You Can’t Live Any Better Than You Think

One of our oft-repeated phrases in Neuro-Semantics is—the quality of your thinking is the quality of your life. It also determines the quality of your communications, the quality of your relationships, your health and well-being, your productivity, and a thousand other things. Thinking lies at the core of all things human. Yet most people don’t know that. Many suspect it. Those who have read in the positive thinking books or books about inspiration strongly suspect it, they may even believe it. Yet most people do not live as if thinking governs the quality of life.

Consequently if you do not understand and believe this, you will not focus on training your thinking skills. Why would you? Is it because, “Anyone can think. Everyone thinks.”? And that’s true, but not everyone thinks equally well. That’s not a statement about intelligence. It is a statement about how to entertain an idea and work it over in your mind. It’s a statement about the process of thinking rather than the end-product of what you think.

When we run the training, Thinking for Humans, which is our first Brain Camp (there are two others), people are amazed right from day one about what true authentic thinking is and how little they actually do. They are also delighted to discover how to think. They often say, “No one ever taught me how to think, only what to think.”

Our task in Neuro-Semantics is not to teach or train you in what to think. We do not do that in coaching, consulting, or therapy. What to think is your privilege and responsibility. We focus on the process of thinking— how to think and how to think about thinking. And ultimately, it is your meta-thinking that gives you control over your mind, your emotions, your speech, your behaviors, your relationships, and everything else. How are your meta-thinking skills? When was the last time you trained them?

You can clear out a lot of health problems by changing and upgrading your thinking. How is that? Well, if you can think yourself unwell, stressed out, and think yourself in all sorts of psycho-somatic illnesses, you can unthink that and set out for a more healthy way to think about your body and its multiple relationships in the world—to food, sleep, activity, etc. If people can worry themselves into headaches, neckaches, ulcers, etc., if people can use stress-thinking to create strain on their heart and lungs and damage their cardio-vascular system—then people can unlearn those thinking patterns and learn new and better ones.

Then there is joy, the basic and essential joy of life, of being alive, of breathing and being a sentient being. If you stepped on your Joy Meter in your bathroom, what would it register? Are you getting a lot of joy out of life? Are you getting a minimum of joy? Are you stressing yourself out about things? The secret of joy also goes to thinking. You can have money, wealth, status, a great job, friends, etc., and be miserable. Lots of people run that pattern! Joy is independent of all of that. Joy is a function of the way you think and the quality of your thinking. Many pursue ‘happiness’ via things, wealth, social importance, degrees, beauty, entertainment, etc. and completely overlook the inside–out process of true joy.

Thinking is so much deeper, so much more profound, and so much more enlivening than most people think. Thinking is enlivening? How can that be? Isn’t thinking an instrumental process for getting things or surviving? Yes, and it is also much more. When you truly and deeply think, your brain comes alive. And with that, your body becomes more dynamic, healthier, and able to provide you more energy for your goals.

Conversely, failure to do good quality thinking lies at the heart of all mental illnesses, emotional misery, and basic ineffectiveness. If you are unproductive, or worse counter-productive, something is wrong in your thinking. If you cannot achieve your goals, the problem is more than likely in your thinking. Are you ready for a Thinking Make-Over? That’s what Brain Camp I is all about. Check it out.