You Are What You Think

There is a ‘secret’ that all great historical and present thinkers, philosophers, and high achievers have agreed to be a universal truth.

This secret revolves around this simple idea: You are what you think.

All these great minds discovered the secret to living a happy, purposeful, and productive life, and it is this:

• We live in a world of thought.
• Our thoughts create our experiences, and thus, we experience what we think.
• It is the quality of our thoughts, then, that creates the quality of our life.

When we are unhappy where we are in life, we seek to create change.

So we go about transforming our environment believing that doing so will create the necessary change we hope to see. We buy things for a materialistic boost of happiness. We travel to escape our problems. We seek substances to numb the mind and help us forget.

But of course, we fall back to where we had started: unhappy with where we are today.

And so the cycle repeats itself. We buy, we travel, we forget — always focusing on the external factors we need to alter internal factors to create better circumstances.

This happens because we falsely assume that change begins from the outside. In truth, the environment does play a role in changing your circumstances, but it doesn’t address the root cause (your thinking) that is the driver behind why you feel the way you do.

Here is what you need to realize:

If you want to change the outside, you must first change the inside. You must change the attention of your thoughts because what you think directly influences how you feel, and how you feel directly influences how your body reacts, and how your body reactions directly influence how you behave, and how you behave comes to define who you are and what you experience in life.

“If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place.”

— Eckhart Tolle

It all begins with your thoughts — our life experiences spring from the thoughts we actively engage in: You are what you think.

And to comprehend the essence of this statement, you first need to understand the link between your thoughts, emotions, and behavior.

The Link Between Thoughts, Emotions, and Behaviour

How you think and how you feel directly impact how your body reacts, and all three influence how you behave and what actions you take.

This is how your thoughts create your reality. It is in the way you behave and acts that you define who you are and what you experience in life — and the way you behave and act is simply a construction of how you think, feel, and do.

So:

• Emotions are the reactions to the thoughts you give attention to.
• How you feel (and your body language) is a reflection of what you are thinking about.
• Since emotions and the body’s reactions are triggered by the thoughts you give attention to, therefore, you are living in a world of thoughts: Your thoughts create your experiences, and thus, you experience what you think.

This means that all the problems we experience are nothing more than a thinking problem.

“We spend all our time and money and energy trying to change our experience on the outside, not realizing that the whole thing is being projected from the inside out.”

— Michael Neill, Author

So how do you change your reality?

You create new patterns that create a new reality.

You recondition yourself.

This is not something that you change overnight, this is a lifetime commitment to mindful reprogramming and growth.

For you to do this, you need to understand that you are not your thoughts, you are the thoughts you give power and attention to — you are the thinker.

Your thoughts are nothing more than an endless stream of ideas running through your mind.

In other words, imagine your mind to be a farm and your thoughts to be the seeds. You can plant either good seeds (roses) or bad seeds (poison ivy). Whichever seed you choose to focus on and plant, it will then grow and multiply. And the same happens in your mind — whichever thought you choose to focus on and plant, it will then grow and multiply.

You are the planter of the seeds.

You are the thinker of your thoughts.

Do you want your mind to flourish into a garden of roses or a farm of poison?

“You are not your thoughts, you are the thoughts you give power and attention to — you are the thinker.”

So how do you create new behavioral patterns?

You create new thought patterns.

This is how do you create new thought patterns:

• Increase your awareness by observing your emotions and body reactions.
• Be more conscious of what thoughts you give your attention to.

The next time you feel a strong emotion, bring your awareness to it by pausing and asking yourself:

What’s going on in my mind right now? Why am I feeling this way?

Why am I angry? Why am I upset? Why am I feeling so low?

This can help us figure out why we are feeling what we are feeling and drive us back to the root cause of these feelings: the thoughts we first gave our attention to.

It triggers an emotion, which then triggers a body reaction and drives us to act in a certain way.

This is how your thoughts shape your reality.

This is why you are what you think.