Mastering Your Mind: A Guide to Achieving Personal Goals

Have you ever wondered why you have such difficulty living by your values, or achieving the goals that you set out for yourself?

After all, we often have good intentions, such as spending more time with family, engaging with hobbies, exercising more, or perhaps educating ourselves about a topic that we always wanted to learn more about. Maybe you wanted to start a new business, but you never get around to taking the first step! This is not for lack of willpower or information; the incredible plethora of constantly changing self-help and business development books in your local neighborhood bookstores demonstrates just how difficult it is to move towards living the life that you want to live!

All of this can be so very frustrating, often leading to a belief that no matter how hard we try, it simply doesn’t matter as we often have such difficulty with moving forward in the direction to leading a better life. What’s the use of trying then, or having high expectations, if it will only lead to disappointment!

So, is it really all that hopeless? The short answer is noooo..! The long answer below 😊:

Before applying your latest self-help book methods, let’s start by taking a step back and looking at the terrain of our own minds. If you are anything like me, the first thing that you notice when you look at your own mind is that it doesn’t stop furnishing a never ending stream of loose association thoughts that seem to come out of nowhere! You could be working at some task (like what I’m doing right now) and suddenly you have a thought of your last vacation in Vietnam, which can be followed by stray thought of riding your bike at 10 years old, then what you just ate 10 minutes ago, then an internal comment (from you to you) of how bad your headache is, followed by berating yourself for not going to bed on time last night, and so on and on. These were my stream of thoughts as I was writing this, and I’m pretty sure that you get the picture! Of course, we also have more intentional and coherent thoughts, otherwise I would never be able to write this blog post! But whenever we even momentarily lose focus or concentration, our minds are predictably off to the races!

In fact, there was a study that showed that our minds wandered 47% of the time and rarely less than 30% during every activity except making love (only 10% of the time)! It gets easier to see how we can get so sidetracked from our goals by the constant chatter in our minds.

The second thing to notice about these automatic thoughts is that they come and go quickly, not quite under the radar, and can often (but not always) be associated with intense emotions. Again, if you are anything like me, a lot of these thoughts can be quite negative and self-critical (from me to me: “you’re such an idiot”), comments that are often out of proportion to anything that we have said or done. Do you get automatic thoughts like this (or am I the only one)?!?

For the sake of convenience, let’s call this Level 1 thinking. There is a part of our brain, called the default mode network, that specializes in this type of thinking. Usually, the thoughts are either thoughts of a past event or future event (involving you) or a random comment about a personal characteristic (such as appearance, intelligence, strength or weakness). As you can see, our Level 1 minds can be quite self-absorbed!

Level 2 thinking (on the other hand) is quite intentional and deliberate, where one thought follows another in an organized and coherent way. This is the type of thinking that I’m shooting for as I try to finish this blog post (or hopefully, while you are reading it)!

Then there is another type of thinking, which I’ll call Level 3 thinking, or as it’s better known, mindfulness. This is when we become self reflective, and able to look at our thoughts and our emotions from a nonjudgmental “observer” standpoint. So instead of me saying to myself “you’re such an idiot”; when I am being mindful, it’s more like “oh look…that thought of calling myself an idiot is there again” or instead of “just” experiencing anxiety, I notice that anxiety is rising up for me, and I feel it in my chest or abdomen. There is an old Buddhist saying that describes this in the following way:

It’s better to be on a bridge overlooking a raging river than to be in the river.

In that space where Level 3 thinking is happening, change in the direction that you want, becomes much more likely. The reason for this is that we are often influenced by Level 1 thoughts without even being aware of it. From the perspective of Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT), we become fused with those thoughts, where we lose any sense of ourselves thinking the thoughts and the only thing in our awareness is the thought itself. In other words, we become the thought for that moment. But when we are in a Level 3 space, we become aware of ourselves (as the observer) thinking the thought. We become detached from the thought and can then decide whether to attend to the thought or just leave it alone.

Here is an experiment to demonstrate this, taken from the work of Russ Harris (a major proponent of ACT):

Step 1: To yourself, repeat a thought that normally causes a difficult emotion in you. It could be anything, for example “you fool… why did you do that” or “I know I’m going to fail the exam tomorrow”. Keep repeating it until you actually feel the emotion welling up inside of you. It could be anxiety, sadness, anger, anything difficult.

Step 2: now add 5 words to the beginning of that thought “I’m having the thought that…” followed by the thought. Do that slowly a few times in your mind. In my example, it would be: “I’m having the thought that I’m such an idiot”

Step 3: now add 3 more words: “I notice that I’m having the thought that…” followed again by the thought. Slowly repeat that a few times in your mind. In my example: “I notice that I’m having the thought that I’m such an idiot”

Now try this for yourself. Do it now…

Now read on…

This is just one very simple way to experience a mindful awareness of a particular thought. Although this simple way does not work with everyone, most people notice that the thought does not carry quite as much weight. It’s not as compelling.

There are many different ways of practicing mindful awareness of your thoughts. You might imagine your thoughts like clouds just moving across the sky or like leaves floating in a stream, while you are watching. Or if you like talk radio, imagine your thoughts are like the voices on talk radio… sometimes they say something interesting, and you listen. Other times, not so much!

When you are in Level 3, it’s almost as if a space opened up where you can decide either to pay attention to the thought, or struggle with the thought, or just to let it be. When you are in Level 1, there is no space.

Victor Frankl put it beautifully:

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.

Many of our automatic thoughts, especially the self-critical ones or the ones that cause powerful uncomfortable emotions, can easily divert us from the values that we hold important and the goals that we so earnestly want to move towards.

So the first step in reclaiming the direction of your life is to know what your values are (see previous post). Develop goals that are consistent with your values. Then, while keeping your values in mind, devote time to practicing mindful awareness of your automatic thoughts. The thoughts themselves are not the problem, it’s our lack of awareness of them that allows them to drag us away from the fulfilling, value laden path that we really want.