The results in your life come from existing thought patterns in your brain. If you want long-term, sustainable changes in your results, then changing thought patterns becomes very important. Human brains average 60,000-70,000 thoughts each day. 95% of your thoughts each day are unconscious/automatic. 5% of your thoughts are conscious. Thoughts cause feelings. Even unconscious thoughts can cause negative, neutral, or positive feelings.

Thought Work is using part of our conscious thinking time to examine the unconscious patterns going on. Gaining awareness of a pattern helps you gain authority over it. This is where your power to choose comes in. It exists in the now, in your consciousness. A belief is just a thought repeated over and over. Training your brain to think new things is like training a wild stallion (see podcast). You’ll notice the feelings before the thoughts a lot of times.

Don’t get so focused on where you want to be and how you’re not there yet. Begin right where you are, not where you were yesterday or where you long to be. All of your power to exercise choice/agency in your thinking, exists right now. The more moments you can create in the NOW, of believing something even slightly different, the more you will shift in to transformation, inside and out. Test it with the feeling. Embody the new feeing of the new thinking. Too far too fast, forcing, does not work. But you can commit to eventually believing something.

In the mean time, try on a new thought that is slightly different than current one, and in the direction of the desired one. I recommend starting with love. If I loved myself truly and deeply, how would I think right now? What would I decide for me right now?

Do not underestimate the power of loving yourself. You are worth it. You are worth loving.You are worth helping. You are worth getting help. We can tell you these things all day long. But whether you believe it or not is up to you. And it really is a choice.

Listen to the full episode HERE.

Lindsay and Danny Poelman are certified life coaches and are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Danny helps guys to stop looking at pornography (and be happy about it) and make their real life and/or marriage what they want it to be. Lindsay helps women let go of the fantasy marriage that doesn’t exist and create the marriage of their dreams in real life.