Mindset Monday - Effective Thinking Formula

This is episode 155 of the Empowered Team Podcast. Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast, where we explore how to optimize your performance in career, sport and life. And now your host, vitality and peak performance coach Kari Schneider.

Welcome to Mind Mindset Monday. Here we go. Today's topic.

We have a good one today, and.

It'S following one that we've done on overthinking. So on today's topic, we're talking about the formula for effective thinking. And this is going to be very powerful because when we think about thinking, we just think. We don't think that there's a way to think about our thinking, but reality is, is that there is a formula. And I've created something and put it together in a way that I think you'll really like, because it's how we can have the best of our thinking. Not just ruminating, not just overthinking, not just thinking about what pops into our mind, but thinking in a way that's very purposeful so we know we need it. It sounds simple, but we want to be able to tap into this. And it takes some practice. And we don't want to have to rely on what's just popping into our brain. Because thoughts are going to keep popping. I always say this. They pop like popcorn. Our thoughts will keep coming into our brain. Like, our heart keeps beating, our heart keeps pumping beats, our brain keeps popping thoughts. And all the thoughts that we have aren't necessarily going to be ones that we want to think. So if we want to get into a way of thinking that's really going to serve our lives and serve our engagement with. With other people and serve the productivity or creation of things that we want to create, there's a way to do it, and I'm going to share that with you right away. So here's the formula. I'm going to say how it worked and failed for me this morning as well. So the formula itself is thoughts. The thoughts are going to come in, but add an intention to that, because we don't need to use or believe all of the thoughts that we think. So when we add intention to our thought, then instead of it just being a thought, we can decide to believe it. We can choose to think something, or we can create a thought that is a thought plus intention. So the formula starts with thoughts plus intention. If you don't have that intention, the thoughts are just going to be popping and a lot of them are going to be negative, repetitive, useless, and maybe something that we didn't even want to focus on. So if we add intention to our thoughts, that is one of the most powerful things we can do for the direction of our mind. We don't want thoughts to be popping all over the place on their own. When that's happening, we're really wasting our time and we're wasting our mind energy. So we want to add intention to the thoughts. That's going to be the most powerful thing to start with. Then, if you take thoughts plus intention multiplied by awareness, and when I say awareness, it's not just awareness of a situation, it's awareness of yourself, awareness of your energy, awareness of your situation and awareness of those around you. If you can multiply your thoughts plus intention and multiply it by awareness, that becomes effective thinking. That's the first formula for effective thinking. Now you might be thinking, okay, that sounds all great, but how can that possibly apply? I don't know what that means in real life. So I'm going to give you a real life example. And it happened very recently, so it's pretty fresh for me. And how it went down, we had to. Our family had to move out of the cottage that we've been living in in order to have renters come into the cottage. So that meant not only moving our personal belongings out, but our food, everything. And we wanted the cottage to be in the utmost, perfect, presentable situation for the renters coming in. So I had a laundry list of things to do in my mind. And at the same time, our youngest was going to go away for a week as well. So there's the packing for her, the timing for all of that, the cleaning of the cottage with the moving out, going to another location to my father's house. So all of this is going on and I'm trying to run the show with a list of things to do. You've got the stress of moving, you've got the stress of new people coming, the stress of going to another place. And I'm calling it stress because normally those scenarios in life for most people are higher on our strength, stress state or our scale of stress than maybe many other situations. So the stress is going up, there's all those things that have to happen, but everything's working really well. I've got it all planned out, everything's going smoothly. I'm delegating tasks to Paul and we've got help for the cleaning, we've paid people to come in, we've got Maeve doing all sorts of things. It's working really well. But that's not where the effect of Thinking came in. Where the effect of thinking came in is when I realized I'd forgotten something. And I mentioned it to Paul, I'm like, hey, can you get the weights? We want to have our workout tomorrow. And away we went. He got the weights, he did the thing. And so our workout showed up. We had moved out, the renters had come in, we had Maeve all packed. We have everything going on. And then the next morning, and I figure he's got the weights, and I'm like, well, where are the weights? Weights are in the vehicle. Awesome. Well, where are we going to do the workout? And by this time, I realized that I was getting frustrated. And this is where I wasn't effective thinking. What was happening is thoughts were popping in and the thoughts were like, well, I thought he packed the bench, but he didn't pack the bench. I thought he was going to help set up or why didn't he help set up with the workout? Why was this happening? Oh, we have a time crunch. We have a call that we're coming on. I need to get this workout in. I'm going to be sitting in a car all day. How? I've got to get this call done. I've got to get this, this other, this other meeting happening. I have to this, I have to that, and I want my workout in. And why didn't he do that? Those are all the thoughts without intention. And I was not effective thinking. I was overthinking. I was in a state of frustration. I was not connected to the person I was with. I was not aware of my own state, and I certainly wasn't aware of the other person's state. All I was aware of was the time crunch. I had barely any time and I wanted to get my workout in. And so I dropped from a state of getting something done to a state of just thoughting, thoughting, thoughting about a bunch of things. So to practice the effective thinking, the intention started to come in. Wait a second. These thoughts aren't serving me. It's certainly not serving my relationship, and it's certainly not serving my partner. I'm in a state of blame. So instead of all of those thoughts, I shifted the intention. I wanted to get something done and I didn't want to compromise my relationship. So that's how I shifted the attention. I started to get into adding the awareness, actually multiplying the awareness that my state was tired. I didn't get a great sleep. My husband's state was exhausted. He had an injury. He really didn't get a good Sleep. So by shifting the awareness to myself, shifting the awareness to him, and bringing the umbrella of awareness to the whole situation, I started to realize that all of those thoughts, those crunch time crunch and fear based thoughts, and blame based thoughts weren't going to step me into effective thinking. So where it shifted, where it worked is by bringing the intention in, by understanding that no, I want to get something done, I want to serve my relationship and I want to make sure that I'm moving forward, not staying stuck or going backwards. So there was the intention, the awareness multiplied that situation by looking at his situation, looking at mine, and looking at the bigger picture that turned what was about to spiral into an argument or missing a workout or complete negative state. Instead of spiraling into that, the effective thinking turned it into being able to move forward, being able to stay connected and being able to not overthink a situation that didn't need that. So that is just a little personal story in what can serve you for effective thinking. And I'm sure this is something that will show up day in and day out. It doesn't take a lot of time or example to be able to find a scenario where this is going to show up. It'll show up every day in some way or another, whether it's your personal life, whether it's your business life, whether it's your training. But the thoughts are going to keep coming no matter what. And that's why I know some scenarios going to come up. But we're usually lacking the intention and we're usually lacking the awareness. You bring those two things into our thoughts and then we can create something that's really powerful with our mind. Instead of staying stuck or going in the opposite direction, we can actually move forward or become aware, or be present with whatever we need and be able to handle it. Because we're not just thoughting, we're actually using our brain the way it's designed to be used in a higher state. We're effective thinking and that will bring us into being able to power think. But first we really need to practice that effective thinking to get what we want. The greater connection with other people, a more effective communication with other people, and being able to produce and create what we want with our own mind. And to do that it takes the creative mind and the effective thinking. So I hope that serves you for today. Just a little blip into real life scenario, the ability to effective think and overcome that real life scenario and be able to use that simple, simple formula wherever you want. Thoughts plus intention times awareness will get you out of whatever, ruminating, whatever overthinking, or just all those thoughts popping anytime you need. So I hope that serves you for today, this week, this month, all the way, going through. Have a beautiful rest of your day. Here's to Monday and the rest of your week. Have a wonderful one.

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