Don’t let thinking ruin your life

Our thoughts are so powerful that we often believe everything we think.

But if we explore where our thoughts come from, and how they’re affecting our lives, we could decide to not take everything we think so seriously.

It might be a novel idea. Wait: I’m not my thoughts? Well…then what am I? Ah, now that is a good question. We certainly shouldn’t leave that answer up to the limited realms of our thoughts, should we?

When we can begin to distinguish between what we think and who we are, we open up a lot of room for new ways of being in the world. A lot of room for a rockin’ good life.

Let’s just take a simple example of how our thoughts can keep us stuck in a not-so-useful pattern.

A woman is being considered for an important project. An executive’s task is to go over all the woman’s materials and decide whether or not she’s the one to take on the project. The decision-maker looks through the woman’s work and finds incredible depth, great creativity, and evidence of a powerful mind. Her work stretches beyond ordinary materials. But the executive also sees that the candidate can’t spell to save her life. There are three words misspelled in the materials.

Now for the decision. The executive’s thinking may go something like this: He is embarrassed by the candidate’s spelling errors. He even flashes back to his sixth grade teacher announcing to the class that someone who can’t spell properly will never get anywhere in life. The executive knows (he thinks) that his sixth grade teacher’s declaration is overkill. But still, the executive knows (he thinks) that spelling is important, that spelling represents a person to the world. And he thinks that if he recommends this person, he might be criticized for recommending someone who can’t even spell.

The executive bumps the bad speller out of consideration.  

Did he make the right decision? Who knows? He may have just lost the next Einstein.

What is important to consider here are the ways that his thinking brought him to the choice. His choice was based on his fears, his inhibitions, and his doubts.

How many decisions do we make this way? How often do we miss a larger picture because our thinking is focused on details of questionable significance? Focused on our own thoughts.

We are all walking around with an amalgamation of experiences that create the ways we think. And our thinking informs the way we act. The question is how much of our thinking is helping us get where we want to be and how much of it is unhelpful at best.

There are two things that we do that prevent us from seeing things clearly. One is that we project parts of ourselves that we can’t see onto other people.

You know, this is the person who yells at people to stop yelling.

The other thing we do is transfer some characteristic that we have seen in someone in our past to a new person. Often, we think we recognize a trait or a habit or an attitude that comes from our parents, for example.  

You know, “You sound just like my mother.” Ack! (I personally adore my mother, and am happy if I ever manage to sound like her.)

Sigmund Freud developed the idea of projection and transference. Later, Carl Jung wrote about our “shadow,” what we can’t see or face in ourselves but can readily identify in other people. We as a culture certainly recognize the phenomena of seeing something annoying in someone else that we can’t necessarily see in ourselves.  Consider the language we have around the idea.

“Well, isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black.”  

“People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”

Oh my. If we’re going around making up all this stuff about other people that may or may not be true, how are we to stop ourselves?  How are we to recognize thinking that is not necessarily valid? Our thoughts are so convincing.

 Let me quote another authority on the matter:

I’m starting with the man in the mirror

I’m asking him to change his ways

No message could have been any clearer

If you want to make the world a better place

Take a look at yourself then make a change

That’s Michael Jackson, from one of his greatest hits, (and his favorite song), Man in the Mirror.

And M.J. got this right: we need to do this for ourselves. We may have all kinds of ideas about how skewed someone else’s thinking is. But we are responsible only for our own thinking. We are the only ones capable of pausing and considering where our thinking comes from. We are the ones who can honestly question how important it is to stand by our thoughts. To defend them. To ruin our relationships because of them. To shrink our worlds because of them. To write off whole, complex, adaptable human beings because of a thought.

Conversely, if we get quiet on a regular basis and allow our thoughts to come and go, we begin to recognize that these thoughts don’t need to control what we do. We slow down. We listen for a quieter voice, a deeper thing that isn’t a thought. What is it?  It’s a knowing, a clarity. It doesn’t come from our racing minds, but someplace surer. Meditation is a great antidote to marathon thinking.

Yes, our thoughts can be powerful. But ultimately, we decide: Is this thought real?