Thoughts Become Things

I’ve coached thousands of business people, and the one common theme that determines the success of any business is the business owner’s and employee’s mindset, psychology, and attitudes. As a Brisbane executive coach as well as someone coaching established businessmen get back on track, it has become evident to me over the years that the right mindset is key to lead a business. Businesses can have the best strategy, comprehensive plans, and skillful employees, but if their mindset is off then success will be hard to come by. 

One of our coaching philosophies is: ‘In order to build a better business you need to build a better you.’ Regardless of your role in a business, work on yourself and the results will follow. To help with your personal development, the simplest, yet most important, piece of advice I have ever been given is: Thought Become Things.

Over the last decade, so many amazing self-help educators have shared their discoveries around the correlation between thinking and results. Napoleon Hill wrote ‘Think and Grow Rich’, Earl Nightingale released ‘The Strangest Secret’, which focused on the concept that ‘You Become What You Think About’, and Bob Proctor developed a program called ‘Think Into Results’. Just to name a few.

The central theme to all of these resources is that your thoughts will determine your outcome in business and life. Or in other words, what you think about you become.

The issue with thoughts is that we’re not even aware of the majority of thoughts we have. According to science, we have approx. 70,000 thoughts per day and 90% of these are the same as yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. These thoughts exist in our subconscious mind, which is made up of your habits, emotions, beliefs, values, and intuition. The subconscious mind is our default or operating system. In a lot of situations, we’re not even sure why we reacted in a certain manner, it’s just that we’ve been doing this for a long period of time.

Imagine that you’re driving in your car and someone cuts you off, what do you do? Do you swear? Get angry? Flip the bird? Honk the horn? Or stay calm. Regardless of what you do, chances are you’re doing it automatically. An event happens that triggers a reaction. Perhaps this is how your parents reacted. Maybe you’ve reacted this way for a long period of time and now it’s habitual.

Let’s think about a business setting. You have a sales call to make or a difficult employee/colleague conversation to have. What are you thinking? How do you feel? Perhaps you’re fearing these tasks and avoiding them until they become urgent. Regardless, there’s an event that triggers an automatic reaction. These are your subconscious thoughts.

In order to change our subconscious thoughts there’s a formula that we need to follow:

The opportunity is to elevate our conscious awareness or shift our thoughts from our subconscious mind to our conscious mind.

One of the best ways to increase conscious awareness is through regular reflection or review of how you behaved, spoke, thought, or felt. My coaching clients and I do this by asking my 2 universal questions daily:

1. What went well?
2. What can you do differently?

As a business coach, I deliberately ask these questions in this order. By asking what went well first forces us to think about the good things that happened, and to practice gratitude. Our minds have a negative bias as they want to avoid danger and keep us safe, therefore people naturally gravitate towards what’s gone wrong. Focusing on what went well helps us overcome the negativity and appreciate what we have.

The second question is designed to get us thinking in a forwards direction. Not what went wrong or what fell over, but what can I do differently? It’s all too easy to fixate on the mistakes we’ve made and dwell on, however, this doesn’t serve us. Instead, take the lesson from the mistake and come up with a plan of what you’ll do next.

By asking these questions regularly you’ll start to become aware of your thoughts and feelings throughout the day, but this is only one half of the change formula. The other half is about taking action. I may take all the time in the world to offer business and sales coaching to my clients. However, the next step requires action on  your part.

Now that you’ve become aware, what are you going to do next? You can choose to do nothing, however, nothing will change for you. Alternatively, you can choose to lean into the task that you need to in order to start creating amazing change.

Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts!  Your success in business and life is determined by your thoughts. Become aware of your thoughts, take action, and watch as you and your business grows.