One of my favorite writers and author of one of my favorite books, Anna Cara, the late John O’Donohue, said, “The most powerful way to change your life is to change your mind.”
You’ve probably already heard me say this, but it’s so important to happiness that I’m going to say it again: When we change one small corner of our world, our entire world shifts. As we change one thought, we change the wiring in our brains to the new thought. Every time, e-v-e-r-y t-i-m-e we exchange a non-happiness thought for a happiness thought, we are creating a space in our lives for happiness to flow.
Your brain is full of grooves, patterns you have worn into your brain with your thoughts. What you want to now do is create new grooves for your happy thoughts to follow. You have a thought. Automatically the thought follows the pattern of the old grooves, which produces more of the same thoughts, and deepens the grooves. By changing your thoughts, you change the grooves you’ve worn into your brain into new life-affirming happy thoughts.
No one else can do this for you. You are the only one responsible for your thoughts. So how do you change them? One thought at a time.
Now that sounds pretty farfetched. We have thousands of thoughts flitting through our minds all the time. Thoughts themselves may be random; we connect them together and give emotional meaning to them. It is the emotional meaning that causes us happiness or unhappiness.
The good news is you do not have to be aware of every thought. The work is in being aware of the emotion that is ignited by thought. This awareness will allow you to rethink the thought and in doing so repattern and regroove your mind.
Get yourself a pad of sticky notes and a favorite pen. On each piece of paper, write a happiness affirmation or positive saying. Fill as many pieces of paper as you can. Try to write at least ten, and then post these reminders everywhere. Post one note on your bathroom mirror, another in your pants pocket, and another in your purse. Post them everywhere, on your car steering wheel, on your pillow, on the inside of the toilet seat, inside the kitchen cabinet, on the bottle of juice inside the refrigerator, on your desk, on your computer, and so on.
Daily add to your happiness reminders and change them around. The idea is to keep reminding yourself of ideas that make you smile and feel good. Changing the notes keeps them fresh, so you don’t ignore them once they become part of the landscape.
Read the notes as often as you can, and always read one when you become aware you are experiencing a non-happy emotion and try to feel—even if only for a split second— the emotion the note produces. That split second is the shift in one corner of your world that will change your whole world into a happier world for you. And as you change your world, you change the world for everyone.