This is the second post in a series on how to change your life. If you want to start at the beginning of the series, head on over to: How To Change Your Life: Part 1 – Become Clear.

If you followed the instructions in the last post in this series, you are already clear about what you want your life to be like. Now you’re ready for the next step…

Getting your thoughts and feelings aligned with what you want to create.

Why You Need To Have Your Thoughts And Feelings Aligned With Your Goals

First, Your Thoughts And Feelings Affect Your Actions

How much effort do you think you will make toward achieving a goal if you don’t believe you can realistically achieve it? You will probably not even bother starting, or else you will give up at the first sign of difficulty. Why make the effort if it’s really not possible right?

However, if you really believe that your goals can become reality, your motivation to take action and succeed will skyrocket.

By training your mind, you can actually start believing in yourself and your ability to achieve your goals. When this happens, your motivation to take action and persevere until your goals become reality will skyrocket.

Second, Your Thoughts And Feelings Help Program Your Subconscious Mind

Your subconscious mind likes consistency. It will do everything it can to keep things in your life the same.

Over the years, you may have noticed repeated scenarios in your life. Your income will generally stay the same, you often end up having similar relationship experiences, you experience the same types of failures over and over again. This is your subconscious mind at work.

If things in your life ever start varying from the norm, your subconscious brain can’t tolerate it. It will actually work against your best efforts to make positive changes in your life. This is why smokers have a hard time quitting, people who lose weight usually gain it all back, and why lottery winners often end up just as broke as they were before winning within a few years.

Thankfully, this can also be used to your advantage. Your subconscious mind can’t tell the difference between something that is real and something that is imagined. So if you spend enough time imagining a new reality for yourself, your subconscious will begin to believe that this imagined reality is the way things are actually supposed to be. It will actually aid you in making your imagined reality come true.

Third, Your Thoughts and Feelings Are What Activate The Law of Attraction

The law of attraction states that like attracts like, but what exactly does this have to do with your thoughts and feelings?

The images your hold in your mind will attract similar images into your reality. So if you regularly hold mental images of you having achieved your goals, the law of attraction will kick in and start working to make those mental images come true.

The feelings you have are also have an attraction force to them. In fact, many people argue that your feelings have much more attraction power than mental images.

If you feel successful, you will tend to attract more success into your life. If you feel wealthy, you will tend to attract more wealth. If you feel worried, you will tend to attract more situations that will cause you to worry.

How To Get Your Thoughts And Feelings Aligned With Your Goals

Visualization

The most effective way to get your thoughts and feelings aligned with your goals is to use visualization.

Spend time every day imagining that your goal(s) are already a reality in your life. Use a first person perspective (looking through your own eyes) so it’s like you are right there experiencing everything first hand.

• What is going on around you?
• What does your life look like?
• Who is there with you?
• Imagine those people congratulating you.
• Imagine yourself celebrating your success with your friends and loved ones.

Make it all as detailed as possible so that it not only looks real, but it feels real too. These feelings can really ramp up your attraction power.

• Feel grateful for your success.
• Feel excited about your success.
• Feel grateful for how easy it was to achieve.
• If your goal is related to relationships, enjoy the new feelings of friendship or love.
• If your goal is related to money, enjoy the feelings of being wealthy and being able to afford whatever you want to buy.

Index Cards

Write down each goal you have on a separate index card.

Read through these cards several times a day to reinforce your visualizations. Reading through them will tend to bring up the images and feelings that you use during your visualizations. This will help to further reinforce the mental reprogramming that you’re doing.

Make it a Daily Practice

It typically takes about 30 days to start shifting the thought processes of your subconscious mind. This is why it’s important to make sure that you visualize for 20 minutes every day, for at least 30 days straight.

If you ever miss a day, you will need to start your count over.

After that, it’s good a good idea to keep up the daily habit as it will continue to reinforce your mind with images of your success. Not only will it will help you to keep focused and motivated as you take action, but it will also continue to activate the law of attraction in your favor.

In our next post, we’ll be covering part 3 of how to change your life – Learn How To Change. Be sure to join us!

Other Posts In The Series: How To Change Your Life

How To Change Your Life: Part 1 – Become Clear

How To Change Your Life: Part 3 – Learn What You Need to Know

How To Change Your Life: Part 4 – Taking Action

How To Change Your Life: Part 5 – Putting it all Together

If your current results in life aren’t as good as you would like, you need to put yourself on a mental diet.

Brain Input = Physical Output

Most of us are aware of how important it is to eat healthy foods if we want to have a healthy body. There is similar relationship between what you feed your mind and the results you have in your life.

The majority of modern folks tend to have a mental diet that consists of news, television, modern music, gossip, mindless online entertainment, video games, and magazines.

While all of these things have the potential to give your mind a positive message, the sad truth is that most of them do not.

• Video games are often violent.
• The news is often negative and full of fear.
• Many popular magazines offer mindless entertainment and gossip.
• A lot of music contains either mindless or negative messages.
• The vast majority of television, movies, and online media is also mindless, negative, or violent.
• Many social circles are focused around gossip, complaining, or activities that don’t serve to improve your life.

Take a look around you. How successful and happy are the majority of people out there? Debt, stress, mental illness, suicide, and relationship problems are becoming more and more prevalent every year.

If you want your results to be better than average, you need to stop feeding your mind the same things that everyone else does. f you want to have different results than everyone else, you need to do things differently than everyone else.

Focus On A Mental Diet That Will Benefit You

What do you think would happen if you started taking some time every day to read or listen to something that was educational, uplifting, or inspiring? What would learning a new skill or talent do for your career or business? Everything that you invest in your mind today will benefit you as you move forward through life.

• If you regularly feed your mind books and articles on time management, you will tend to become very good at managing your time.
• If you regularly feed your mind books on spirituality, you will tend to become a more spiritual and loving person.
• If you regularly feed your mind with stories and techniques related to success, you will start becoming more successful yourself.
• If you learn a new skill, you become more valuable to your employer or your customers.
• If you hang out with other people who more positive and successful than you currently are, you will start to become more like them over time.

Whatever it is that you want to change in your life, decide what it is that you want instead, then start immersing yourself in it.

• Read books on the subject.
• Hang out with others who have already achieved what you want.
• Take a course on the subject.

Conclusion

By feeding your mind the right mental diet, your life will automatically begin to be influenced by ideas of greatness and excellence.

I think Mark Twain hit the nail on the head when he said:

The man who does not read great books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

Put yourself on a healthy mental diet today and watch the results in your life start to change almost automatically.

The story begins when I decided to visit a local Buddhist center where I live. Twice a week this center offers teachings and guided meditations which anyone can attend. I had never been before so I decided to check it out.

The evening started out with a guided meditation. After the meditation, the monk began a lecture on how to be happy. The lecture lasted about half an hour and I walked away some really interesting information.

What We Mistakenly Think Will Make Us Happy

If I asked you, “What would make you happy”, what would you say?

Would you tell me that you will be happy when:

• You get a pay raise.
• When you marry your soul mate.
• When you’re a millionaire.
• When you’re healthier.
• Once you’ve had a vacation.
• When you buy a new home.
• When your jerk of a neighbor moves away.

The common denominator to all of these answers are that they are all things outside of ourselves. This is what advertising and social proof teach us about how to be happy.

We’re bombarded with information everyday that tells us that in order to be happy you need the types of things we listed earlier. The problem with this type of thinking is that it gives your power away.

When you start looking to other people, places or things to make you happy, you’ve given your power to be happy away to everything around you. You end up spending all your time and energy trying to manipulate everything around yourself in order to make yourself happy.

This approach often doesn’t work because you have very little control over the world outside of yourself. And the odd time it does work, the happiness rarely lasts for any extended period of time.

Happiness Comes From Within

So if happiness doesn’t come from things outside of ourselves, where does it come from? It comes from within us. You have the power to decide whether or not you are happy.

We all seem to have an innate need to decide if something is good or bad. We pass judgment on things outside of ourselves. If the car breaks down, we judge that as a problem. If the noisy neighbor moves away, we judge that as a good thing.

The thing is, nothing is inherently good or bad on it’s own. We are the ones who make a decision on what is good and what isn’t.

How To Be Happy

The key to lasting happiness is to become a master of your mind. Learn to control your thoughts and stop placing judgment on things around as being good or bad. When you can do that, you attain an inner peace that nothing can disrupt.

So how do you do that? Two key things are needed:

1. Become conscious of your thoughts and learn to question them

You don’t need to monitor every thought that crosses your mind. That’s a nearly impossible task. However, you can use your emotions as a guide to show you which thoughts you need to examine.

If you are feeling any negative emotions, you can be sure that your thoughts are negative. Ask yourself; “why am I feeling this way?”. Then remind yourself that you don’t need to depend on anything outside of yourself for your own happiness. That person, place, or thing holds no power over you. You have the power to choose to be happy.

2. Meditate

Meditation is a tool that will greatly assist you in mastering your thoughts. It actually develops new neural pathways in your brain that will help bring a more balanced and holistic perspective to your thinking.

As these new neural pathways develop, more of the brain becomes active in your thinking processes.

As you begin to see things from new and different perspectives, the old preconceived ideas of them being good or bad begin to drop away and you begin to see things as they really are. These things are no longer good or bad, they just are.

When this happens, you begin to feel an inner peace and happiness that comes from within. This inside happiness cannot be shaken by anything outside of you.

Conclusion

If you want to know how to be happy, you must understand that happiness is an inside job. Stop trying to control everything around you. Learn to control your thoughts instead.

Question your negative thoughts and remind yourself that you decide whether or not you are happy. No one, or no thing, has the power to decide that for you.

Begin a meditation program. Meditation will help you to stop judging things as good or bad. Instead, you will begin to feel an inner peace and happiness developing that nothing outside of you can change.

If you master these two things, you have become a master of your own happiness.

Most of us spend much our time each day doing things we have to do. Working, chores, meetings, errands, and more, all take up our time and we have little control over doing them. Sure you could always call in sick, or say no once in a while. But for the most part, it’s safe to say that there are many things in life that we just have to do whether we like it or not.

There’s also those times when we face failure and struggle. Nobody enjoys life when they’re facing these things right?

What Determines How You Experience Your Life?

How you feel  in any situation is based on the story you tell yourself about it. The best way to explain this is by using a couple of examples.

1. You just finished a big meal with your family and they all had to run off to do something. Now, you’re left with a huge pile of dishes that need to be washed. Not an exciting thought right? The things you tell yourself about this situation might be something along these lines:

• There are other things I would rather be doing than dishes.
• That pile of dishes is going to take forever to wash.
• My hands are going to get irritated and itchy from being in all the soapy water.
• My back might start aching from standing over the sink.

2. You’re trying to break a habit like smoking or overeating, but you keep failing. The things you tell yourself might be something like this:

• I can’t do this.
• I’m a failure.
• The addiction is just too strong for me to quit.
• I might as well give up.

When you’re going through these types of experiences, it’s easy to get caught up in the story you tell yourself. Well, I’m going to share a technique that you can use to turn that story around so that you can enjoy your life more.

Asking The Right Questions Can Make Your Life More Enjoyable

By asking yourself a couple of questions, you can make something you’re doing or experiencing more enjoyable. You’ll be amazed at the type of answers you can give yourself when you ask the right questions.

By asking yourself questions, you set your brain on a path of trying to solve a problem. Brains love trying to solve problems so you might as well use this to your advantage. If you’re serious enough about wanting an answer to your question, you brain will give you one.

The types of questions you should ask yourself will depend on whether you are in an unpleasant situation, or if you are struggling or failing at something.

Make An Unpleasant Situation More Pleasant

There are two questions you can ask yourself when you end up in a situation you don’t particularly like.

1. Is there anything good about this situation?
2. What could I do to make this situation more enjoyable?

For example, let’s go back to the situation where you’ve just been left with a big pile of dishes that you have to do by yourself.

1. Is there anything good about this situation?
   • Maybe this is a good opportunity to have some time alone to clear your thoughts or ponder something.
   • Maybe doing it by yourself is a good thing because you can be sure the job is done to your liking.
2. What can I do to make this situation more enjoyable?
   • Would putting your favorite music on make it more enjoyable?
   • Would putting a scented candle on that you like make it more enjoyable?
   • Maybe calling a friend on speakerphone might be fun. You could chat with them while you work.

bonus hint – once you’ve answered #2, ask yourself “OK, that will make this situation better, but is there anything else I could do take make it even better yet?

Once you have your answers, implement of them as you can, and just watch how the experience changes for you.

Turn Struggles Or Failures Into Learning Experiences

If you’re facing struggles or failures and it’s bringing you down, there’s a good chance you’re focusing on the problem itself. Here are a couple of questions you can use to change your focus. These questions will help you change a struggle or failure into a learning experience that will make you a better, more succesful person going forward.

1. What caused me to struggle or fail?
2. How can I use what I’ve learned so that I’ll be more successful in the future?
   • Is there some way I can avoid what caused me to fail this time?
   • What could I do something differently next time that might help me be more successful?

By using failure and struggle as a tool to learn from, the failure doesn’t feel so bad anymore. The experience changes from something negative, to something that you can learn from so that you become better and more successful in the future.

The Right Questions WILL Help You To Enjoy Your Life More

Asking the right questions can help you make an unpleasant situation more enjoyable and they can take struggle and failure and turn them into opportunities to learn and grow.

Just to recap…

Here are the questions you would ask yourself if you find yourself in a situation you don’t enjoy:

1. Is there anything good about this situation?
2. What can I do to make this situation more enjoyable?

And here are the questions you would ask yourself if you find yourself struggling or failing:

1. What caused me to struggle or fail?
2. How can I use what I’ve learned to make myself better and more successful in the future?

If you seriously apply this technique of asking yourself the right questions, I know you will start enjoying your life more.

If you’re willing, why not leave a comment and share a situation you’re experiencing right now and how you might  apply this technique to it.