I am back and on the brink of thinking!

 I am back!

And boy did these two totally different experiences in the last months of 2007 in Vietnam and New Zealand do me a lot of good.

So what happened that was so good?

During these holidays I actually got to experience how ineffective my thinking is.

Now what is so good about that, you might think.

Well….it is huge as everything I create is a result of my thoughts!

And if my thoughts are below par, you can imagine that my results are not much better!!!!

Although people such as Victoria Castle, Mike Dooley and Elyse Hope Killoran have been telling me that my thoughts are hugely important if I want to do bigger and better things with my life; did I get that?????
NO, not really, not until recently.

Because the unfamiliar situations on my holidays required me to think, I got to see that I focused my thoughts mainly on the problems and not on the solutions, which created unnecessary struggle and feelings of distress.
I saw that I got stuck in the groove of how things are a problem and that I never got into thinking solutions.

And for the first time I got to fully appreciate how I limit my life with this limited thinking; something the above mentioned teachers have tried to show me for ages.

The photo of our New Zealand holiday shows our favorite isolated beach.
It is isolated because it is not accessible by land and boats cannot come ashore often as there is usually big surf and lots of rocks.
However as we have kayaks we can land albeit with some difficulty.
So we have the beach to ourselves and we have weeks of wonderful privacy in nature.
However this year on the day we had planned to go home I was too unwell to paddle, suffering from a tummy bug.
So we had to stay put.
The situation was that food was running out and we had to get home for the cat.

Now watch how my thinking made the problems bigger and how I spent little time on thinking up a wholesome solution and having things work out.
If it had been up to me things might not have solved themselves so beautifully.
And as a contrast watch John’s thinking.

So I think:
“Why am I still unwell, why am I causing this problem, I am useless?”
You can see that there is little value in this thinking.

“What if I am still not feeling better tomorrow, we are running out of food and what about the cat.”
Again this thought is not very conducive to a solution and it is actually not such a problem as I am making it out to be. John is quite capable to kayak to a shop, buy some food and ring his mother about the cat.

“I need a boat to get me off this beach if I keep feeling this way, but they cannot come through the surf and where do I find a boat anyway?”
This is still problem focused thinking and still not aimed to create a thoroughly thought through solution that will give me confidence that the problem can be solved.

So I am fretting for the rest of the day, getting really worked up and feeling more uncomfortable as the day goes on.

This is John’s thinking:
“We cannot go home today, we have just enough food left for today and tomorrow morning; I’ll go and read my book and look at the situation tomorrow.”

No need to say he has a very productive day and mine is a total waste.

The next day I am still unwell and now I am really getting worried.

Here is what the effective thinker thinks.
John looks at me, sees I am still unwell and says; “I’ll pack up the things and stow the kayaks. Then I’ll paddle out and look for a boat that can take you off this beach. Then I’ll return to tow your kayak back.
As for the surf, let the people on the boat decide how to get you through the surf and onto their boat. They will know how best to solve that problem.”

Here is what the ineffective thinker thinks:
“Oh what a nuisance, I cannot possibly ask somebody to go through the trouble blah blah blah.”
“Oh John cannot get through that surf towing my kayak, he will kill himself and/or ruin the kayaks on the rocks.”

I have no trust in any solution; all I can think is doom and gloom and I sink back into helplessness.

However John does as he thought.
He packs up, paddles off and finds a boat full of divers only happy to help.
They stay outside the surf, I do have enough strength to swim through the surf with their help and climb onboard.
John successfully gets his and my kayak through the surf and somebody on board the rescue boat offers to paddle my boat back to the beach where the car is.
In the end everybody enjoyed the experience and the excitement, nobody was put out and I ended up home safely.

Now isn’t that interesting that on the beach all I could come up with were bad scenarios, while John was busy enjoying his life knowing there was a variety of solutions.

See the difference?