6 Ways to Improve your Thinking to Thrive

Everything we do starts with a thought.

Everything we don’t do starts with a thought.

Yet we rarely have the opportunity to learn how to manage our thinking – we just pick up things along the way. Personally, I was certainly like this until I faced some big life challenges and changes that made me reassess. I started to explore what I could do to improve my wellbeing and maintain it.

Part of the answer for me to improve the way I felt was to take the leap out of a well-paid secure job into the world of self-employment (with two young children many thought this was fool-hardy rather than brave). I did this because I found myself in a role that had taken me too far away from my purpose, why I was in the world of learning. I wanted to pursue my passion of enabling people of all ages to realise their potential and thrive. I have been following ‘my why’ ever since, enabling people to develop those capabilities that make the real difference in all areas of our wellbeing but are not taught in the education curriculum – we’re expected to just pick them up in some adhoc way.

In this personal and professional maelstrom, I started to learn more about the brain and how we can take more control of our thinking – to consistently think more positively, believe in ourselves, manage stress, manage tricky situations in professional and personal relationships, achieve our goals – be ourselves – only better! We have all seen the huge impact of thinking and attitude on the capacity of people to thrive. We’ve also heard the age-old excuse for sticking with thinking that doesn’t serve us well, ‘I’m just like that’. (We may have even used the phrase ourselves).

Developing our capacity to use the power of our mind to more consistently use thinking that helps us to thrive is an essential foundation in my equipped2succeed programme. Develop Your Amazing Winning Brain is about reflecting on how to more effectively manage our thinking – positively taking control, rather than allowing our thinking to limit us.

So, what do I mean by, ‘Develop Your Amazing Winning Brain’?

Let’s break it down:

Develop: to bring out the capabilities or possibilities of; bring to a more advanced or effective state;

Your: uniquely belonging to you – your thoughts, your attitudes, your actions;

Amazing: causing wonder by using the limitless potential and power we have within us;

Winning: the act of a person who chooses their future and creates the life they choose; brain: the organ inside the head that controls and co-ordinates all mental and physical actions; thought, memory, feelings, and activity.

Brain: the organ inside the head that controls and co-ordinates all mental and physical actions; thought, memory, feelings, and activity.

Just take a moment to reflect on all the work you’ve done on your thinking over the years. How has your thinking developed? If you’re like most of us, it’s happened in quite an ad hoc way by ‘osmosis’ – picking things up from our personal experiences, people we’ve met and read about, and our educational, community and professional environments.

It’s all in our mind – from our beliefs and values to how to ride a bike.

So how do we use our thinking to help us improve in all areas of life?

Here are 6 things to reflect on:

1. Learn More - Give Yourself Greater Insight

Learn some brain and mind basics - about how the most powerful computer you will ever know, your brain, works.

In creating the ‘Using Your Amazing Winning Brain’ workshops and chapter in the equipped2succeed book, I ‘translated’ essential elements of the research and ideas into practical, accessible insights and tools. I have been working on the ‘Using Your Amazing Winning Brain’ book for a while as it underpins our power to build our capacity to thrive. Look out for it later this year. I am constantly learning more, and if you want look into this in more depth, here are a few books that have informed my thinking:

The Private Life of the Brain – Susan Greenfield

The Power of Your Subconscious Mind – Dr Joseph Murphy

Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl

Bounce: The Myth of Talent and The Power of Practice – Matthew Syed

The Chimp Paradox - The Mind Management Programme for Confidence, Success and Happiness. – Dr Steve Peters

Brain Rules – 12 principles for surviving and thriving at work, home, and school – John Medina

Rebel Ideas – The Power of Diverse Thinking – Matthew Syed

2. Input – Output

You get out what you put in, and in nothing is this truer than in our thinking. And this is not necessarily dependent on experience. There are people who have been through truly horrendous situations and kept their positive thinking and goals in tact – they realise that no person or circumstance can affect their thinking unless they allow it.

Quality begins on the inside... and then works its way out.

Bob Moawad



Manage your memory bank and pull out stuff that helps you.

If you dwell on the negative, you add to its power.

If you dwell on the positive, you add to its power.

It’s your choice whether you dwell on the positive or negative.

It’s your choice who to listen to, what TV programmes to watch and what you read.

Are you watching soaps full of doom and gloom and melodrama that reinforce all the negative sides of life or are you reading about success stories and learning from inspirational people?

Are you listening to negative people who know what’s wrong with everything but are short on solutions, or are you surrounding yourself with positive, empowering people?

3. CHOOSE your thoughts

We can choose our thoughts, just the same way we choose our clothes in the morning. It takes some work to choose thoughts that empower and enable us but it’s worth the effort. It takes practice to filter out negative thinking habits that hold us back and choose thoughts that contribute to our wellbeing and achieving our goals – to replace:

I can’t, with I can

I’m just like that, with I am improving all the time

They are just dreams, with My goals are

There is a limit to what I can achieve, with I can achieve what I choose

This is beyond me, with I believe

4. R.A.S – We Attract What We Think About

Our brain wants to help us get what we want and the reticular activating system (R.A.S.) helps us spot the things we think about – our goals. There are millions of pieces of information and potential stimuli around us all the time and the RAS is the brain’s way of helping us to focus on those things that are important to us. It helps us to spot the things we think about, so we start to attract or see whatever we’re focusing on (whether that’s positive or negative!).

This means that we can take focus our thoughts, every day, on what we want to achieve.

It is therefore vital that we focus on the things we positively want to achieve rather than negative distractions: what we want rather than what we don’t want.

I want a yellow car – I start spotting them – especially if I have a wacky, humorous image in my head reinforcing the goal.

5. Overcoming the paralysis of FEAR

False Expectations Appearing Real

The brain doesn’t tend to recognise the difference between a real or an imaginary threat. We recognise a threat that puts us in danger. However, we can also be fearful about things that aren’t going to put us in danger; meeting new people, going to new places, trying new things, changing the job we don’t like for one we do.

The bottom line is that we’re going to be frightened on occasions. If we want to improve our wellbeing, follow our purpose and thrive, we need to be prepared to feel scared, acknowledge it and ignore it, or deal with it.

In her book Daring Greatly: ‘How The Courage To Be Vulnerable Transforms The Way We Live, Love, Parent And Lead’, Brené Brown talks about, instead of letting fear stop you, expect it to be there. Acknowledge it and, ‘Say, ‘I see you, I hear you, but I’ll do this anyway’.’ She goes on to say,

‘It feels dangerous to show up, but it’s not as terrifying as thinking, at the end of our lives, ‘What if I had shown up? What would have been different?’’

One of the things that can help overcome fear is gradually expanding our comfort zone – one step at a time. Think of a few things that scare you or will certainly challenge you and start to tick them off. Accomplishing one thing that challenges you will expand the whole of your comfort and you find yourself ready to take on the big stuff. For example, going to a new place, trying something new, calling someone and asking for a meeting, doing a scary physical (but safe) challenge or playing someone at sport you know is better than you.

6. Use Your Brainpower to Re-wire

The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.

William James

Our brain is the seat of all our learning, formal education and experiential learning, how to walk, talk and write, and all our positive and negative learned beliefs, habits behaviours and thinking. We can grow and change throughout our lives – ditch the stuff that holds us back and develop the and thinking that takes us forward, help us to improve and make us happier. The recognition and study of neuroplasticity has proved beyond doubt that we can use the power of the brain to improve everything in our lives: from health, mental wellbeing and quality of life to financial wellbeing, from being not quite good enough to being elite in our field, take us from C’s to A*’s, from struggling with relationships to managing relationships better, from being anxious in certain circumstances to overcoming fear and performing at our best. We can systematically use Relaxation – Visualisation and Mental Rehearsal to perform better:

- learn new things and improve skills;

- improve our ability to perform well each day;

- develop the ability to T.C.U.P. – Think Clearly Under Pressure when being at our best matters most;

- improve our ability to manage personal and professional relationships

- create positive habits;

- use the power of imagination and creative thinking

- build our focus and discipline

- develop our winning mentality

equipped2succeed

Relaxation – Visualisation – Mental Rehearsal – The Process

You can download music and a guided R-V-MR track, especially designed to help you establish your own process. The music has been especially commissioned to help our brains make the right connections.

Life is a mirror and will reflect back to

the thinker what s/he thinks into it.

Ernest Holmes

Beverley Burton

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