Chapter 216

It’s always your state of mind and your thinking that produces how you feel and respond.  - Jon Gordon

Our states of mind and our thinking are directly related to the stories we tell ourselves, just as I was pointing out in the last chapter. Those stories affect us in powerful ways and always put us in a certain frame of mind, always leading  us in a certain direction in our thinking.  What we think about something pretty much defines all that we are gonna get from that something, negative or positive.  Our thinking puts all the structure to a psychic room where we experience things, and out of that room comes our feelings.

These mental constructs are the substance of our lives. This is the framing that makes our understanding of what is going on around us possible. But we also influence that framing, its not just all external, and here is how we respond. Most of the time I don’t think people do much more than react. You have your state of mind and what you are thinking, so that is the context, the mental room in which you are in, and so when stimuli come I believe most of us have deeply set paths and patterns to how we react to said stimuli. I believe most of feelings and responses are damn near automatic.

I believe this, because I have dissected this in my own life and have come to realize the tremendous amount of energy required to intercept the automated feelings and responses. This is why I think the pathways are deeply set in most of us. But disrupting those deeply set pathways can be very enlightening. 

Each time I am able to change the way I feel and respond to a normal situation is like stopping an earthquake or redirecting a tsunami, but it’s worth it!

The keys to this mental room are in our thinking.  And in our state of mind, which is just another way of saying the stories that we tell ourselves.