Bust the Bondage of Your Undermining Secret Thoughts
Breaking Bad Habits
Do you ever wonder why you haven’t stayed on a healthy diet?
Why you haven’t made more satisfying connections with your friends and family?
Why you haven’t been more disciplined instead of wigwagging between working at a job you hate or quitting?
Or Why? Why in the world you fell in love so hard for someone — and it all fell apart anyway?
The truth is that there is more going on under the surface in your life. Because you are…
in bondage to habitual undermining thoughts.
For, says Rawlin Vanatta in We Think in Secret, most of what is happening in our brain occurs as “‘secret thoughts,’ thoughts that happen automatically beneath the surface of your conscious awareness that trigger a bodily action.”
Because the fact is that “every second of every day our brain processes about 400 billion bits of information from our outside environment,” says Vanatta. But “we are conscious of only about 2 thousand bits of that information.”
This reality causes us to see things in a very limited, and often distorted way. It’s like when you turn on a flashlight and you can only see things that are within range of the light. And the rest of the world is dark. Shadowy. And distorted.
And then …
you wonder,”What is happening?”
“Why haven’t I figured things out?”
Why do I keep doing things that don’t turn out instead of doing things that work?”
Like when you ‘decide’ whether or not to talk to someone, why do you get flustered and tongue-tied so the words you say aren’t the words you want to say?
Why do you get too anxious to speak up when your boss gives you a job to do that you hate and you find yourself dealing with an irate customer instead of customer service handling it?
And why are you unsympathetic and bossy instead of being gentle and empathetic when your teenage daughter wants to date and you think she’s too young.
The reason is, says Vanatta,
“you are not making your decisions.”
“Your secret thoughts are.”
And according to Vanatta, “The irony of our ‘secret thoughts’ is that although we choose them every day … we did not even originate them. They were given to us before we could even accept or reject them,” explains Vanetta.
For many of our perceptions of the world were passed down from generation to generation. We inherited our parent’s programming, just as they inherited their parent’s programming.
For, states Vanetta, we are the “sponge” that “soaked in all the beliefs of our environment. They became the basis of our view of the world.” As well as our view of ourselves.
And sometimes the beliefs we inherited were our insecurities. Our lack of self-confidence. And lack of self- trust.
For …
our beliefs originate from our feelings.
Deep rooted feelings. Feelings such as fear. Doubt. Anxiety.
These feelings arouse deep-seated beliefs which arouse our desires. And desires generate secret emotional thoughts that our subconscious takes as commands, and acts on.
But, these emotional ‘secret thoughts’ aren’t rational or logical. As anyone who has fallen head-over heels in love will tell you. Their love is an infatuation created by “deep-rooted desire.”
And all too often …
“our desire is not in alignment with what we want
out of life,” explains Vanetta.
So we unconsciously choose someone who is incompatible with us. Someone who we aren’t really in sync with.
But instead of facing the truth, instead of acknowledging our inner conflicting desires, we rationalize our feelings.
We rationalize our desire by telling ourselves our love is real and we’ll love them forever.
Or we justify the fact that we satisfy our craving for sweets and eat chocolate covered donuts by saying, “I need my chocolate.”
We even justify our extreme bossiness with our children with the rationalization that kids need to be bossed around. It’s a parent’s job.
We probably even rationalize away our need to find a job we love by saying, “I have bills to pay.”
And so, our ‘secret thoughts’ stay buried in our subconscious, and
those secrets thoughts rule our lives.
Without your knowing it. Without your ever realizing that your ‘secret thoughts’ are making your decisions for you.
Without seeing that, says Vanetta, “Your decisions are nearly always tainted by them.”
Until …
You get a gnawing feeling in the pit of your stomach and become aware that something is wrong.
Something is deeply wrong.
For you feel enslaved.
As Og Mandigo explains in the Greatest Secret in the World, you are suffering because
you have become a “slave” to your habits.
For you have “surrendered” your freedom to “years of accumulated habits and the past deeds of {your} life have marked out a path which threatens to imprison [your] future.”
All because your ‘secret thoughts’ have become bad habits. And according to Mandino, “Bad habits are the unlocked doors to failure.”
Yet we keep doing the same things, repeating the same mistakes, unconsciously entrenching our bad habits deeper and deeper in our brain’s pathways.
And undermine our hopes and our dreams, as well as our success.
Unless…
You finally wake up.
You become aware that what is wrong. You realize you’ve been unconscious and sleepwalking through life.
And the wakening of your conscious mind arouses your desire to “gain the understanding [needed] to break any chain of habit that is no longer serving you,” says Vanatta.
For, as Vanatta explains further, you can either choose to be enslaved by unwanted habits for the rest of your life. Or you can begin “choosing better ‘secret thoughts’ to create a better you.”
For even though your secret thoughts will continue to control your life,
you can deliberately, intentionally, choose.
You can choose which thoughts you will act on.
Thus, you can choose which door you will walk through.
Will you cross the threshold of the door of failure by staying enslaved by your bad habits?
Or will you choose good habits, which according to Mandino, are the keys that open the door of success?
Will you choose the good habit of becoming more and more aware of your ‘secret thoughts’?
The more conscious you are, the more aware you will become of any thought that is counter-productive, any thought that moves you away from the door of success.
When you make it a habit to choose to act only on thoughts that are beneficial to you as well as to others, you bust the bondage of undermining secret thoughts. Then..
you’ll move you in the direction of success.
Instead of failure.
So believe in your ability to control your mind and your life.
As Mandino says: “You are special. Act it.”
