How To Reprogram Your Mind (for Positive Thinking)

People ask me, brendan, how do I reprogram my mind? And I'm like, that's kind of creepy. Are you a cyborg? Why did somebody one time, like ninjutsu your brain and hypnotize you into thinking something horrible like, why do you need to reprogram anything? Most adults don't need to reprogram something. They just need to program it for the first time. You know, it's like there was never actually any programming that happened anywhere. There were just all these patterns of incidences and these circumstances that have all coalesced into some of these automatic thoughts and behaviors that they aren't necessarily being responsible for. They're just. They come up automatically and they happen to them. It's not like someone said, I want you to think this, I want you to think this, I want you. No one ever sat you down. And probably just like, maybe it happened. But for most people, that never happened. What they're really saying is, brendan, I need to get a hold of my mind, man. Because sometimes I just got these constant negative recurring thoughts that come up. I can't get rid of them. Or sometimes I get obsessed about this one bad thing that happened to me. Or sometimes I say, you know, I just can't even control my attention, dude. So what they're really struggling to do is to master their mind in a more sort of capable way. So let's talk about how your thoughts are generated. Some of this you might already know if you read my book the Charge or you've seen some of my other work in High Performance Academy. We. We talk a lot about how do you master your psychology. I'm gonna give you one simple framework to think through and then some tips and tools and strategies you can immediately input into your life to better manage your mind. The first thing, if you're having negative recurring thoughts and feelings that are coming up, those are really. They're just. They're easy. And here's what I mean by that. You know, we kind of have two systems of thought. Psychologists like to say. Now we have the System 1 theories in which the. The System 1 is your automatic just unconscious, immediate thoughts and impulses that come up from your body that usually your brain is just saying, hey, dude, we've thought through this before, or, hey, dude, we're trying to protect you. So it's running at a very baseline, easy, energetic level. Your brain loves to optimize itself. It doesn't like to have to do a whole lot of thinking. It just likes to say, what do we already know? How can we apply it to the situation? So if you had fears in the past and a similar situation is here, your body just generates those fears and says, hey, man, run away again. If you had challenges in the past and you want to protect yourself, your brain just says, hey, protect yourself. Right now. We're worried about this, but sometimes those are not helpful thoughts. They're automatic, but they're not actually helpful. It's just your brain saying, this is the easiest route we know. And part of becoming a more mature, conscious, enlightened person is to better take control of our system two, which is our sort of conscious dashboard on our mind, or our ability to more directly work, control, generate and create our own thoughts and behaviors in the moment, not relying too much on just the things that come up for us. Now, of course, we're always going to. Most of our lives is very systemic one driven, very unconscious, automatic. We're just going through the motions. But the people who achieve the peak amounts of success, the highest performers in the world, have said, you know what? I need to discipline my mind to support me. Even when it comes up with an automatic immediate thoughts, I want those to be positive and buoyant and confident and strong. Something that leads me to healthy decisions for my life, not just things that protect me. And so I think that we have to learn how to do that. One of the simple ways to do that is this framework to understand how thoughts develop into strong and automatic thoughts in our lives. I call the framework rwid, which stands for Relative Weight of Importance and Duration. People often who have negative recurring thoughts and feelings in their life. The reason those keep coming up all the time is because they. They at some point in their life or continually are giving those thoughts, the negative ones, more attention than necessarily any other thoughts. In other words, the relative weight that they give those thoughts is quite high, and they give a lot of importance to them. So those thoughts are very important to me right now. And they're durational. They last over a period of time. They keep thinking about those thoughts, thinking about those thoughts, thinking about those thoughts. And it's all that repetition that seals it in the back of their head. And now their head says, oh, this is an easy thing, I know this one. And it pulls it forward. So that simple repetition, because they made it important and they thought about it a lot, it keeps coming up for them over and over and over again. So there's two negative. There's a good negative thing about that and a positive thing. The negative is if you keep obsessing about negative Things your mind will be automatically conditioned to bring it up more and more and more often without your control, just automatically. The positive aspect is we can use that same skill set and that same rule to apply positive thoughts into our own life. We can give positive thinking, positive questions, positive approaches to life, a lot of importance in our life and a lot of focus and focus on them and give a lot of duration to them over a period of time. And they get sealed in the brain as well. And now the brain says, well, that's easy. Automatically thinks about it. So for me personally, I've done this so much in my life that I just have. I automatically think about the best possible outcomes. And almost everything I do, I used to think about the negative outcomes. I thought that's not supporting me. So how did I do that? Well, leveraging RWID it helped. And let me break it down for you a little bit about how you could do this. Because the first thing you have to do in order to improve your mind is take total control of your attention and notice the where are your thoughts right now? At a very continual basis you have to think, where are my thoughts right now? Are they supporting me or are they automatically coming up negative and self protective in ways that are not advancing my life? Just to be aware, to be conscious of what's going on in your body, in your sense of feeling and emotion and the sense of the thoughts you're actually having. Just start paying attention, you know, for a lot of people because they've never done this before and it's hard to remind them to do it. It's like simple, here's what I want you to do. Just start paying attention to your thoughts. Anytime you're in line, anytime you're in line. From now on, if you're in line at Starbucks, just say, I'm in line at Starbucks. Brendan said, think about my thoughts. What are my thoughts saying right now? Just checking in. You're in line in traffic waiting for the next car. Just sit and think, what are my thoughts right now? And just notice what you've been thinking about. The more we notice what we've been thinking about, the more we can interrupt what we've been thinking about. See, if we just allow that feeling to keep coming up and you don't pay attention to it, our life can be very frazzled and very highly anxious. But once we say what's my mind on right now? And we redirect it, that is where personal power comes from. First awareness, right? And understanding and the consciousness of what's going on, but then the ability now to be self directed, to choose what we want to focus on. So first we're attentive to it and then redirect it. If it's negative, it's not supporting you. Redirect it. How do you redirect it? First and foremost, you just say what would be the opposite of this negative thing? Then you think about the positive thing and you focus on that and you repeat it to yourself. For many people, that might include closing their eyes, just visualizing a more positive outcome, thinking about the more positive outcome, thinking about more positive outcome, thinking about the more positive outcome, focusing on with their eyes closed, and that visualization of a more positive outcome of how things could turn out well, or how would the situation could be better, or even just what are the next steps I should take? Visualizing that and assigning a high amount of importance and duration to it. Meaning making that thing important to us. By making it. How do you make something important? You give it a sensation. You feel that thing, you, you sense it. You sense what your next step would be. You sense how it would feel if the outcome would be better, how it feel emotionally, psychologically, spiritually for that thing to be up. Allow it to have a lot of emotion to it, pay attention to it, your eyes closed, you see that thing, you feel it, you sense a different step, you know what you're going to do, you pay attention to it and you keep focusing on that. Just over a period of minutes. Keep focusing and keep focusing, focusing. When your mind automatically wants to go back to easy, which might be negative, you go, no, no, no, no, I don't want to, I don't want. I'm not into easy right now. I'm into conditioning my mind. Focus, focus, focus, focus. Give attention duration and sensation to it. Attention, duration, sensation. Attention duration, sensation. Visualization, visualization. Visualization. It's repetition of that positive alternative to a negative impulse that comes up that gives us personal power. Let me say it again. It's that attention to that positive alternative over attention to repeating that negative impulse or thought that gives us personal power. It's not that we're going to someday wake up in the perfect world in which we don't have negative thoughts. There's plenty of times I struggle too. I come up with this. I'm thinking about a new dream, a new goal. I'm going to go interview some, you know, major celebrity or we got a big time celebrity client and I get a little nervous and I can start thinking about all these negative things that could happen if I screw up, my mind immediately interrupts that. Now because my mind goes, relative weight of importance and duration. Brendon, you can either give this thought more time and energy and focus, or you can just stop it and force your brain creatively force it to direct it to a different possible alternative Force it literally go, oh, I'm sensing this negative thing over here is coming up for me. I'm sensing it. Stop. Okay, get to work, brain. What positive thing could I create? And focus on and close your eyes and think about it and focus on it, and focus on it, and focus on it and build it out, make it elaborate in your own mind so you can visualize and see it and feel it and focus on it, focus on it, focus on it, focus on it. Literally later on in the evening, focus on it again, focus on it again. You start building in that capacity. Now, if this all sounds way too philosophical and you're like, dude, how do I land this? How do I make it happen? Here's a very simple thing you can do to reprogram your mind. Create a sheet of two simple things. Very simple things. I want you to write five questions down that you're going to ask yourself three or four times a day. Five questions that are positive for yourself that you're going to every day. You're going to wake up in the morning, you're going to read these questions to yourself. You're going to answer them, you're going to read them, you're going to answer them every morning, then at lunch, read the questions, answer them at night, read the questions, answer them. These can be questions like, what could I feel incredibly grateful for right now? How could I surprise or flirt with somebody right now? How could I have fun right now? Positive things like that, right? How could I demonstrate love or excellence right now? Ask these questions in the morning, ask them in the afternoon, ask them at night. By asking these positive questions over and over, I mean, you just do this for 30 days, you're going to recognize a total shift in your life. Just simple questions. But you're giving them weight by focusing on them three times during the day. You're having duration by focusing on it three times during a day, over 30 days, your mind starts to reshift its gears to give automatic ease to answering those questions and living in that mindset versus an undirected unconscious mindset. Second thing on that sheet or those things, you can do five questions first. Second thing I want you to do is come up with three words that describe your ideal self. Just three words, you know Mine are, for example, present, excited and bold. So I'm going to focus on those questions three times a day as well. What I do is I put them on my iPhone and they come up as an alarm three different times during the day. Just my phone buzzes and those words are there. I'm like, oh, right, I'm that guy. I got to focus on being that guy versus whatever. I might be in a bad mood. I'm like, ah, you know, completely detached. And then I look, I'm like, dude, no, I'm an excited person. Break that thought. Get back into this. Got it. This is who I am. And now that might sound so simple. Simpy, simpy. It sounds so simple. But guess what? People won't do the discipline. They are so frustrated with their mind because they haven't done the conscious discipline to reprogram it. That's the last thought here. Yes, we all have unconscious thoughts, every single person of us. If you don't have a mental disorder and then guess what? You have extreme power in your life to overtake it. And even those who have mental disorders, psychologists and therapists work with them to recondition their mind by allowing them a different way of attaching meaning to the past incidences. But even if they attach different meaning to the past, the whole focus is bring them into today and teach them to use their mind to direct itself into positive orientations to make healthier the decisions to enact healthier behaviors. If you can just focus on getting more attentive to what you're feeling and then do these thought exercises. What questions? Who do I want to be? And you do that over and over again. Everything changes. Last thought. Our unconscious and our mind is incredibly programmed not just by thought, which is what I've been talking about. Relative weight of importance and duration. Focusing our attention on. On what questions would ask ourselves. What positive alternatives can we create for ourselves? What labels can we create for ourselves to support us? But our mind also is incredibly conditioned by action behavior. You've heard the term, like fake it till you make it. I don't love that. I'd rather just say, you know what, just be authentic over and over and over and over again. Right? If you take action on a consistent basis and it teaches your mind to do that. So do things that are positive for yourself. Take bolder actions. Teach yourself. I'm just going to be confident just for no other reason. Watch my video on being confident here on YouTube. I want you to really think about this. The more that you take action, the more your brain gets automatically conditioned to understand. That's what we do. Hey man, that's just what we do. We just react to bad situations like this because that's how we've done it. You can actually condition your mind without doing any thought other than just behaving in a more positive manner and suddenly you find yourself thinking more positively. I know it sounds duplicitous but word is duplicitous. I think it's word sounds good. Good word. It's like a $10 word right there. You know, that's a big word for Montana. But I really want you to think about that. Your actions condition your mind as much as your recurring thoughts condition your mind. So be a person of good positive thinking. Be a person of good positive action and suddenly one day you'll wake up and you're like, I don't need. I just feel amazing. I feel extraordinary. I feel positive. And that's what it feels like to live the charged.