How to Navigate the Grey Area of Your Thinking

28 January 2011

Thought" A Definition - thought generally refers to any intellectual or mental activity. It can refer either to the act of thinking or the resulting ideas or arrangements of ideas. Similar concepts include cognition, sentience, consciousness, and imagination. Because thought underlies almost all human actions and interactions, understanding it its physical and metaphysical origins, processes, and effects has been a longstanding goal of many academic disciplines including, among others, biology, philosophy, psychology, and sociology. (source=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought)

Navigating around the grey area of your thinking is a daunting task, in life the best way to face daunting tasks is to break them down into smaller more achievable goals, the same is true when trying to navigate around your thinking.

Firstly we can break the process of thought down into positive and negative thinking. Everybody thinks differently I think differently to you and you think differently to another and we all use a mixture of positive and negative thought patterns in our day to day life. The important thing is to try use a thinking pattern that best suits you.

Negative Thinking Patterns can be broken down themselves. In order for us to navigate to the ones we recognise and do something about them we can define Negative thinking patterns as thinking nothing good will ever happen to you, thinking you know what others think of you and its all negative, should of would of could of type thoughts, believing you are at fault for the negative things in life, and seeing everybody else as incapable therefore heaping the responsibility on your own shoulders.

Positive Thinking Patterns can be defined as any thought with a positive inclination or Optimism. Positive thinking can be reinforced my memories and the knowledge or evidence that you can do something, and have done it well before.

Having a basic understanding of the way thought works and dividing it into manageable pieces will make it easier to navigate round your thoughts. You will start to recognise and become aware of the thought patterns in your own mind and be able to change them.

Learning to navigate around your thoughts will take time; it is a slow process as we are all prone to over thinking and having repetitive thoughts. Our day to day routine is cyclical and results in us thinking the same things as we go through our daily routine. So our true thoughts can feel lost amongst the daily work related thoughts and what shall I have for lunch? What tie shall I put on thoughts that enable us to carry out our daily tasks?

Only through practise and learning about our own way of thinking and thought processes will we be able to learn how to navigate around them better and succeed in gaining clarity of thought and decisiveness and optimism that will benefit our lives and those we work with live with and socialise with.