Sustainable Thinking
About 2 minutes to read“Sustainable” is generally defined as the ability to maintain something at a certain level, but it’s not a term we commonly apply to our thinking. I would say sustainable thinking is the ability to maintain consistent thought patterns that produce the highest-quality outcomes, ones that align with our goals and visions.
To illustrate this idea of a different way of thinking that cultivates the connection between what we think and what we do, I’d like to share a quote from the Dalai Lama, “In order to carry a positive action, we must develop here a positive vision.”
So it’s about consciously creating a vision in our minds that we can then match our words and actions to. The goal is to develop an ability to be consistent and deliberate with our thoughts, and when we’re efficiently channeling that vision through the way we live and behave, it’s going to produce better results.
Thinking deeply about the relationship between our thoughts and our actions is so important to understanding why and how we function the way we do. At a granular level, the average person has up to 60,000 thoughts a day, and 80 percent of the time they’re the same as the day before and the day before that.
We get into our routines, then we run on autopilot. When we’re not deliberate about what we’re thinking, it leaves us open to random outcomes that don’t reflect our priorities.
It takes three to four weeks to either build or dissolve habits, and with those 60,000 thoughts a day, that means in that span of time we’re conducting over a million thoughts that mostly get filed away in our subconscious. You can see how our subconscious mind can develop really strong programming, and our subconscious is where 95 percent of our behavior comes from.
That's how Monday starts. 51 more chapters to go.
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