Ep 6: Are Your Thoughts Helping You—or Hurting the Ones You Love?

If you're a parent looking for practical, sound, solid advice in an ever-increasing dangerous world, then this podcast is for you. So here's your host, Richard Ramos.

Can I use my mind to create my reality? If so, is that a skill that we can learn and use to become who we want to be and create the life we want to experience? Let's face it, none of us are perfect. When we lie in bed at night reviewing our day and our efforts to be a more tolerant, less reactive person, we don't just see the parent who lashed out at our child for failing to quietly and quickly Submit to a simple request. We envision either an angelic self whose patience was stretched like an innocent victim, or a hideous org laying waste to a child's self-esteem. Which of those images is real? The answer is all of them are real. Images ranging from positive to negative. Your past shortfalls can be traced at their root To one major oversight. You haven't committed yourself to living by the truth that your thoughts have consequences so great that they create your reality. Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Parent Whisperer podcast. I'm Richard Ramos. In our last episode, I shared with you the first step In a 4-step process that we teach in Parents on a Mission for parent personal growth, which was know yourself to grow yourself. We talked about the importance of the practice of slowing down, getting quiet, to turn off all the noise outside of our mind and inside of our mind. And in this meditative, prayerful quiet time, We attempt to quiet the analytical mind so we can focus on our inner world of our thought life, where we can practice thinking about ourselves, become aware of our emotional buttons or landmines, as I like to call them, that cause us anxiety, anger, irritation, and frustration. And in this time, we can settle into our subconscious mind to realign our behavior with our conscience and to create a better future quality of life. In this episode, I'm going to continue our lesson on personal growth by talking about the power of our thoughts. Now, to be honest, in this episode, I neither have the time nor am I qualified to go into all the aspects and depth of understanding about our conscious mind, subconscious mind, and inner working of our brain. After all, I am not a psychologist or a neuroscientist. But as a parent, coach, and mentor, I can share with you enough to help you get on the path to growth based on my own experience, as well as the POM experience, as I like to call it, that others have had by completing my course. So I would encourage you to do your own research and reading on this topic. There is plenty of information out there for anyone wanting to go deeper. That said, let's talk about the second step, for parent personal growth, which is to understand the power of our thoughts. The quote I shared at the beginning is from the book Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Dr. Joe Dispenza, a neuroscientist on the cutting edge of studying and doing research on the human brain and the power of our thoughts, which, as he said, creates our reality. Now, that's a pretty bold and challenging claim in itself, because what it essentially says is that we are responsible for the quality or lack of quality in the daily life we are living. In other words, I am responsible for what I have experienced. I am responsible for what I am experiencing right now. And I am responsible for what I will experience in my life. Jack Canfield, co-author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series, he shares it this way in a formula he uses The letter E plus the letter R equals the letter O. And what he means by that is our life events, or that we have life events and we have a reaction or response to those life events that equals our outcomes. So what he's saying here is that life events that happen to us It's our reaction to those events that determines our quality of life. And that means that we are 100% responsible for our life experiences. We're not blaming others. We're not playing the victim game. We're not blaming the government and the education and this thing and that thing. We are taking responsibility 100%. For our life's experiences, and it's all because of our thought life. Now, that can be either a depressing or an encouraging statement depending on how you see it. It is a two-edged sword because it can be good or it can be bad news, all depending on my thought life. So my thoughts are either hurting me Or helping me, and it's all up to me. Here's another example of the power of thoughts. Sow a thought, reap an action. Sow an action, reap a habit. Sow a habit, reap a character. Sow a character, reap a destiny. So we see that our destiny is a result of our character. Our character is a result of our habits. Our habits are a result of our actions. And our actions are a result of our thoughts. It all starts with our thoughts. This is a simple but really powerful formula when you think about it for personal growth. And change from the inside out. Sowing and reaping is a universal law or universal principle that works whether we understand it or not. So here's the empowering thing about it. We can choose to change our thoughts and therefore change our outcomes. Here's another way of looking at this, another quote to reflect on this issue of our thought life. John Maxwell says, hurting people hurt people and are easily hurt by them. So understanding this quote by Maxwell reveals why we can sometimes hurt the very people we love Like our children, due to a negative and hurting thought life. Now, we could go in a lot of different directions thinking about this and talk about a lot of different things and outcomes— our job, our income, our career, and a whole variety of different relationships that we have. But right now, we are talking about this in the context of my personal growth and emotional maturity so I can be the best possible version of myself for myself and for my children. According to the psychologist researchers, think about this: we talk to ourselves 50,000 times a day and 80% of it is negative. And according to the neuroscientists, over 90%— hear this— over 90% of the thoughts you'll have tomorrow will be the same negative thoughts you have today. Psychiatrist Daniel Amen has named the battle of negative thoughts in our mind as ants. A-N-T, automatic negative thoughts. And I like this metaphor because we all know what to do when ants show up in our home. Get out the Raid and kill those ants. And that's exactly what we need to do in our mind, in our brain, is kill those automatic Negative thoughts. So how do you do that? Well, in Parents on a Mission, I share the process for killing these automatic negative thoughts, or the process of renewing our mind or rewiring our brain, however you want to look at it, in 3 basic steps. First, we need to become what I call a thought catcher. Which is actually practicing the self-awareness that we learned in our last episode. Secondly, we need to become a thought changer, and this is the exercising of our will and desire and realization that we can change. And third, we need to become a thought replacer, and this is the practice of using self-affirmations. Thought catcher, thought changer, thought replacer. Now, this might sound too simplistic to you, but it's not easily mastered in practice because it requires you to be very attentive to yourself, as we talked about in our last episode, being self-aware, and to be conscious of your unconscious mind. Where our automatic thoughts come from and cause us to act in certain ways. These automatic thoughts form the very habits that we need to break in order to create a better quality of life. And then third, the discipline of the consistent practice of positive affirmations using 2 of the most powerful words in the English language, Which are I am. Because whatever you follow those words with, I am, you are basically declaring or forecasting or prophesying, if you like, your future about yourself and your life. For example, if we're always saying, I'm so sad, I'm depressed, or I'm not worthy. Those kind of things after you say I am, versus I am blessed, I am joyful, I am grateful, I am happy. See, those are the things that we learn and the habits that we begin to create using our thought life to change our life from the inside out. See, what I've learned is that personal growth And/or human transformation requires a combination of 3 things, basically 3 things. Number 1 is the right information. Number 2 is the right focus. And number 3 is the combination of the right information and the right focus with the right emotions. And as I said at the beginning, there's a lot to learn on this topic. But what I've shared with you here can get you started. And if you can get in the habit of practicing these principles— catch your thoughts, change your thoughts, and replace your thoughts— you will see the results of parent personal growth. In our next episode, I will continue with the next step, which is the power I'm Richard Ramos, and you've been listening to the Parent Whisperer Podcast. Don't forget to subscribe, share this episode, and always remember, Parents on a Mission is not for bad parents, but for good parents who want to get better. See you next time.

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