How do you change your thinking?

I got this quote a while back:

The greatest discovery of my lifetime was that a person can change the circumstances of his life by changing his thoughts.
William James

Change is an important issue, both on a personal level and for society and our world. It brings another quote to my mind: “Change comes from within.”

Another quote, by Albert Einstein:

Clearly the problems we suffer cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.

Albert said it well, to solve our problems (personal or at other levels) we have to think in a new way. The trick is to change how we think, being open minded helps a lot.

How do YOU change your thinking?

This entry was written by Bengt, posted on March 6, 2008 at 5:47 pm, filed under Note and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

2 Comments

  1. Benjamin
    Posted April 5, 2008 at 1:33 pm | Permalink

    That’s a hard one. Can I answer after another year of blogging and when I finish my MSc? More seriously… I’d say two things:

    1) Change your inputs – what you read and experience changes your thinking. Want to change? Change what you read and do.
    2) Take hold of the steering wheel – conciously steer your thoughts and practice driving on a new routes. Eventually (through habituation) your brain will stay on the new paths, but there will be initial efforts.

    What say you?

  2. Bengt
    Posted April 5, 2008 at 2:20 pm | Permalink

    @ Benjamin,
    Thanks for your comment!
    I agree with your two things, especially taking the steering wheel. When we take the steering wheel we are able to change things.

    It is also important to be aware of how we (re)act and try to figure out why. To be able to change old patterns we first need to figure them out.