The biggest changes in our lives don’t need to come from elaborate and expensive systems and strategies. The most important changes can often come from taking small actions in the areas that really matter.
In today’s episode I am going to share with you what I think will be the single best way to truly change your outcomes in life over time. It’s a simple idea but it takes time, attention and commitment. If you’re ready to unlock that incredible potential within then this episode can really help.
Grab a free copy of my book Bridging the Gap here:
https://go.jonathandoyle.co/btg-pdf
Enquire about booking Jonathan to speak:
https://go.jonathandoyle.co/jd-speak-opt-in
Article on Depression Research:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0
Transcript
Well, Hey everybody, Jonathan Doyle with you.
Speaker:Once again, welcome my friend to the daily podcast.
Speaker:It is good to have you on board.
Speaker:What a privilege it is.
Speaker:You are going to bless me with the gift of your time.
Speaker:I better do a good job, right?
Speaker:No pressure on me, but I want to make sure that I give you something useful.
Speaker:As we always say, you don't need.
Speaker:A vast panoply, plethora of ideas and strategies and
Speaker:systems to change your life.
Speaker:So often we can get bogged down in this idea that we have to find.
Speaker:This vast complex meta system to change every corner of our lives.
Speaker:No friends, as we always say, all we need is one good idea
Speaker:that we're actually prepared.
Speaker:To use.
Speaker:It doesn't matter what we know.
Speaker:What we know in life actually doesn't truly matter what matters is what we
Speaker:do with what we know, what we learn, how we use it, whether we deploy it in
Speaker:effective ways that bless ourselves and other people, you can know everything.
Speaker:You can know.
Speaker:Every system strategy, book, insight, psychological, spiritual principle.
Speaker:But if you do not deploy them and put them to work.
Speaker:They are nothing.
Speaker:They are not particularly useful.
Speaker:It's like having the world's most beautiful library, but the door is locked.
Speaker:You never go in and use the knowledge and put it to you.
Speaker:So we are going to do that today.
Speaker:Uh, please make sure you've subscribed, hit that subscribe button.
Speaker:It's a great blessing to me.
Speaker:If you could do that.
Speaker:And, uh, what else hit the subscribe button and a.
Speaker:Go check out the show notes.
Speaker:If you want to get a free copy of my book, if you'd like to book me
Speaker:to speak it's in the show notes.
Speaker:Go check that out to find out more.
Speaker:Now today, we're going to talk about.
Speaker:I really challenging topic.
Speaker:It's something I've been alluding to in episodes on and off, I
Speaker:guess, for the last year or so.
Speaker:It's this idea that the thought processes flowing through
Speaker:our brains on a daily basis.
Speaker:I think we need to have a bit of a.
Speaker:What do you call it?
Speaker:A come to Jesus moment.
Speaker:We need to have one of those moments where we begin to re-look at rethink.
Speaker:Our relationship with our own thought processes.
Speaker:I'm increasingly convinced that transformative change tends to happen
Speaker:at the level of our relationship with our conscious thinking.
Speaker:You know, changing our subconscious thinking is obviously more
Speaker:challenging because it's subconscious.
Speaker:You know, that can be accessed of course, through state of deep
Speaker:states of meditation and prayer.
Speaker:Uh, things like music and drama and symbology can change some of that.
Speaker:But, uh, it's a harder process, whereas our conscious thinking process.
Speaker:Is something that we can begin to work with.
Speaker:If we get conscious, if we begin to pay deep attention to the actual thought
Speaker:processes going on and catching ourselves in the act of going, you know, what.
Speaker:That's not helping so much at the time I thought process is fly along and we assume
Speaker:that they reality regular listeners.
Speaker:You know, I talk about this regularly because, you know, as in Paul famously
Speaker:said of sinners of whom I am chief, I can say with you have a lazy
Speaker:thinkers of which I have been chief and by lazy thinkers, I just mean.
Speaker:I have been a person historically, who has been victim to the weather of my thinking.
Speaker:So if the weather was good, I could be positive and pumped.
Speaker:If the weather was not good in my internal psychological dialogue, then I could
Speaker:become victim to its super, super fast.
Speaker:Now I want to, I just want to mention something and I've got to go deeper
Speaker:to find out where I was reading it.
Speaker:I was reading some research.
Speaker:Have a high level or peer reviewed research.
Speaker:Just around.
Speaker:Do you know how all of us have grown up with the concept of the biochemical
Speaker:basis for negative feeling states and significant mental health problems?
Speaker:You know, all of us have been aware of this idea that, um, the neuro
Speaker:chemical balances in our brains can affect our feeling states.
Speaker:There's been some very interesting research coming out recently saying we're
Speaker:not quite sure how true that may be.
Speaker:And, uh, I don't want to go down that rabbit hole with you just yet.
Speaker:I want to get my, uh, empirical, uh, epistemological basis
Speaker:a little bit stronger, but.
Speaker:If we took that out of the equation, just as a thought
Speaker:experiment, let's just say that.
Speaker:Uh, mental health states are much.
Speaker:Uh, more consistently predicated upon.
Speaker:The way that we are thinking.
Speaker:See the problem with that.
Speaker:See two things of just two things to think about if that was correct.
Speaker:If we were in a sense doing it to ourselves now that
Speaker:is not blaming the victim.
Speaker:Of course everybody listening, we're all in a different space on our own emotional,
Speaker:spiritual, mental health journey.
Speaker:But if we took some of that out, that kind of neurochemical fallback,
Speaker:then what would happen is firstly.
Speaker:You know, big pharma would go out of business even faster because
Speaker:of course they're incredibly invested in that process.
Speaker:But secondly, we'd have to take an incredible responsibility.
Speaker:For monitoring, managing and directing our thinking.
Speaker:Now.
Speaker:This is difficult to do.
Speaker:This is something that I have found difficult and challenging to do in my own
Speaker:life, but I want to give you some quotes.
Speaker:Firstly, I want to give you three.
Speaker:And, you know, if you think of the famous quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Speaker:the American metaphysical poet.
Speaker:Emerson, uh, excuse the gender specific famously said a man is
Speaker:what he thinks about all day.
Speaker:And you heard that before.
Speaker:Um, let's just change it.
Speaker:A person is what they think about all day.
Speaker:It's a very famous quote from Emerson.
Speaker:That we become what we think.
Speaker:You know, if we thinking thoughts that are.
Speaker:You know, Uh, I guess let's say somebody does something to us that we don't like.
Speaker:We've all had the experience of, of borrowing down deeply into
Speaker:thoughts of self justification.
Speaker:I can't believe they did this to me.
Speaker:This is terrible.
Speaker:This is, and we get in that spin cycle where it was
Speaker:spinning along and we begin to.
Speaker:Gravitate and think about those.
Speaker:You know how we've been hurt, how we've been wounded.
Speaker:And I was thinking as I was coming into the studio.
Speaker:Do you remember when you were a kid and Christmas was coming
Speaker:or your birthday was coming?
Speaker:Like, I don't know about you, but we would begin to obsess about it.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:You get so excited that the joy and the excitement leading up to those
Speaker:days could be really quite profound.
Speaker:Um, my daughter's having her 15th birthday tomorrow and, you
Speaker:know, she's, um, In many ways.
Speaker:She's a very, she's a beautiful human being and she's a very gentle spirit.
Speaker:And you know, she's quite, self-contained a little bit like a dad.
Speaker:But then the last few days and weeks she's been really talking about her.
Speaker:Birthday and how excited she is.
Speaker:And you can see that a thinking process, a thought process.
Speaker:Is targeting.
Speaker:A positive feeling state about something that's meaningful to her.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:So you begin to see that we are making choices about how we think
Speaker:and what we choose to focus upon.
Speaker:All right now.
Speaker:I think this is a really hard message.
Speaker:I think it's harder than we actually want to give credit for, because it's
Speaker:easier to blame an external circumstance.
Speaker:It's easy to blame a neurochemical process and it is to go well, what if, you know.
Speaker:I am participating in my own unhappiness or my happiness.
Speaker:Let me give you another quote here.
Speaker:This is from Emmet Fox.
Speaker:Emmet Fox was a member of a gang.
Speaker:What is it called?
Speaker:I think it's called the new, the new faith movement in the early 20th century.
Speaker:It was a kind of weird sin.
Speaker:Not syncretism, but, uh,
Speaker:Uh, kind of, um, Yeah, I guess it was a synchronous movement.
Speaker:It kind of pulling together of.
Speaker:Of stoic, metaphysical, spiritual principles.
Speaker:Um, I think what they were trying to do is take the best that they could
Speaker:find out of all the world's spiritual, psychological principles and meld
Speaker:them into a kind of way of being.
Speaker:So they'd be good in this.
Speaker:There'd be stuff in this that would be problematic for some of us, but I
Speaker:just want to give you this one quote, he says, what you think upon grows.
Speaker:Whatever you're allowed to occupy your mind.
Speaker:You magnify in your life.
Speaker:Whether the subject of your thought be good or bad.
Speaker:The law works and the condition grows.
Speaker:Any subject that you keep out of your mind tends to diminish in your life
Speaker:because what you do not use atrophies.
Speaker:The more you think of grievances.
Speaker:The more such trials, you will continue to receive.
Speaker:The more you think of the good fortune you have had.
Speaker:The more good fortune will come to you.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:So at the extreme end, we've got the kind of, you know, that movie and book,
Speaker:the secret that came out when you just kind of, you think about a push and
Speaker:then you walk out in your driveway and it's there and you're like, good's that.
Speaker:So you can see there's a, w we've got a spectrum here, right?
Speaker:We've got a, we've got a spectrum.
Speaker:We've got a spectrum from believing that we can manipulate physical
Speaker:reality simply by our thinking.
Speaker:All the way back to believing that our thought processes
Speaker:are completely irrelevant.
Speaker:What I'm trying to do is move the needle for all of us today.
Speaker:And move us a little further down the line to realize that what we
Speaker:think upon is Emmet Fox's you grows.
Speaker:And what we don't think about tends to atrophy.
Speaker:So remember is a keyboard.
Speaker:I broke my arm skateboarding.
Speaker:I remember I was, it was a pretty bad break and I was in a, uh, I
Speaker:was in a cast for a long time.
Speaker:And I remember when I finally came out of the cast.
Speaker:You know, the, the atrophy that had taken place, the muscle system hadn't been
Speaker:used and it had kind of withered away.
Speaker:And I had to do a lot of work to get it back.
Speaker:So I liked this principle from Emmet Fox here that.
Speaker:You know that if we're not thinking about.
Speaker:Uh, w you know, particular things, if we're not dwelling on, who's upset us.
Speaker:If we're not dwelling upon.
Speaker:What's wrong with the world.
Speaker:Then it begins to diminish in our lives.
Speaker:Now.
Speaker:I want to qualify this by saying, I'm not saying if your ex you've experienced
Speaker:abuse or trauma that you just, you know, don't think about that completely.
Speaker:I'm a big advocate for saying, we need to process deep pain in life.
Speaker:We need to do that work.
Speaker:We might need, um, psychologicals, you know, spiritual counseling,
Speaker:whatever we need to, to work through the wounds and the pains of life.
Speaker:But I think there comes a point.
Speaker:Where we have to begin to diminish.
Speaker:Some of the negative things that we can think about.
Speaker:And begin to focus upon some of the things that are true.
Speaker:Good and beautiful about reality itself.
Speaker:If you focus upon the negative in the world at the moment?
Speaker:Well, the first thing is you're not going to run out of material, right?
Speaker:You're not going to run out of material.
Speaker:You can find something in the world right now to be.
Speaker:You know, Either terrified about or angry about or upset about, and you can
Speaker:see it tearing apart the social fabric at the moment, politically, socially
Speaker:in a, in many parts of the world.
Speaker:But what have, we can begin to think about other things, you know, think
Speaker:about things that are more beneficial to us that are more beneficial to others.
Speaker:The last quote, I'll give you.
Speaker:Comes from the good book itself from Philippians four, chapter eight, where,
Speaker:you know, simple finally says, finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true,
Speaker:whatever is noble, whatever is right.
Speaker:Whatever is pure.
Speaker:Whatever is lovely.
Speaker:Whatever is admirable.
Speaker:If anything is excellent or praiseworthy.
Speaker:Think about such things.
Speaker:So right at the birth of the early Christian Church, you see this process
Speaker:by which there's an encouragement to, Hey, direct your thinking.
Speaker:Think about these specific things.
Speaker:Don't think necessarily about the wickedness and evil of the Roman empire.
Speaker:That's trying to kill you.
Speaker:If you think about that, you'll become.
Speaker:You know, You'll become full of fear.
Speaker:You'll become, you know, angry and bitter and you should
Speaker:think about beautiful things.
Speaker:Think about pure things.
Speaker:Think about noble things.
Speaker:Think about things that are true.
Speaker:So there's this direct.
Speaker:Exhortation.
Speaker:To direct our thinking.
Speaker:So, all right, let's wrap this up here is I guess the, what I keep
Speaker:trying to teach everybody is step one.
Speaker:Is consciousness.
Speaker:Step one is to become increasingly conscious of what is going
Speaker:on in your thinking process.
Speaker:If you're struggling with depression.
Speaker:I'm not telling you anything you don't know because I've been there with you.
Speaker:I've experienced depression in life.
Speaker:I've experienced anxiety in life.
Speaker:And I it's just, you know, there, those negative states there.
Speaker:It's like this weather comes in.
Speaker:And we make agreements in a sense, we agree with the thinking, like
Speaker:life's never going to get any better.
Speaker:No one really cares about me.
Speaker:Things are going to get worse.
Speaker:It's never going to change.
Speaker:And that, that internal dialogue, I guess this is the nature of CBT, right?
Speaker:Cognitive behavior therapy is like,
Speaker:Beginning to capture the thought, notice the thought direct the thought.
Speaker:And begin to genuinely think differently.
Speaker:Now, concentrate.
Speaker:This is work.
Speaker:This is work.
Speaker:This is not a nice feel.
Speaker:Good idea.
Speaker:This is not an Oprah Winfrey, Instagram meme.
Speaker:It is like you've got to work at this.
Speaker:So as I go through my day to day, I have to work at this.
Speaker:I have to notice I have to work at it.
Speaker:I have to even pay attention to things like maybe, maybe I'm just tired.
Speaker:You know, there's a physiological thing going on here in a sense, right?
Speaker:We get tired.
Speaker:Sometimes we need to notice that we're in a, in a fatigued state.
Speaker:We need to rest.
Speaker:We need to eat well.
Speaker:We need to look after ourselves.
Speaker:We need to get the exercise.
Speaker:We need put those pieces pieces in place as well.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:What am I really the essence of this?
Speaker:Is, I just think that all of us need to begin to pay attention.
Speaker:That if we want a different quality of life, we are going to need a
Speaker:different quality of internal dialogue.
Speaker:You know, just want to draw your attention finally to that
Speaker:when Emmet Fox's, you know,
Speaker:If you think about the good fortune you've had them all
Speaker:good fortune will come to you.
Speaker:You know, some of you might be just not, you know, I guess, resistant to what
Speaker:I'm saying here today, but I keep coming back to somebody like Victor Frankl.
Speaker:Who went through Auschwitz who went through the Nazi
Speaker:extermination camps and survived it.
Speaker:And developed, you know, logotherapy the third Viennese school of psychotherapy.
Speaker:And he was like, you know, He found things in the death camps to be grateful
Speaker:and, and to feel fortunate about.
Speaker:And then his life goes on to be alive in a sense of profound, good fortune, where he
Speaker:makes a massive contribution to the world.
Speaker:So by this, I mean that even if you have had difficulties in life, Even if
Speaker:you have had suffering betrayal or pain in life, you can still find some good.
Speaker:You can still begin to reprogram your internal narrative to go.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:You know what this happened?
Speaker:This happened, this happened, but guess what the meaning of
Speaker:it is it's made me stronger.
Speaker:It's made me more accepting of reality.
Speaker:It's made me more compassionate.
Speaker:It's made me want to reach out to other people who suffer.
Speaker:So, no matter what we go through, we can frame the meaning and we frame the
Speaker:meaning of our negative life experiences through that internal language through.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:This happened to me, but guess what?
Speaker:It was awful.
Speaker:I wouldn't wish it on somebody, but it's given me the ability
Speaker:to be gentle, compassionate.
Speaker:It's given me an ability to model, make something of my life,
Speaker:regardless of what's happened.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:I want to say summary again and keep going, but I think I should wrap up.
Speaker:But I'm going to do it anyway.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:Here it is.
Speaker:You don't have to be a victim to your thought life.
Speaker:I don't have to be a victim to my thought life.
Speaker:We need to begin to capture our thoughts, notice our thoughts
Speaker:and direct our thoughts.
Speaker:And it's hard, hard work.
Speaker:It's a moment in history where it's much easy to be a victim.
Speaker:It's much easy to blame, you know?
Speaker:Uh, an external process, an internal process, a a
Speaker:government, a financial system.
Speaker:Pick pick your, you know,
Speaker:Pick your poison.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:We can find something to externalize our problems toward don't mean
Speaker:that we don't fight for justice and do what we can reasonably do
Speaker:to change systems and structures.
Speaker:But at the end of the day, We have an incredible chance.
Speaker:To direct a future.
Speaker:By catching ourselves in the act of unhelpful thinking.
Speaker:And choosing and deciding to think differently.
Speaker:Friends.
Speaker:This has been the journey of my life.
Speaker:This has been the battle of my life to do this, you know, to actually do this work.
Speaker:I'm going to be doing it today.
Speaker:So if you get off this podcast and you're like, oh, that's a nice idea.
Speaker:Come and join me, come and join me in the actual work.
Speaker:Because if you can do this, you will change.
Speaker:You will not necessarily massively change overnight, but you will change.
Speaker:You go.
Speaker:I don't have to think this.
Speaker:I don't have to think this about this person.
Speaker:I don't have to think they always do this.
Speaker:I can choose how I think I can choose.
Speaker:I can choose.
Speaker:I can choose.
Speaker:All right, God bless you.
Speaker:Please make sure you've subscribed.
Speaker:I'd love it.
Speaker:If you could share this with people.
Speaker:I, if you think I'm crazy.
Speaker:Uh, semi and email jonathan@jonathandoyle.co.
Speaker:And, um, I'll try and dig up that, uh, scientific paper
Speaker:on the neurochemical basis.
Speaker:I did have it recently, so if I can find it, I'll put it in the show notes today.
Speaker:Or you can email me and i'll keep finding it and i'll i'll put it out there god
Speaker:bless everybody my name's jonathan dog get out there take the power back take that
Speaker:control back be a blessing to the people in your life because you're choosing to
Speaker:think differently my name's jonathan doyle this has been the daily message and you
