This is a guest post by Liz Seda.
It’s 5:00 in the morning.
A 23 year old woman is just arriving at a hospital to have a surgery that may change her life forever.
“I won’t know,” the doctor said to her gently, “what I have to do until I get in there.”
All the while, the woman is wondering how it came to this, when just a year ago everything seemed to finally be falling into place.
Just one year previously, she started her new job at a Fortune 500 company. It was an amazing opportunity and she relished the challenge. Her plan was to be a force of nature in that company until she reached the top.
Unfortunately, things don’t always go as planned.
The first few months were difficult as expected, but not because the work was hard. Indeed the work was challenging, but what was most difficult was having to conform to a culture she just didn’t fit in with.
She clashed with her peers because she wanted to do good work while they wanted to play politics.
She angered her manager because she wanted to improve procedure and processes while he wanted to skip steps and go straight to results.
She was an outsider. She was different.
Every day she was filled with dread at the thought of facing all of the negativity she would inevitably have to experience. She was tired of all the negative feedback and she was exhausted because nothing she could do would be good enough because she just wasn’t a good fit.
The harder she tried, the more difficult it got to carry on. Her days were filled with fear, dread, anger, and worry. Her mind was filled with hate, resentment, failure and shame.
It’s no wonder she got sick.
Countless studies have shown how severe prolonged stress can weaken your immune system and cause all kinds of sickness and disease.
She knew this. She just didn’t know it could be this bad.
All of her fear, dread, anger, worry, hate, resentment, failure, shame, and depression began to take physical form, as all thoughts usually do.
In this case, the form was a very large, possibly cancerous ovarian cyst.
At the age of 23, she was at risk of infertility. And all because she didn’t take the connection between her mind and body seriously.
That 23 year old woman was me.
My chronic sense of hopelessness and defeat was, literally, killing me.
The Mind Body Connection
This is only one example validating the existence of a connection between your mind and your body.
Although, the exact nature of this connection isn’t fully understood, there’s no denying that your state of mind has an effect on your well-being.
Negative thoughts, whether voluntary or involuntary, will, with enough conviction and belief behind them, manifest themselves into your reality. The same is true for positive thoughts.
And it doesn’t matter how you slice and dice your negativity. Thinking ‘this sucks’ is the same as thinking ‘I sure do hope this doesn’t suck.’ Either way, you’re focusing your mind on same basic idea: something sucking.
Your thoughts are extraordinarily powerful. Every success, failure, accomplishment, and inspiration can be attributed to your state of mind and the power behind your thoughts.
As my story demonstrates, your mind could care less where the thoughts come from and whether or not they are positive or negative. Your mind has just as much power to destroy you as it does to uplift you. It’s up to you to direct your thoughts and manifest what you want rather than thinking about what you don’t want.
You must learn how to control your mind if you want to attract success into your life, no matter what your definition of success is.
The only alternative is letting your thoughts control you as I did. Fortunately, I didn’t have cancer and I didn’t become infertile, but I did lose an organ. This was a direct result of the state of mind I allowed myself to remain in.
You may not believe in the mind body connection right now, but what if I told you it’s possible to lose an organ if you don’t manage your mind? Is that a chance you’re willing to take?
Out With The Bad and In With The Good
If you’re a skeptic, I suggest picking one of the following practical tips and applying it every day for a single week. Try your hardest to buy into it for one whole week and witness how your life changes.
Seven tips for beginning your mind control experiment:
- Expect good things to happen to you. Believe you deserve these good things.
- Laugh a lot. Napoleon Hill recommends taking a minute every day to have a good laugh (although he does suggest that you go somewhere private to do it).
- Exchange negative thoughts for positive thoughts, and block negative thinking immediately.
- If possible, ditch negative people and start associating yourself with more positive people.
- Practice visualization and affirmations.
- Exercise and eat healthily. Treat yourself with respect.
- Practice being enthusiastic in everything that you do.
These are only a few things you can do to infuse positivity in your life. My Supercharged Life is loaded with articles chock full of tips to living a more positive life.
The most important thing to remember is that your life is exactly what you make of it through your thoughts. Just as I manifested a toxic environment by accepting negative thoughts in my mind, your own reality is created by your own thoughts.
And never forget, as my good friend Napoleon Hill says: “What the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”
About the Author
Liz is a corporate dropout turned lifestyle designer and blogger. To find out more, go to her blog at A Life on Your Terms and download her Life Lovers Guide to the Galaxy. You can also find her on twitter at @elizabethseda.