That your mind will work for you or against you.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. If you're on a diet, watching the food you put in your head (i.e. your thoughts) is as important as watching the food you put in your stomach. It's true that you absolutely have to get your head motivated to diet to take you through the tough parts that you will inevitably face. It's the positive self talk that spurs you on to greater things. If you leave your thoughts to chance, your thoughts will yo-yo and make it more likely that your diet will yo-yo as well.
In a recent post I noted that your thoughts will either work for you or against you. I've also mentioned that your brain is always working to create thoughts and emotions and so this working for you or against you is constant and ongoing. It's very important you understand this because its a very powerful process. I'm about to give you two very powerful examples of it in action. One where it worked for someone and one where it worked against them.
One of the people I'm going to talk a lot about is success guru Jack Canfield. I've got some great video of him in an upcoming post. For now I'm going to show you a tale he includes in his highly popular book - The Success Principles.
In his book he tells the tale of a guy in the back of a refrigeration truck, who gets trapped in the back of the truck just before everyone goes home and no-one is due to return for a few days. Unfortunately the man dies and it appears he has died from the effects of hypothermia from being locked in the refrigerated truck. As the story goes he leaves he wife a note, telling her how cold he is and how much he loves her.
Now there are no surprises to this story man dies of hypothermia in a freezer truck, are there. Well there's one. The cooling unit on the truck hadn't worked for some time and the ambient temperature over the few days he was in there weren't low enough to cause the man to die. Yet he did die. The letter he left talked about the cold that simply wasn't there. It seems in his mind he had created a situation where he believed it to be cold enough to kill him, based on where he was - and it did kill him.
The other story is of Morris Goodman. Morris is also known as the miracle man. Morris was involved in a crash in his light aircraft. His injuries were so extensive that he was paralysed from the neck down, unable to speak and unable to breath without assistance. Doctors told Morris he would be this way for the rest of his life. They even told him he would be a vegetable.
As part of his therapy they taught Morris to communicate by blinking his eyes. Morris told them he would walk out of hospital by Christmas day which nobody believed, such was the damage.
We know this because Morris can now speak and he tells his story after walking from hospital on Christmas day after defying known medical science.
Morris will tell you that after his accident, he had no working body. The only thing he had was his mind. He used his thoughts to first get his breathing back and went on from there.
I've deliberately picked these two stories because what happened to the two people in them is impossible. How do you die of hypothermia when it isn't cold enough to get hypothermia? How do you go from being so profoundly disabled, with a severed spinal cord yet walk out of hospital on the day you say you will.
Its impossible isn't it?
Well it seems not. The other reason I've picked these two stories is that there is evidence around them about the role their mind played. The hypothermia victim from the note and Morris' own words. One has had a positive effect and one has had a negative effect.
What is clear is that your body will work either for you or against you and that you choose which it will be.
