self-talk is more automatically replaced by a positive inner dialogue.