Changing Your Tune

Your life is a testimonial
Your life is evidence of your desire to know and grow. You need never stop learning.
Your mind can be developed ad infinitum, unto infinity. The only limit to your imagination is the one you put on it.
Why would I limit myself to songs I’ve been singing? Why can’t I make up a new tune? What will enliven me, give me great and wondrous new insights, understandings and perceptions?

Blissful Loops
It has been said that “ignorance is bliss”, but bliss in not necessarily a sign of ignorance.
Where we may love to look for correlations may need modification from time to time to maintain a flexible and fresh approach to life.
It could be said that we are defined by self created repetitive mental mantras, also known as self-talk.
What if we were able to objectively notice the nature of that self-talk and alter it in such a way that the change in meaning helped us to migrate to a more fulfilling state of mind and way of life.
What if we decided after writing down our oft repeated comments on reality that we wanted a change in our reality, and lo behold we accepted that we had the power to actually imagine that things could be different, then we could also imagine how we could change our thinking and our reality with relative, but deliberate, ease.
For instance, we could decide to start telling ourselves that we had a good memory, regardless of what others were telling us. The trick could be as simple as acknowledging the situations when we actually remember things, even if those situations are very basic to our life, and relatively rare. Adopting this new habit would allow us strengthen our self image and encourage us to spend a few, seemingly endless, seconds recalling something we had forgotten. Exercising that memory muscle will allow us to keep it strong and healthy.

Affirming ad infinitum
And if you are not happy with the thoughts you are thinking, change them through creative effort, or make a determination to read inspiring and uplifting thoughts or ideas repeatedly until their life-giving vitality wash over your consciousness until your possibility horizons are infinitely expanded.

More Than Positive Thinking
You may have heard or read that the secret of changing your life through positive thinking isn’t necessarily possible, that is, you’ll be disappointed if you expect positive thinking by itself to bring everything you want into your life.
Introspection and self-affirmation are more than positive thinking, they are reprogramming techniques that if persistently and faithfully practiced can produce appreciable results. But how is it different from positive thinking?

One must first acknowledge the nature of their thoughts. Are they positive or negative? Have you defined what you want? Written it down? By writing, as I’m said, one can see how to begin to see what they are destined for, and how to redesign that trajectory. Relentless analysis can help one refine the effort and the goal. If one doesn’t find their attitude changing, then one has to ask: why isn’t it?.
We can also ask ourselves: What am I missing? What do I need to do to make the critical difference? Often, we need to do what is un-habitual, what we don’t necessarily like or enjoy, to change the conditions that will illuminate a new angle or approach for achieving a significant improvement. Be open to learning from others. What will work for one person, may not work for another. Some teachers suggest that self-effort isn’t enough and that one may need to align themselves with a Divine power greater than themselves in order to overcome persistent and long held habit patterns. Conceive of whatever transcendent being, power, presence, or personality will empower and enliven your creative will to win with wisdom.

Actors and actions
Often times it’s easy to judge someone, label them accordingly, and condemn their actions, rather than trying to understand them. We’ve all done it, and it’s been done to us. But any competent builder of character and personality development will tell you that a failing doesn’t make a failure. In fact, many business leaders will tell you that failure is part of the process. If one doesn’t fail at something, one is not trying hard enough.
Of course, the idea is to do one’s best, but in the process of doing something new, one’s efforts may not result in a desirable outcome.
We can take especial care in monitoring the progress of our efforts, and not waste time beating ourselves up while trying again with a different tack, and an enterprising attitude.

Watch your attitude
When I was growing up and my thinking was negative, My mother would tell me, “don’t take that attitude.”
Of course, the first time I heard that I had to say: “I don’t understand”
Eventually, I realized that she meant don’t judge yourself or others based on what they said or did.
“Don’t think that way,” she said. That is, don’t think that what people did or said was meant as a personal affront to me. It was what it was, an action or comment that was probably based on a misunderstanding, faulty reasoning, or ignorance.
Don’t think in a negative, self-deprecating, or hypercritical manner. Condemn the action and not the actor.
If you made a mistake, if you did a stupid thing, then see it for what it is. You did something stupid. Figure out why, and how you can avoid doing it again in the future.
In the introspective writing process as in life, we learn to understand our attitudes and make them serve us.

When we Frame
Roberta Ness has done some amazing research, analysis, and exposition on the nature of creativity and innovation. One of the concepts she uses is the idea of a “frame”, which is a set of expectations, beliefs, and understandings that we all entertain about a variety of things, people, circumstances, and outcomes. The idea of “frame” reminds me of a “paradigm”. I encountered this word for the first time in a transformational program decades ago.
The value of acknowledging or understanding this concept of a “frame” or a “paradigm” or a “box” is that it enables us to see how our thinking, perception, and creativity is stifled, reined in or circumscribed by the nature of the frames we have created for ourselves.
What frames? – we may ask. I think it’s common that people repeat over and over to themselves the same ideas. If we are quiet for a long period, longer than usual, a practice that may be rare to the majority of people, we will notice that our minds are in a rut, repeating the same self-talk over and over, thus reinforcing the same ideas and frames that have become our worldview or our accepted reality.
If we take the time to regularly write down our thoughts, this practice can enable us, as I have said many times before, to see patterns in our thinking that we can then change, alter, modify, and transform, thus initiating, and embedding new ways of thinking and acting that can improve our self-perception, and appreciation for the world and everything in it.