Who is the commander of your thoughts?

To be successful in your life, you need to become the commander of your thoughts. You will surely ask yourself, "how can I do it if most of the time they are totally controlling my mind"? Well, before anything else and as any commander would do, you should know who are the components of the troop that will lead you to success.

Knowing your troop

Your troop is composed by rebellious and many times, inconsistent thoughts. So, I'm going to give you an overview of who your subordinates are. Knowing how your thoughts are formed can help you identifying what of these are reliable or not, stopping the unwanted events in your life to continue controlling your mind.

The path of our thoughts

Thoughts are the result of an intricate process involving approximately 100 billion neurons, the cells of the nervous system. Each stimulus gives rise to thousands of connections between neurons producing up to 100 trillion of synapses. Some of these connections send up to 1,000 signals per second. “Somehow… that’s producing thought,” says Charles Jennings, director of neurotechnology at the MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

Right now, as you read this text your brain is receiving a stimulus of light that your optic nerve sends to it. When it arrives, in a matter of seconds, another connection gives meaning to what your eye has captured and transforms it into an image. In turn, it finds inside your long-term memory the meaning and understands what you saw. The long-term memory is the place, like a big library, where you accumulate everything you have learnt in your life until now. At the same time that this happens, your auditory nerve may pick up the stimulus of a sound to which you have not provably paid attention (unattended channel). Never mind, it will go through a similar path to the visual stimulus. At some point, the two stimuli would may coincide and be recorded in your long-term memory. Then, at the moment of remembering what was written in this text, your brain will activate not only the memory of the writing but very probably, the sound that your ear has captured and you ignored while were reading the text.

The influence of unconscious perceptions

As you can imagine, this is a simplified picture of how our brain works and produces responses to stimuli, even to the unselected ones, thus determining our life's meaning. And this is the problem, many of these stimuli can be negative. Words or body language from those around us can also be unnoticeably recorded and stay inside our memory for all our life, being triggered at any time to mask who we really might be. So this scenario can be formed by an act of the past, as in the case of the teenager who wanted to start a personal project and his mother told him: "this is too big for you." Today, as an adult, he faces problems to achieve his personal and professional goals, just because every time he starts a new project, his unconscious takes from his memory the words of the mother, the negative statement that created in him the false idea of not being able to succeed or even deserve to dream new and better things for himself, because as his mother once said, these are too big for him. The advice may have been useful in the past because it served a young person. But he grew up and learned, or should have learned to find new ways to plan things in his life. Therefore, determining the thoughts that are useful to you today about those who are not, is the only way to success in your life.

Because unconscious perception still occurs in the absence of attention

You need to learn how to promote a cleaning of false statements in your mind. Eliminating those that one day were useful but that they are not anymore, and the ones entering your mind to create false beliefs about yourself in everyday life. Probably, every morning you look to your face in the mirror, scanning the tiny surface of your skin and take action over each imperfection or annormality. How many times did you take care of your thoughts in the same way? If you did not do yet, chances are that you are not the commander of your thoughts but a subordinate obeying commands of an ignorant.