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Changing Your Thinking Can Change Your World - At Least a Little Bit

Sometimes little, even trivial things can serve to make a big point, or as W. Clement Stone said in The Success System that Never Fails, it is "little hinges that swing big doors." This blog post serves as an anecdotal example.
This coming Sunday is my birthday. Number 59 by my reckoning (as well as what's on my driver's license).

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that I started feeling a bit anxious about it, which is weird for me because (a) it's not one of the round number BDs and more importantly, (b) most years I haven't cared much about it.

Not a big deal, but for some reason, this year I found myself focusing on it. Any effort to not focus on it just got me focusing on it all the more. (Try to not think of elephants.)

Altering How You Think In Order To Change Your World

I've started listening to some CDs by Tony Robbins. One of the things he's big on is knowing the results you want and why you want them. So I started thinking, not about what was not happening, but rather on what I wanted - and why. Once I began doing that, it became easier to figure out the actions I could and might want to take.

The obvious solution was to discuss things. But there was a possible complication. Maybe there was a surprise party in the works and me bringing it up would spoil it. The odds were against it, especially since I've previously indicated I'm not much into surprise parties.  But the possibility of one existed and I had to take this into account.

What to do? I focused on this for a bit, but then realized that the focusing itself was helping to create experience I didn't want. So I switched from thinking about what was "wrong" to thinking about what I wanted.

And what I wanted was a nice celebration with my immediate family at a restaurant overlooking some body of water (ocean, lake, or a river). Why? Because I see it as a marker of our lives and our family being in a good place. It's just a marker, and in the scheme of things, it's not all that important because our lives and the family are in a good place. So this was a nice-to-have, not a must have.

After thinking about it, I opened with, "There's something I want to discuss, and I apologize in advance if I'm screwing anything up."

That's all it took. I told Donna what was on my mind and what I wanted, she was glad I brought it up (and confirmed there is, thankfully, no surprise party) and she and Kaden will figure out what the four of us ("us" now includes Kaden's fiance, Wendy) will do to celebrate the way I wanted.

I grant this was a little thing. Worth a public mention only because it serves to illustrate a point: we really do create our worlds, at least in part ... by thought and deed.

And the implication is that sometimes at least we simply need to think differently so we can act differently and thus generate a better result. No hocus pocus. Just a practical way of connecting thought, action, and results. It's not always that easy, but sometimes it is. And this was one of those times.

The Tony Robbins' audio was what I needed at the moment, and I'm grateful that I was open to learning something that could be put to immediate use.

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