Before I experienced my spiritual awakening in December 2020, I had begun working to improve my mindset. I had been in a spiral of depression and anxiety for much of 2019 and it didn’t alleviate which is how I came to read Dana Wilde’s book, Train Your Brain, in an effort to find relief from my state of mind.
Another author and speaker in personal development, a Canadian named Bob Proctor, was also influential in helping me move out of my negative mindset and look at the world in a new way. I had always lived life as a member of the herd, I went to university so I could get a job, I got a job and the job was meant to bring me satisfaction and happiness. Except that it didn’t.
If you look up Bob Proctor on YouTube, he has been a prolific speaker around personal development since the 1960s and his material became more and more centred around how to increase your income. I had been in the business since 2016, and, although we have generated significant revenue, there was not much profitability. So what Bob Proctor was teaching caught my attention.
In addition to financial freedom, Bob also talked about freedom in all other areas of life, time and personal freedom. His instructions around how to move from where you currently are in life to where you want to be were similar to the approach Dana Wilde used in positive mindset.
And so I began thinking about how my work to develop a positive mindset led me to being aware of Bob Proctor and the two approaches combine to create the five step formula I now promote as the way to raise your frequency and develop your intuition in my Five Steps to Freedom program.
I use these five steps all the time, every day, in a continuous cycle because no matter how often I try to remember to think positively, a negative thought or experience will still come up! It doesn’t mean I’m doing anything wrong, it doesn’t mean the process isn’t working but it does mean that I still have an unconscious mind full of negative thoughts that bubble up when I’m not paying attention!
It’s critical that I recognize the cycle I am creating in my own mind. Train Your Brain outlines how the reticular activating system (the RAS) in the brain is like a matchmaker, looking for things in the outside world to match up the thoughts going on in our mind. Essentially, the RAS is creating a loop of sameness.
So if you are feeling anxiety and depression and thinking to yourself “I feel so depressed, I feel so sad, I feel so bad, I hate the winter, the winter makes me feel so bad” the RAS is looking around outside to match those thoughts and add to your burden of proof that things are terrible!
The way Train Your Brain shows how to break this cycle is to first notice the way your brain is matching up your thoughts. I noticed this for the first time when I started crying automatically in the car – this was a cycle for me and my brain knew my repetitive thinking and showed me – oh you are driving your car, this means you feel bad and so here are some feelings to support that thinking.
After noticing – awareness – you take steps to interrupt the current cycle. In the book, Dana tells us the goal at first is simply relief, relief from the negative cycle. So, we start with soothing, slightly better thoughts to interrupt the pattern.
Soothing thoughts such as “I may have felt depressed before but now I know I can feel better just by thinking positive thoughts” or “ever since I started to listening to Dana Wilde I notice I am starting to feel better”. From the soothing thoughts, you can add more positive thoughts “Things usually work out for me” or “things are working out for me” or “everything is working out for me”.
Building the positive thoughts gently, over the next days and weeks helped to lift me out of my anxiety and depression and I actually started to feel good again. Once I began to feel better and literally train my brain by implanting positive thoughts to replace the negative thought loops, I started to get good ideas, insights and felt motivated and interested in my life again.
The book, Train Your Brain, shows us how to use a positive mantra or a repetition to make yourself happier. How to break out of a negative cycle by interrupting it. By breaking away from the old, habitual patterns in our life that no longer serve us and build new, helpful patterns of thinking that create growth and happiness. And as a result of starting to feel happier, all of these other opportunities started to pop up into my life.
So, what do you do to continue building a positive mindset, feeling better, and noticing all the great ideas, insights and circumstances that flow in as soon as I move from negative thoughts to positive? You continue the cycle, day in and day out and you notice what mantras or phrases provide relief and lead to more happiness.
Do you use positive thinking to interrupt negative thoughts? What have you found that works well for you? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!
If you’d like to learn more about Five Steps to Freedom: Create Your Ideal Life Using Your Mind and Intuition, please connect with me I’d love to help you!