Thoughts are our anchors

Alan is a really competent young man; he’s bright, capable, has a lovely personality and huge potential. I’m always impressed when I see him work because he genuinely cares about the work he does.

Recently I happened to hear two more senior colleagues urging him to own his authority, to help his colleagues raise their game to a new level, a level he is already operating at. They wanted him to do it, they believed in him, but… and it’s a big but… he didn’t believe in himself.

The opportunity he was given on a silver tray was rejected because he couldn’t see what they saw.

His thoughts had literally put a cage around him. They had limited what he would do and who he could be. Even though someone else was holding the door open, he was insisting on staying inside in his cage.

How often do we do that? How often do I do it? Answer: toooooo often.

Our thoughts create anchors, for better or for worse. They can liberate us or they can bind us. Alan’s thoughts bound him. They weren’t based one perception of reality; they were based on his past experiences, his accumulated fears. They were not based on the reality of his colleagues. A perception that tired to give him the courage to believe the future can be different from the past, or the faith that others demonstrated they had in him.

While I understand that we are conditioned by our past experience, we focus far too often on the failures, pains and lessons. So we create more failures, pains and lessons, because that’s our unconscious anchor. Well, I say ‘we’ but let me say ME. I know I have those very same limiting beliefs.

I also know there are others who don’t have those limiting beliefs. Their thoughts are not cages. Their thoughts are the scaffolding they use to create amazing experiences in life.

I am blessed: I have huge potential to improve the quality of my thoughts! (Hee hee, that could have been a negative, but there’s a silver lining to everything!) I am lazy in my thinking: there is a lot of opportunity to think more creatively, positively and proactively in my life. There are also hundreds of books out there, many of which I’ve read! and practiced for 5 days, only to fall back into my old patterns.

I think it’s time for me to be more proactive, to retrain my thinking, after all I go to the gym to train my muscles, training my mind would even more powerful.