“Your thinking, more than anything else, shapes the way you live. It’s really true that if you change your thinking, you can change your life.” John Maxwell
It seems like I spend many a Saturday sitting on my stone path pulling weeds and grass from among the Steppables, a ground cover that you can walk on. I really don’t mind doing this because gardening, including weed pulling is like Valium to me. It’s calming, gives me time to think and the dog loves it, too.
Last week after the computer fiasco and my attitude struggle, I went out to the stone path. While out there, I began to think how much the stone path reminded me of my mind. No, not that I have rocks in my head, which is true sometimes, but what I sow in my mind is often what I reap in real life.
“How the mind is fed, shapes the life that’s led,” Christian Simpson (my coaching mentor.)
Like my stone path, or any garden for that matter, it can be gorgeously cultivated or shamefully neglected. What we plant, grows. Just as I intentionally cultivate my stone path to keep it free from weeds, allowing the ornamentals to flower and flourish, I need to tend the garden of my mind.
If I don’t plant seeds of truth, growth, and possibility, an abundance of weed-like seeds of lack, limitation and mediocrity will take hold and continue to produce after their kind.
I can allow my current circumstances to permeate my mind garden and believe that “that’s just the way I am” or “that’s just the way it’s going to be,” or I can plant seeds of expectation of good things to come. I can sow seeds that will ultimately change my life.
I need to remember that my current circumstances do not define me. My current circumstances are the product of what I have been planting in these last years. The very cool part of all this is that I can weed my mind. I am lord over my thoughts and I can change them. And when I change what seeds go in, I change what I become without. Yippee!
The picture is of the stone path. It’s been weeded and it is so beautiful, but it takes constant vigilance to maintain that beauty. So it is with our minds–it takes constant watchfulness and care.
What are you planting? What thoughts are you nourishing? How are you cultivating the rich, fertile soil of your best asset, your mind?
This is something for me to think, as well, about as I head back out to the stone path with Truffle, my dog.
Thinking great thoughts,
Jan
Jan McDonald
John Maxwell Team
(still CEO of Life Options)
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