摘自：http://www.davecheong.com/2006/06/26/we-can-be-happy-if-we-choose-to/　

Personal development is about understanding how our mind works, consciously controlling our thoughts and having good patterns. Developing an awareness of how our mind works can improve any and all aspects of our lives as well as our interactions with family and friends.

I’ve been interested in personal development for years - probably since I was a troubled adolescent. Our family moved to New Zealand when I was 11. In the beginning, things were difficult. Not only did we leave our close family and friends behind, we also had to deal with a different environment and foreign culture. I recall being only the second Chinese student in my school at the time! To cope with these changes, I devoured lots of self improvement, motivation and personal development books. One thing I learnt during this challenging time was the notion we can be happy if we choose to.

Try this. Imagine you are holding a lemon in your hand. Can you feel the smooth yet rough texture of the skin on your hands? Is the lemon cold to your touch? Take a moment to trace your eyes across the unique grooves on the surface. Now hold the lemon to your nose. Can you smell its freshness? Use a knife and visualise yourself cutting into the lemon. Can you see what’s happening? Squeeze the juices into your mouth. Can you taste the sourness around your tongue? Swirl the lemon juice around your mouth and slowly swallow it.

Are you salivating? I am! The reason for this is because our minds cannot tell the difference between what’s real and what’s imagined. To our minds, the lemon was as real as a real lemon we had in our hands. This is pretty important - whatever our mind thinks, our body naturally responds.

Our mind and our body co-exist in a symbiotic relationship. Our body is essentially a mechanical tool for our mind. It feeds our mind with essential nutrients to survive and function. It carries our mind wherever it wishes to go. However, we exist in our mind. We can choose what we think about, how we feel and in what way to respond to things around us.

A child on a tree might think, “Whatever happens don’t fall”. Do you know what happens? He falls and breaks his arm. How many times have you thought, “Don’t forget the keys tomorrow” and then you promptly forget the keys the next day! There’s a reason for this. If we tell ourselves not to fall from the tree or not to forget the keys, at a subconscious level, that’s exactly what we’re thinking about. We are thinking about what would happen if we fell or forgot the keys because that’s what we have instructed our minds to think.

One philosophy I subscribe to completely is positive thinking. If you visualise a positive result, your mind and body naturally work together to make it happen. Instead of thinking about not falling or forgetting the keys, try “If I jump, I will catch that branch” or “I will have my keys with me because it’ll be in my purse”. Now, we’re focused on the positive results instead. By controlling our thoughts and what we think about, we can influence the outcome.

If we took this to the next level, you can see that by controlling our thoughts we can actually change our lives. I know people who sit and complain about their lives all the time. “I hate my job”, “Why am I fat and ugly?”, “If I won the lottery, I would…”, “My spouse treats me badly”, “I’m unhappy with…” etc. Sometimes it makes me angry to hear these things from people I care about. Mostly though, I feel sad.

Things aren’t going to get better if you just sit and complain about how unfair life is. If you are unhappy, focus on what would make you happy. Think about the positive outcomes. You have a choice. It all begins with a simple thought. If you believe you are overweight, think about how you can implement an exercise routine. If you hare unhappy with your job, think about how you can reskill yourself and change your vocation.

When good things happen to us, we feel happy. However, don’t rely on the randomness of good events to determine your happiness. Take control. Proactively put yourself in situations where you increase the frequency of good events. Do this by asking what would make you happy and what you need to do to ensure it happens.

I’m convinced that this “thought creates reality” mindset as Steve Pavlina describes it, is something worth exploring. In his post, he describes one way to really test if what we think about can really affect reality or not is to change our dominant thoughts. I’m determined to try this out and will post about some experiments I will conduct over the coming weeks.

If you take only one thing from this article, take this. You can change your life by choosing what you think. Your mind can influence how your body reacts. It cannot tell the difference between what’s real and what’s imagined. If you focused on the positives, even if life isn’t going as you had planned, things will get better. At the very least, you will live a happier life.

Isn’t that better than the alternative?

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