How to Change Your Life by Changing Your Thinking?

If you are anything like me, you have an inkling or a feeling that you are destined for more. But you look around and you have an “average life”.

I tend to wonder, all the time if there is something out? Is there something I am supposed to know or do to change my life?

In Re-Create Your Life, Morty Lefkoe suggests we are what we believe. Our world is a construction of our beliefs. We see what we think, not what is objectively in front of us. What we believe is how we construct reality.

He further suggests positive beliefs broaden our world while our negative beliefs limit us. Can our beliefs be that powerful to change our lives? This got me thinking and I decided to experiment. Could changing my mind change my life? Could a mindset change actually make a difference in my life?

So I decided to have a positive mindset for a week and I kept thinking positive thoughts. And I kept thinking positive thoughts and Frankly, nothing changed.

Positive Action

Then it dawned on me that I was missing another important ingredient: Positive action.

So I decided to engage in a positive action that would drive my positive mindset change. In my opinion, the best advice on making lifestyle changes that I have come across is from David Goggins. In his book, Can’t Hurt Me, he suggests you write down all your excuses in life. Write down all the things that are preventing you from achieving your goals. Write down every single excuse. You then flip the script by beginning to work on each excuse but ONE excuse at a time.

For David, his number 1 excuse was he hated learning. He said it wasn’t that I was “dumb” but I was lazy. So he decided to educate himself. He eventually developed a system to help him learn. The system involved him writing down everything he was learning to enable him to imprint it on his brain. That literally meant he had to rewrite whole textbooks several times, to have any chance of remembering anything.

As he explained, if he had an exam he would start learning the year before. He would buy spiral notebooks and start transcribing by hand his textbook and notebooks several times. He would rewrite everything in the textbooks about 10 times before his brain would register the information. Easier study methods such as reading and testing himself through questions didn’t work for him. If he needed to remember, he needed to write everything down several times from his textbooks.

My Experience

Now back to taking positive action, I decided to take his advice and listed all the things I felt were holding me back in life (My Excuses). The number one on the list was my health. Unlike most people, I almost always seem to be exhausted. I am almost always out of breath ( Unknown to me at this time in 2020, I had a mild case of Asthma). So on 25 October 2020, I decided to run. I decided to run every day for a year. I decided to fix my primary excuse for having an average life.

Now believe me running is the most difficult thing I have ever had to do because you guessed it I am almost always out of breath. But I continued on running and still run to this day past a year. To use an analogy to explain how much I hate running if you hate reading and reading a book feels like the biggest punishment in the world that’s running to me.

Along the way, I decided to measure my progress and get myself a Fitbit. I was able to improve my resting heart rate from 71 BPM to the current rate of 63 BPM from October 2020 to date.

How my life has changed?

So how has this changed my life? For starters, I accomplish more. I take more chances in life. I have decided to start this blog, a podcast, and a YouTube channel because you guessed it-I have more energy. All of the above is a direct result of having more to live for and being alive more.

For the most part, Leon Howard, (The Wallstreet Trapper) says it in the best way possible. He explains FEAR as meaning Finally -Existing – Average – Reality. Through changing my mind and taking positive action, I am finally beginning to exit my average reality. I am finally starting to live a fuller life.

If you feel there is something more out there in the world and there is so much more. Give the process a try. If you feel you want to expand your life from your average reality, I would suggest you write down all your excuses. My excuses were always tired, not enough time, and no need to bother. All completely untrue.

Write down all your excuses and choose the one most important excuse and work on it. As David Goggins said, start slowly, one step at a time and before you know it you are running Marathons.