Peter Hollins - Think With Intention: Reprogram Your Mindset, Perspectives, and Thoughts. Control Your Fate and Unlock Your Potential.

Peter Hollins

Think With Intention

Reprogram Your Mindset, Perspectives, and Thoughts. Control Your Fate and Unlock Your Potential.

Reprogram Your Mindset, Perspectives, and Thoughts. Control Your Fate and Unlock Your Potential.

By Peter Hollins,

Author and Researcher at petehollins.com

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Think With Intention: Reprogram Your Mindset, Perspectives, and Thoughts. Control Your Fate and Unlock Your Potential

Strong Opinions, Weakly Held

A Shift in Perspective

Granting Yourself Permission

The World Keeps Rotating

True Risks and False Prophets

How to Take a Leap

The Sweetest Suffering

Curiosity Will Save You, Not Kill You

Back to the Beginnings

One Last Stab at Curiosity

A Complaint-Free World

Comparison is the Death of Well-Being

If you were seriously committed to having a strong, healthy body, you might decide that you needed a smart workout plan, a diet regimen that worked for you, a doctors checkup, and so on. If you really wanted to learn a complex new skill, youd look into getting training from teachers and experts, and start putting in the hours of practice. And if you wanted to accomplish a once-in-a-lifetime style adventure, youd absolutely invest time in planning it, finding clear, practical ways to bring the whole dream to life. Wherever there is a goal, there should be a sequence of events to lead you there.

While it seems perfectly natural to have a proactive, diligent mindset when it comes to developing certain areas of our lives, the same cant always be said about the way we approach our mindset itself.

Many people instinctively know that the worthwhile things in life require conscious effort and focus, yet somehow we forget that the mindset one inhabits is as dynamic and changeable as our physical bodies, our skills, our dreams. Scratch thatour perspective is more dynamic and changeable, and even more important to achieving the life that we want. We would never expect our dream physique or ultimate vacation to materialize overnight just because we had good intentions. Yet so many of us relinquish responsibility when it comes to our own mindsets, perhaps assuming that how we think will simply work itself out!

What does it really mean to be intentional in your thinking?

In this book, well be focusing on the art of consciously choosing your thoughts, your perspective, your attitude and your entire worldview. Why? Because thoughts inform behavior, and behavior informs reality. In a way, every shift you make in your life is first a mental one. Nobody ever achieved a goal, overcame a weakness or learnt something new without a genuine change in mindset first.

When you are a person who takes conscious, responsible control over your thoughts, you put yourself in the drivers seat and take ownership of your reality. You are no longer reactive and at the mercy of forces outside your understanding. Instead you are at the center of your experience, the elements of your conscious mind serving you, rather than being a slave to distraction, addiction, negativity, apathy, and anxiety. The world looks scary if you feel that youre subject to the whims of your emotions and thoughts. Now imagine what it would feel like to change your self-narrative at the flip of a switch. No, its not easy and its certainly not something that comes naturally to us, but its quite possible.

If two unfortunate souls get into a serious car accident, their mindsets, thoughts, and beliefs surrounding recovery and coping with trauma and injury will certainly determine how their lives go from that moment on. Some people excel and thrive despite adversity, while others wilt and fall into depression. Intentional thinking is the reason behind that distinction.

In the chapters that follow, well see that thinkingand thus livingbetter is simple, but not necessarily easy. Many self-help books offer you a narrow, predictable perspective on the problems of life, but few take a broader look at the perspective itself, and how to work on that level. In the chapters that follow well be zooming out and thinking about how we think. This meta approach is not about deciding which life philosophy is better, but rather about mastering the skill of discerning which approach will work best, in which situation, and to which end. Indeed, the first step is to even become aware that there are different approaches to the problems in your life.

Intentional thinking (and indeed all the mindsets well consider in this book) rests ultimately on one very important premise: we are not our thoughts.

Thoughts are also not necessarily representative of reality. In the same way, a momentary lapse or emotional outburst does not change who you are. We can lose sight of the fact that we are thinking, dreaming beings who obsessively tell ourselves stories day in and day out. We can start to wholly believe the stories we tell ourselves, so much that we forget that any of it was a story in the first place. We start to mistake our images of reality, our thoughts and feelings, for reality itself.

When you are living an unconscious, unintentional life, the flow of thought traffic runs unchecked and unobserved. You go with the flow and take the path of least resistance, never even really aware that its a path at all. For instance, when someone disagrees with you, you become angry and tell yourself a story about what they did and why, react to your own anger, and speak out to attack that person. You become further and further embroiled in a tumble of thoughts and feelings without ever considering that you are, indeed, having thoughts and feelings, and that your experience would be entirely different had you given yourself the opportunity to choose something different. And of course, thoughts are unconscious, instant, and often detrimental.

We are not our thoughts. We are also not our feelings. Both of them are transient and ever-changing. They emerge, and fall away again. Much of the time, they come unbidden, like the weather. The question of who you are if not your thoughts and emotions is a deep one, and we wont delve into questions of philosophy here. But perhaps in beginning to explore the range of conscious agency thats possible when you become intentional in your living, you can start to feel more like the being behind the thoughts and emotions. The one watching them come and go. The director of the play, the master conductor who can zoom out, not identifying with any one instrument in the moment, but seeing the music as a whole.

When you forget yourself and identify with the fleeting sensations of your experience as it unfolds, its as though you momentarily forget that youre watching a movie that is not real, and will end. Automatic thinking runs on its own, powered by the momentum from your interactions with others and the environment, with history, culture, and your current beliefs. But the moment you notice these thoughts, you take a step outside of them, and realize that you are not your thoughts.

And its a short step from noticing to wondering, how can I change this? How can this moment be improved? What do I really want?

The shift from an unconscious and reactive mindset to an aware, deliberate and intentional one is subtle and yet world-changing. It wont always be easy, but if you follow the roadmap this book provides, you will find yourself on the way not only to a better mindset, but a better life.