Build A Mindset That Builds Good Habits. 4 Exercises to Change Your Thinking Habits.

Your mind is going to run somewhere every morning, and if you don’t choose the direction, you might not like where you'll arrive. I’m Angela Shurina, and I’m taking you inside a practical way to train your thinking so it consistently leads to better emotions, better actions, and a better life outcomes, not just another burst of motivation that fades by lunch. Subscribe, share this with a friend who’s ready to grow, and please leave a review on Apple Podcasts so we can bring even more great ...

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  Hey guys and welcome back to another episode of Change Wired Podcast. My name is Angela Shurina. I'm your host. I'm your partner in personal and collective transformation, your executive master health, sleep, stress management, nutrition, fitness, self-actualization coach, and just someone who is really passionate about and obsessed with human potential and what we can become more of every single day if we choose to. And that's what this podcast is all about. How do you choose consistently to invest into actions that you know are good for the future you want, for the future self you want to

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  create, you want to become, instead of this entropy and inertia and just stinking the status quo and not choosing growth and not choosing discomfort and challenge over comfort and just think where you are, which is always more familiar, easier, saves you energy, more comfortable. But is this a place where you want to stay? So today we are talking about how to condition the kind of mind, how to train the kind of mindset that gets you, that gets you going, that gets you to places, to exciting places

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  of your personal growth and evolution. Today, we are talking about this concept of mindset gym that I've looked into, developed, I even sold a project with the name mindset gym to one of the incubators in the US for founders to train their mind and to train their thinking, which then conditions our emotions, which then defines our actions, which then defines our life. Let me start with four words, four short sentences, that Alon Rice on Change

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  Wired Podcast, we had them a couple of episodes back, has been repeating to himself for 30 years. I may, I can, I will, I am. Alon Rice, regarded in South Africa and globally as a pioneer and maverick of business incubation, has been repeating those words to himself in the shower for 30 years, and he contributes that practice, done first thing in the morning, to his wild transformation from sleeping on the streets of Turban to becoming this globally recognized pioneer, maverick of business incubations, making a lot, a lot of money,

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  helping a lot, a lot of people to make a lot of money and creating a lot more positive impact, helping other to build things in the real world, to make it better, to keep it turning. I may, I can, I will, I am. Every morning, shaping his mind, conditioning it to go in a certain direction before the day gets going. Alon still does it, 30 years later, having gotten or having done all these successful things and considered by most of the people in the outside world, in his environment, like he's got it, right? He

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  got successful. Why keep doing that?

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  The most successful people I interview on my Change Wired Podcast, the most successful people I work with, I talk to in everyday life, the more I read and watch, the more I notice that how much attention goes into shaping their inner world, their mindset, their thinking. You've probably, guys, heard this quote in one shape or the other. We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our habits or systems. Contributed to stoics and some other authors, Navy SEALs like to repeat this a lot. Here's

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  what I'm more and more convinced of, guys. We fall to the level of our thinking habits, not even systems or habits in general, but thinking habits and our action habits, what we create in the outside world and how we grow ourselves, ultimately comes from our thinking habits. And researchers say that 60% or more of our thoughts are habitual, basically they are the same, and then they shape most of what we end up doing, and that shapes our life, which tends to run in circles and patterns. And if we don't attend to it,

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  it runs on inertia, not really moving to a lot of places. Thinking drives emotions, emotions drive actions, actions change your life. In my precision coaching certification, one of them, we had this worksheet that I still use with clients, sometimes changing it a little bit for different purposes, but we use this worksheet. When you define, when you notice a habit or a pattern of behavior that you don't want to repeat, first thing you do is you investigate. You write down that behavior, and then as it happens, you

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  stop yourself as soon as possible, and you ask yourself, what is the emotion that I was feeling that produced this action? And then you dig deeper and you ask, what is the thought or a few thoughts that made me feel this way? So then I do this thing, and then I regret or get certain results that I don't want to have in my life. So first, we investigate this pattern, thought, emotion, action. And people who study psychology, behavior change, they do neuroscience, they noticed it quite some time ago, that first you get

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  the thought, then you get the emotion, the feeling, then you get the action. These days, psychologists, researchers, behavioral scientists go one level deeper, and they ask, what we're going to talk a little bit more about, well, actually a lot more about just now,

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  researchers look a level deeper, and they ask, what is the environment? What was happening around you that triggered that thought, that triggered that emotion, that triggered that action? It's not you, it's what around you. I also love repeating these days that humans are like plants with legs. The environment you put yourself in consciously or unconsciously will define what your seed of potential going to grow into. There is even a book that recently came out from a great researcher, Angela Dackfor, Situated. So you can Google Situated, really, really great book on the topic, really fast eat, really easy. They have this worksheet,

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  this exercise, where they also have this like three boxes, action, thought, environment. They skip the feeling, sort of, but the idea is exactly the same. So we fall to the level of our thinking habits. Thinking drives emotions, emotions drive actions, actions change your life. If you don't know, you're skeptical about that, try and experiment also. Try this worksheet that I do with my clients when we work on their habits that they don't seem to work through. Next time you do something you don't like, pause and ask as soon as possible, what emotion did I feel that made me act this way? Why did I feel it? What

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  was I thinking? Like follow the thread back, and it almost always starts with a specific thought. Thinking drives emotions, emotions drive actions, actions change your life. And if you already know that's true, a more interesting question to ask next is, how do you change your thinking? How do you condition your mind to have different thoughts? The ones that take you to the right action, not the one you regret. Remember Alon in the shower, just a little bit early? Affirmations, what he was doing, sometimes they're called incantations, I think there is a difference, but repeating yourself certain phrases, usually paired

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  with visualization. Repeat something often enough, and you lay down tracks for your neurons to fire along. Literally, when you repeat the same phrase over and over and over again, your brain lays neurological, like there is a structure in your brain physically appears for your neurons to fire smoother, more effectively. So the action of repeating certain phrase gets better and better and better and faster and faster and faster. One of the key things about your brain biology is it likes efficiency. So when you repeat something, whether that's a physical action, whether that's a thought, whether that's a word, a phrase, it's like

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  learning any language. After you, after you learn it for some time, it becomes your automatic thing that you just do. If somebody asks me in Italian, come stai, I automatically can answer bene, like well, because my brain is conditioned to give a certain response to a specific question. But then again, back to affirmations and repeating certain things, you create a pattern.

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  Along which your neurons are so much faster and easier to fire. And basically you create new habits, thinking habits, that your brain is easier to get back to over and over and over again. It's a repeat something often enough and you lay down tracks for your neurons to fire along. You start coming back to those thoughts because you've practiced them, just like learning a language. The same way your posture also improves when you train your back in the gym. It all comes down to neurology, your neural pathways and neurons firing better along the tracks that you lay down with repetition.

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  After affirmations, there is the design of your environment surrounding yourself with the right words, with the right pictures. Now, in any place I stay, I even travel with those. I have certain phrases and words on pieces of paper, like my life purpose, accept what is, never stop learning, kindly inspiring others to realize their purpose. That's one of the things I have on one of my walls. And then I have a picture of Tony Robbins, then I have a picture of Elon Musk, of Richard Branson, with certain quotes I like from them.

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  So surrounding yourself with the right words, the right pictures of people you admire, for example, who remind you of your potential and who you aspire to be. That is a very powerful way to trigger certain thoughts, certain images, certain

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  mindsets in yourself. So your environment shapes what your brain pays attention to and what your brain pays the attention to, designs or conditions, the way you think. So number one, affirmations, repeating to yourself certain things, just like alone in the shower. I may, I can, I will, I am. Then surrounding yourself with those phrases and images that inspire, that trigger specific patterns of thinking. Then we have, one of the most powerful ways to shape up your mind is to,

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  it's also a way of surrounding, of shaping your cognitive environment, reading good books, following great people, spending time with people you think, who think the way you'd like to think and have the results you'd like to have. You're biologically wired to model the behavior of your tribe. You soak it up like a sponge soaks up water. So whatever you consume, so to speak, but especially people around you, you're going to be soaking up their words, their ways of thinking, their ways of decision making, the way, their ways of thinking about the world, solving problems, finding solutions

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  or reacting, responding to the environment or to what happens to them in a certain way. You're going to soak it up. And again, people around you, physical proximity are going to be the most powerful. But then you also have your social media and you can watch your videos and you can read books and again quotes and put pictures on the walls, et cetera. So choose your tribe carefully, intentionally, I would even say. And there is also an exercise I learned and then redesigned for my own purposes from cognitive behavioral therapy, an exercise that I call thought restructuring,

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  that I do teach all of my clients who need to reshape their thinking, their mindset to serve their life, their mission, their purpose, the future version of self better. An exercise I call again, thought restructuring. It's very simple. When a thought shows up in your mind that makes you feel emotions that won't lead you to the actions you want, redirect your mind with one question. Is this thought useful to my future, to the future that I want to create? And if not, what's another thought that would be more useful? Like example, I'll never be able to accomplish this, whatever that this is. Maybe you reach your business goal, your fitness goal, change your relationships to yourself

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  or with others, or have become a better public speaker. Like I'll never be able to accomplish. And we all have these thoughts popping up in our mind. You can change it.

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  Instead of that, you know, I'll never be able to accomplish this. You ask yourself, is this thought useful to the future that I want to create?

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  And then you, that thought can become, I can improve just like everyone else. If I don't stop learning and improving, progress is inevitable. So what's the next step to learn or make progress for me? And then you go and do the thing, instead of doubting your ability. Doubt isn't that useful, guys. Not if you're truly committed to the result you see, you want, to the transformation, to the challenge. If you are committed to making it happen, doubt is not useful at all.

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  Have you ever tried this or something else? Questioning your thoughts, is this thought I'm having useful? You are not your thought, you are the thinker. So you can change your thoughts, just like you can change your clothing. With thoughts, it's a little bit more challenging because you don't see them. And sometimes if you are not into meditation, you become so fused with your thoughts that you start feeling like your thoughts are who you are. They are not, they're just thoughts like passing clouds that you see. So your thoughts are these things that also pass in your head that you notice.

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  And you can choose which ones to create more of, focus on, pay attention to more. And ultimately, the more you practice this thought restructuring or learning to focus more on thoughts that are useful, that create the right kind of emotions, that create the right kind of actions that you want to have more of to create the life you want, the more you do it, the more conditioned your mind becomes.

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  Just like in the regular gym, when you train your bicep, your bicep gets bigger, more conditioned and stronger. The more reps you do, the more conditioned your mind becomes. The work gets easier, it becomes your habit, your new thinking habit. Alon has been doing his reps for 30 years. And with all the success he's accumulated, he hasn't stopped. Because he probably understands that like with exercise, if you want to keep your mind in shape, you have to keep training. If you want to keep your teeth shiny and white, cavities free, you are much better off by brushing them every day.

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  If you want to keep your leg muscles conditioned, you kind of want to do it every day.

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  The opposite is atrophy. Atrophy of your muscles, of your better thinking, of your emotional resilience. It's atrophy. Inertia, the default setting of your lazy brain, wired to save energy. Your brain, my brain, we all have one lazy brain wired to save energy. Your mind will go somewhere every morning, guys. The only question is whether you choose the direction or it is a default direction to choose and say, to choose to save energy and stay the same.

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  So what's your mindset gym rep today? The one thought that you'll practice until it becomes who you are. Examine your mind, guys. Think of the thoughts that you need to be having consistently to feel the things that you need to feel consistently, to do the actions you need to do consistently to create the kind of life you want. So when you talk to yourself about your habits, specifically about the habits you need to stop doing, or maybe habits you want to build, don't just look at level one, on the surface, on the surface of action. Look deeper. What are the emotions that you feel consistently? What are the thoughts that you have, that you're allowed to have consistently? And what are the practices?

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  Whether those are affirmations in the morning, like Alon Reis does still, has been doing it for 30 years. Whether that's putting words on walls and pictures and then surrounding yourself with people who you want to be more alike. Whether that's practicing on top of that thought restructuring and choosing useful thoughts and then doing the reps, doing the mindset gym workout. Whatever that is, choose one thing, maybe some affirmations. Maybe reading a passage, a page from a book like Daily Stoic or Laws of Power

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  or Daily Green. I have been reading and listening to a lot of Robert Green. So he also has his daily reading. The reason why daily reading books are so popular these days is because people know, people notice, a lot of people notice, guys. But when you read something every day, even a page from the right book, especially first thing in the morning, it's kind of like Alon's affirmations. They shape the right kind of mind that creates better emotions that lead to better actions that create better life. To cut the long story short, but before we actually do that and recap our four practices

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  to condition the mindset of a champion, of someone who grows into exactly the future that you want. Guys, don't forget to share this episode, to read, to review it on Spotify, on, I don't know, YouTube. Give us a like or Apple Podcast. If you are an Apple Podcast listener, please leave a review. When we get more reviews, did you know that, that most really great guests look at those to define whether they say yes to a podcast or no? So please go and review our podcast on Apple if you are on Apple devices. And let's recap, what do you do in your mindset gym to condition the right kind of thinking

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  that will shape the right kind of emotions that lead you to the right actions in the future that you want? Number one, affirmations, maybe choose a couple. I am an insatiable learner and I get better every day, learning from everything, anything and everyone I admire aspire to be more like affirmations. Two simple ones, maybe not as long. Surrounding yourself with the right words, with the right pictures that remind your mind of where it is you want to go. Maybe put your goals on the walls, put a picture of Tony Robbins or whoever it is makes you have more powerful thoughts. Surround yourself with the right imagery.

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  Listen to the right people, spend time with the right people. Shape up your social media accounts so you only have the empowering stuff coming at you. Shape and choose your conception. And then thought restructuring. Every time a disempowering thought comes into your mind, ask yourself, question it. It's not you, it's just a thought you are having. Is this thought useful? And then what can be more useful thought? And then repeat that thought to yourself three times and do it again and again and again and again. And track this thought restructuring exercise, just like you would your bicep workout and see how your mind slowly but surely will be a different kind of mind

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  that gives you a different kind of thinking, that gives you a different kind of emotional life, that creates different kind of actions, that shapes a completely different life. Thank you, guys, for listening. Thank you for tuning in, designing your mindset workout, just like you would your muscle workout. Get it done, get it done every day, just like brushing your teeth. And rate your view our podcast, especially on Apple. Until next time, guys, keep growing.