Youtube is full of videos which show you how to control your mind, and that's fine. That can be
useful, but in this video I want to explain why that's not the ultimate in emotional freedom;
and I want to show you what is. My name's Steve and I coach professional people just
like you to combine your personal brilliance with unshakeable emotional freedom, and a great place
to start is with my free, simple, five-step guide to mastering stress in the moment.
People are attracted to the idea of controlling their mind because stressful feelings come
from stressful thoughts, and if we can make ourselves not have those stressful thoughts
then we don't get the stressful feelings. It's called the thought feeling connection. For me
to get stressed about something that's going to happen in the future I have to be playing through
that in my mental simulator; I have to be thinking about it; and at first it seems to make sense that
the best way to not suffer that connection is to control the thought bit by controlling
the mind. Now that's not necessarily a bad thing to explore. It could be a useful thing to master
but there are snags. Number one is that you can't control your mind all the time.
You have to let your guard down sometimes, and besides who wants to spend their entire life,
their entire waking hours, controlling their mind? You would never relax from that, and that alone is
a reason why that's not where emotional freedom is. How can you be emotionally free if you're
constantly having to control your mind? Number two is that trying to imprison your thoughts, because
let's face it, that's what we're doing when we talk about controlling our mind, to control
our thoughts, we're trying to imprison those thoughts, we're trying to suppress those thoughts,
and that imprisons you as much as you are trying to imprison it. You know, me holding my thoughts
in check, that's a two-way bind. Now I get it that when a lot of people talk about controlling
your mind, and controlling your thoughts, they're not really intending you to be on 24-hour watch,
but if controlling your mind and controlling your thoughts is the ultimate solution that
you're searching for, then you are going to spend a lot of hours doing that. And number
three no matter how much you try to imprison your thoughts some of those thoughts will escape. You
simply will not be able to suppress every thought that you don't want to have. And number four is
what if the thoughts that you're suppressing actually have an important message for you?
It could be unwise to try and hold those thoughts back, to suppress them, to change them if they do
have a useful message, even if they are thoughts that it feels uncomfortable to be with. By the
way, if you're enjoying this video so far do give it the thumbs up and don't forget to subscribe to
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Now none of this is to say that it's not worth learning how to control individual thoughts,
or specific thoughts, or to learn how to mitigate those individual thoughts when they come up.
That can be useful. It's also not to say that it isn't worth learning how to train your mind,
to learn how to think about certain thoughts differently. For instance to maybe change the
structure of a certain thought so that you can have the thought and get the information from it
without it bothering you so much. That's possible. But for ultimate emotional freedom you need to be
able to let go of controlling. You need to be able to let go of being the guardian of your thoughts,
of being the prison warden of your thoughts. You have to be able to let go of interfering,
because the fact of the matter is it's not up to you what shows up in the stream of thought,
and in your role of controller of your thoughts you're not necessarily the best judge about which
thoughts to let pass and which thoughts to not let past, so if trying to control your mind
isn't where the ultimate in emotional freedom is then well what is? Well, it's to change your
relationship with thought! But what does that mean? Well it's learning to see your thoughts
differently, it's learning to see that the thoughts that we have are just thoughts,
the same way that you might look at a movie and be able to say it's just a movie. Now that's not
to say that our thoughts don't have valuable information for us, but it's an investment in
seeing our thoughts almost like a neutral observer of our thoughts, rather than somebody
who is emotionally involved with our thoughts. It's like seeing that when we have thoughts it's
almost like creating an umbrella above us, that we can only see what's under the umbrella,
we can't see what's above it; or to use a separate metaphor, it's like your thoughts create a tunnel
and you can't see what's outside of the tunnel. Learning to have a different relationship with
our thoughts, to be able to see that there's a whole world of truth above the umbrella
or outside of the tunnel, is what allows us to meet whatever shows up in the stream of thought
and to be able to observe it, to take information from it, but also remain
relatively neutral around it; to know that that's not something we have to be scared of.
Now I'm not saying that developing a new relationship with thought
is necessarily easy. I mean in a way it sort of is, and in a way it sort of isn't.
It definitely takes investment in time and practices, and for a good place to start with
that I recommend you watch this video up here. This is Steve wishing you health and happiness.