Building Mind Blocks

You must have seen kids playing with building blocks. These blocks look colorful but very simple.  As adults we do not get fascinated by these buildings blocks.  Just like kids build blocks one on top of another, we adults too build stress in our mind one on top of another not realizing how much damage they do to our lives.

In the management world today, executives are evaluated on how well they can manage stress.  Though there are structured questions to test the tolerance level, it has become increasingly important that high level executives should learn the art of managing high level stress for the smooth functioning of the organization.   Stress is not something that affects only the top management executives in this world but everyone in some form or other.  Stress can be both physical and emotional and they can be good and bad.  For our building block theory we shall take the emotional and bad stress that affects most of us.

I wish to take two types of examples from real life situations. Let us assume that we commit a mistake at workplace and when we try to cover it up you ended up doing more mistakes. On the same day when we get an email from our manager like this, "Let us meet first thing in the morning tomorrow" what do we do?  Another example.. let us assume that when we ask our girl/boy friend’s intention in marrying us and he/she ask for time to think it over, What do we do?.   In these two examples the foundation is the message “Let us meet first thing in the morning” and “time to think it over”.  How many of us will take it just as ordinary sentences or messages?  We are tend to build our assumptions on top of these messages.  Then we will build on top of it by thinking how to defend ourselves, what excuse we need to give, should we say sorry or fight for it, is there some thing we can look for to give an excuse....and many such thoughts will pass in our mind.  Similarly in the second example we will begin to think.... has he/she started looking someone else, did he/she really love me, what we will tell our friends if he/she leaves me. SUCH BUILDING BLOCKS ARE TOTALLY UNWANTED AND WE NEED NOT GO THROUGH THIS. What we are doing here is nothing but building negative blocks inside and around you. We do not like our "self" and people around us when we do this. There is a DANGER by building such blocks in our mind. The manager may want to congratulate us for some good work or customer appreciation but we already built such negatives. In the second example the boy/girl friend who wanted more time might have thought of a surprise event to propose.  Because of adding more building blocks we build such strong negatives that may not help appreciate the event.

It is very easy to avoid such building blocks in our mind. Whenever we get the first signal of any negative thought, we need to come out of it immediately. Here are the steps on how to release our negatives at the very fist instant before they become strong by adding more blocks on top of it.

1) Acknowledge: First we should acknowledge that we got a negative thought. We should not brush it off OR try to say, 'let me forget it' The more we say we want to forget it the more we are sending it deeper. Let say, "Yeah, this is a negative thought/feeling…so what, I can get out of it" Fully understand the message, the source, the person or place it comes from and just acknowledge only the message and do not think of problems associated with it or the consequences.

2) Release: There are many ways to release a thought from our mind.  The simple way is to direct our attention other than what we are doing currently.  Some turn on to music, some make a phone call and some move of the place to a different location.  Every single thing we do to avoid building more thoughts on the issue or problem is good for us.  One exercise is to close our eyes and visualize standing in front of an ocean.  Bring the issue or problem to our mind and visualize throwing the issue/problem from our mind deep into the ocean.  Then feel a sense of emptiness or vacant space in mind where the issue was once sitting.

3) Replace: Once we feel that our mind is empty or vacant we can replace it with good thoughts/Feelings/happenings. In the above two examples we may replace good incidents that happened before with the Manager or boy/gir friend or visualize how we want things to happen tomorrow or in the future and start believing it.  It will happen exactly the way we wanted it to happen.

All being said, let us stop building blocks on our negatives and learn to acknowledge them when they come to our mind, release them immediately and replace them with positive and good thoughts. We have only one life on this earth and let us live the way we wanted it to be.

WHAT YOU THINK IS WHAT YOU ARE.

AJ