Your Thoughts Become Things

I want to highlight a profoundly simple concept and paint the explanation around it. My mentor Jim Bunch said in a coaching call the other day “Your thoughts become things”.

What does this mean, for your thoughts to become things? Ultimately it’s about how what you think finds a way to materialize into your life in one way or another. This has massive implications for the quality of our life, the amount of success we have, and the way we operate on a daily basis when we understand that the majority of our thoughts are unconscious.

This is where I want to introduce the concept of the Stick Man, which is also something I learned from Jim Bunch. And it’s in understanding the Stick Man where we can see how our thoughts actually become things.

Even before you have a thought, you need to consider your beliefs. At an unconscious level, your beliefs shape the thoughts you have. It’s the default pattern of relating with things, the quick conclusions you draw about things, and it serves as a filter that everything around you needs to pass through in order to formulate a thought.

Then once you have a thought, it induces a certain feeling and that feeling affects your level of interest or motivation to engage in a certain behavior.  As we know, what we do leads to the results we get in our life.

So the Stick Man is a simple representation of how our internal thoughts and belief systems reliably produce external results. Your thoughts become things. 

This is the unconscious pathway, but fortunately for us we are not forever at the mercy of our unconscious mind. We can choose our thoughts, we can determine how we want to think about how we feel, we can make ourselves take action even when we don't feel like it, and to some extent we can even choose our beliefs.

With this awareness, you can put yourself above the unconscious pattern, bring more consciousness to your life, and have a game plan for how you’d like to respond in different circumstances rather than figure it out in an emotional environment. 

That is living life with intentionality, where you realize you have a choice in everything you do, and you’re committed to making the choices that are representative of the best version of yourself, as often as you can.