How To Change Your Mind To Improve Your Life

No matter who you are or what your life currently looks like, you probably have a number of things that you would like to change. We all do. Nobody is ever entirely satisfied with his or her life for very long and there are always things that could be improved. One of the major goals of life is to work out how to make those changes real, and there are many ways you might go about doing that. But without effectively changing your mind, your perspective and your reason, many of those changes will be harder to come by, and might even fail to last. Here’s how to change your mind, and improve your life in whatever way you want.

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Develop Some Mindfulness

You can’t really expect to change your mind until you know what actually takes place in the mind day in, day out. The fact is, most people don’t really know exactly what the mind does all day every day. That might sound surprising. You might think you know your own mind perfectly. But if you ever find yourself getting lost in thought; that’s evidence that you don’t fully know what your mind is doing. Without having a strong grasp of that, you can’t really hope to change it.

So what do you need to do? Quite simply, you have to develop some mindfulness. This is a word that gets bandied around a lot these days, but what is it essentially? It simply means that you pay attention - to what is going on in your body, what is going on in your mind, and anything that occurs around you. And that means, really paying attention.

The best way to start doing this is to start up a daily meditation practice. If you do that, you can begin practicing the muscle of mindfulness, and develop it into a real skill that you can call on at any time. At first, you will find that it is difficult to do this, or even that a number of painful emotions arise. That’s perfectly natural, and it’s only by sticking with it that you can get through that period. After that, you will have an incredible skill to pay very fine attention to what your mind is doing at all times.

Then it’s just about taking that skill ‘off the cushion’, as they say, and applying it throughout your life. The ultimate goal of meditation is to destroy the invented boundary between meditating and not meditating, and make your entire life one of closely paying attention. You will find that this gives you a strong sense of what your mind is doing at all times, and then you will start to notice some of the things about the nature of your own mind that you might want to change.

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Find The Faults In Your Thinking

Thinking is not necessarily always useful. There are many thoughts which arise as a natural response to a situation, but which are actually very problematic. Once you start paying attention to thoughts, you will see that there are many thoughts you have which are downright incorrect or wrong. That is just what happens. You shouldn’t beat yourself up about it, but you should make a point of trying to highlight the faults in your thinking. Why? Because having a clear idea of the faults in your thinking will allow you to pinpoint what actually needs changing in your mind, and that is what we are hoping to do here after all.

Some of the faults you find might surprise you, shock you or even worry you. Just remember: you can change any of them, and that’s exactly what you are aiming to do here. So don’t worry. Just take a look and see which thoughts you might want to change, and then make a point of doing so.

But how do you actually do that?

Making The Change

When you have identified a thought that you might like to change, you need to think about what you can replace it with. In most cases, it will be a response to a particular stimulus, so you need to consider what the stimulus means for you and what you can hope to do in order to react to it more effectively. In essence, this is all about being less reactive to life, and more of an actual agent when it comes to engaging with what happens to you. There is only so much you can control, but you are trying to make sure that you control what you can as well as possible.

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What you actually need to specifically do here will depend on the stimulus, your conditioned response and what you are seeking to change in your life. But make sure you decide on the thing that is most useful and positive, and which is going to make the best possible change for yourself and everyone around you.

The more you do this, the easier it becomes. It’s all about practice, and you will find that this simple act is enough to profoundly change your life, even if that means changing your life in numerous subsequent, small acts.

The Qualities To Develop

It can be helpful to have an idea about some of the qualities in which you would most like to develop in your thinking, as there are certainly some that are more useful or beneficial than others. Knowing what these are and purposefully cultivating them can be very important in all this, so it’s definitely something to look into. Let’s take a look now at some of the qualities of mind that you might like to try and develop. And remember: none of these are beyond the realm of what you can be. They are all within your grasp, if you want them to be.

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Compassion

Arguably the most important quality of all is compassion. If you have compassion for the people around you and for yourself, you are going to find that much else starts to fall into place. Having compassion allows you to open up to life more, and that means that you are going to have much more in the way of positive and engaging experiences. If you are finding it hard to be compassionate, you might want to investigate why that might be. Is there some blockage that you need to look at?

Gratitude

The benefits of having a grateful demeanor are well known and well documented. Those who practice gratitude as a purposeful, active practice are more likely to feel calm and connected to others in their life, more likely to be able to deal with unfortunate circumstances, and will always have less stress in their life. You will also be more optimistic about your life, and find it easier to empathize with the plight of others.

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The best way to generate more gratitude is to turn it into a specific practice. You can do this by keeping a gratitude journal - and take a look at some gratitude journal prompts if you are struggling to think of anything to write about. After a while, you will naturally start to feel more grateful about everything that happens in your life.

Patience

Even when you make all of these changes, you have to be prepared to wait a while. That’s just how things work. You can get pretty much everything you ask for, if you know how to ask it. But that doesn't mean you will get it straight away. Most things take time, especially developing these kinds of characteristics and making these kinds of changes in your own mind.

It’s not just your own mind that takes time to change. Most things in life require some patience, so this is something that you should definitely focus on practicing in your daily life as much as you can. With enough patience, everything becomes a little lighter and easier to deal with, and you regain something else very important too…

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Sense Of Humor

Without a sense of humor, life is very dramatic indeed. You will find that even small problems become much bigger ones if you fail to have a sense of humor, and this is something that you should absolutely bear in mind if you are wondering why things seem so problematic. If you feel you don’t naturally have a sense of humor, usually all that really means is that you have not yet allowed yourself to fully relax to the flow of life. The more that you do this, the sooner you will be able to take everything on the chin. That will really help to make a huge difference to how you experience your life.

As you can see, it is perfectly possible to change your mind and improve your life, as long as you know what you are doing. Follow these tips and pieces of advice, and you should find that life becomes much more joyful and a lot easier in no time at all. Then you can share the wisdom with others.




*Collaborative Post