What is thought work?

You may have heard me talk about your need to do the thought work. What is thought work? How does it benefit you in normal day-to-day life? How does it help you become a better man? Why would any man want to even do thought work? Who has the time to just sit around and think? I am a busy dude who barely has time to get home, much less time to sit around and think.

I get it This may seem like a really dumb idea. Why does one need to work on how one thinks? We have been thinking since we were born. So are you trying to say we are thinking wrong? Well not wrong but many times our thoughts are not intentional. We just let thoughts waft in and out of our heads with no examination as to whether that thought was a good thought or not.

This is why so many people are running around and living their life in emotional childhood. This is why so. many people are not willing to try something new. This is why you haven’t been able to find fulfillment yet. Your unintentional thoughts are keeping you from your objective.

Why Thought work is Needed

What is it about thinking that is so important? Well, your thoughts create your results. If you think your wife is going to cheat on you then you are actually going to do stuff that pushes her to cheat on you.

You see our brains are computers. It goes out and finds what you are looking for. Why are you fat? It will tell you why you are fat. Your mind will do it in a way that will cause you to feel bad about your body mass state. So you will want to subdue those emotions and without thinking you will eat more and drink empty calories. and add on even more weight. All because you wanted to know why you are fat. Your brain showed you why. This is evident in the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon or when you go buy a green Toyota all of a sudden you see the very same green Toyota all over the place.

If you were willing to be intentional in your thinking you would be able to see the thoughts that you don’t want to have and you could start trading those useless thoughts for thoughts that are better suited to helping you make your goals. Like how can you lose weight? Your brain will start noticing weight loss opportunities.

How Thought work Helps

Thought work is the intentional observation of your thoughts. Then actually asking why that thought is being had. Why do you believe what you believe? This is where the basket of thoughts comes into play. You are able to change the thoughts you have because beliefs are only thoughts that we perceive to be true. So does a belief really serve you or is it just a thought that you were told to have?

Much like the old story of the newlyweds. A young couple Had just come home from their honeymoon and the wife wanted to wow her new husband with her cooking skills. So she went to the store and got a roast. When she arrived home she started preparing the meal with her husband in the kitchen. One of the first things she does is cut the roast into two and put each half in a pan of its own.

The husband questions this and the wife said that is how her mom made a roast. Why did her mom cut it into two? She didn’t know, so she called up her mom and asked why she cut the roast into two pieces. Mom said that it was what the bride’s grandmother had always done. So they called grandma up and asked her. Grandmother laughed and said, “because my pan was too small”. You see sometimes we just think we have to do something a certain way when in reality it doesn’t have to be that way.

Yet examining why you believe something is a great exercise and helps you in many different ways.

Helps with accepting your emotions

Many people go through life believing that their emotions just happen to them. This is actually not a fact but a belief because why would you want to believe you have control over your emotions? It is easier to just think that emotions are just floating around waiting for you to walk by and SMACK! anger, WHOMP! Jealousy. Yet that isn’t the case your emotions are created by your thoughts.

So when you are doing the thought work you are able to see why you are feeling frustrated. You can even examine that feeling and see why is it that you don’t like it. Who knows maybe if you look at it close enough you can actually like the feeling of discomfort because you know that something wonderful is coming around the corner.

Help you find thoughts that don’t serve you

Much like beliefs you also see why you think the way you think when you sit down and do the thought work on a certain problem. Is it your thoughts around money or are you afraid of success? Maybe you had an uncle who you respected that said you wouldn’t make it as a writer and you actually don’t know why he said that.

Do you want to keep those thoughts? If so then alright if not then toss them out like a last year’s holey underwear.

Helps you lose weight

What? Yeah doing your thought work can help you lose weight or achieve any other goal you set in Infront of yourself. As I mentioned your thoughts create your results. So what thoughts are you having that are keeping you from your success? Is it that you are fat and ugly and no chick would like you? Then that will be your result. Is it that life keeps throwing some type of emergency your way so you can’t make progress toward your goal? Then when an emergency happens you are going to go toward it.

There are so many thoughts you can have and when you come to recognize that the problems you are facing are because of the thoughts you have you will actually start finding time to do the thought work. What? You still don’t have time? how do the most important people in the world have time? They actually know how to spend their time wisely. They schedule their days a week at a time. It is called Monday Hour One. The stories you tell yourself are just stories. If you want to lose weight you have to start listening to the lies you tell yourself and do the thought work around them and decide if you want to keep believing them.

Helps you get into shape

Why are you an out-of-shape man? All the thoughts you are telling yourself and others are the thoughts that are keeping you out of shape. You have the ability to change that thought and get for your wife/girlfriend. All it takes to start working towards a body like Captain America is putting in the effort. to put in that effort you have to change the stories you are telling yourself. To change those stories you need to do the thought work.

Do the thought work and you will have more motivation to get out of bed and move more. All it takes is changing the thought you have about whatever that obstacle is.

Helps you Find your purpose

Many men say they don’t have a purpose, or that their purpose is to be where they are. If that was the case then why are they so unhappy? Why are they not fulfilled? Because that is the lie they are running with. Are you supposed to be in middle management or were you meant to do something greater? You can be greater but that often scares men from even trying. So you have to do the thought work on your dream and vision and see if it is what you truly want. When you find that you are well on your way to finding your purpose.

Helps you to have a differentiated Relationship with your wife/girlfriend

What? Let’s say you are home and your wife gets home from work and she is pissed off. I mean she is big mad. How does that make you feel? Most men who are nice guys instantly try to change the emotional state of their spouse because of how they feel about the thought of their wife being mad. They have thoughts about how their wife isn’t in the mental state they are comfortable with so she must need help changing it. They don the Mr. Fixit Belt and rush into the bedroom and start trying to fix something they have no idea why. First off, you can’t control her feelings so you are wanting to do the impossible, and second because you can’t control your wife you are only going to piss her off more. Let her have her own emotions

The thought work is seeing when you want to jump into Mr. Fixit. When did your wife being pissed off your concern? Because you love her? When did love become about controlling another person’s emotional state? It’s not love it is all about how you feel. Love is letting her have her emotions and let them wash over her and you just be there to help where you actually can.

She won’t think you love her if you don’t? If that is the case then you are married to a manipulator. You can’t control her feelings so she is the only person who can control how she feels. That is the same for you. You can change how you feel about your wife feeling anything and that actually helps the relationship more. Allowing your wife to be an individual human with her own life and you to be your own human being living your life. Yeah together yall are superpowers but yall are also individuals.

Helps you find the successes you are wanting to achieve.

Because you are finding your purpose and you are changing your beliefs you are able to change everything about your life. You are able to find more and more success when you find out how to do good thought work. The key is in the people you spend the most time with. The key is to learn more about how your thoughts create your results. Coaching will help with this too

How do you do Thought Work?

Now we have talked about all the good thought work will do now how does it work? The way it works can be quite easy or difficult depending on how much work you are willing to put into it. It becomes easier the more you do it. Eventually, you can cut some of the steps out and just jump into the examination part without the extra steps. When starting out most of your thought work will center around your thought downloads.

Thought download

A thought download is actually easy to do. Grab a notebook or any piece of paper if you do not have a notebook and start writing down all the thoughts you have in your head. all the conversations you have had in your head. Every little story and excuse and reason and truth you tell yourself. write each of those down. The first few days you do this you will get a lot of crap out of your way. You actually will find that you can think clearer. That is because your brain is crappy at remembering things and when you write something down your brain doesn’t worry about it anymore you have committed it to paper. Do this for a few days. This helps get all the junk removed.

Now once you have done that for a few days you can actually start working on your thoughts themselves. Now, what are your thoughts about a certain circumstance? Remember circumstances are just the facts not your thoughts about the facts. So once you have written all the thoughts down start examining each one one by one. Ask yourself some questions.

• Do you believe that is true?
• Do I want to keep this thought?
• Does this thought serve me?
• What if that belief wasn’t true?
• Do I really believe this?

You see just start examining what you have written down and as you keep sifting through the thoughts you will find many thoughts that will keep coming up. Those thoughts may need extra work to get it fully changed. That is because your thoughts can be a habit. So it will take time to change that habit to the new set of thoughts that better serve you.

If you want help then schedule a call and lets see how we can work together.