The Magic Bullet

We all want to feel good. When our level of well-being is high, no matter what confronts us, life seems effortless and uncomplicated. Contentment and success come easily. What do we do, though, when our level of well-being is low and we feel dejected, pessimistic, or insecure? No one wants to feel this way; from this perspective, every life situation seems awful.

What if I told you that there is no strategy, tool, technique, or activity that will elevate your state of mind? In fact, if you reach for an external elixir, you will only feel worse in the long run.

Yes, I am aware that this principle flies in the face of conventional performance, therapeutic, motivational, or self-help solutions. If a person is feeling down in the dumps, there must be something that he or she can do. Right? Well, since I don't believe there's a magic bullet, let me point you in a direction that I was fortunate enough to come across many years ago.

You can't fix an internal malfunction with a foreign game plan.

To raise your level of well-being, you must uncover the reason why you are low. Not the external, circumstantial, or illusionary reason—the true reason: Your thinking has hit a temporary snag, and since you looked outside for the explanation and fix, your mood and performance have followed suit.

In other words, to feel better, all you need to do is understand the principle of thought. Not what you think or why you think it—just the fact that human beings think. And while our thoughts sometimes produce wayward feelings, all thoughts are arbitrary, meaningless, and innocent.

What if, once you understood this, the rest would actually take care of itself? Could it be that simple? The answer is yes. A person's struggles are never situational; they are always a figment of his or her own thoughts. That's why the minute your thinking slows down, new thought arrives, your feelings change, and you then see the exact same circumstance in a totally different way.

What we think is meaningless—it is the feeling a thought produces that guides us.

For example, if I'm thinking negative thoughts about an upcoming presentation and, as a result, I'm feeling insecure about my ability as a speaker, the last thing I want to do is search for a new strategy to reach the audience. Why? Because my insecure feeling is telling me that I am not seeing the situation clearly; I must be still. If my presentation needed my attention and action, the feeling would be matter-of-fact, obvious, and direct.

There is one more thing about this subject that you need to know: looking toward the principle of thought and your feelings, when you are struggling, will not necessarily make you feel better in an instant. But it will prevent you from making matters worse by turning to a fix when you're not competent to do so. Instead, if you simply go about your business (or stay in the game, as I like to say), your mood will start to trend upward—all on its own.

The bottom line is that if you deeply understand that your thinking (and only your thinking) forms your current reality, you will also see that fixing a thought-created perception by applying an externally created cure will not work. It's like putting a trap under your bed for a monster. Remember, like a young child who is temperamental one minute and gleeful the next, if left alone, your level of well-being will always self-correct to clarity, resiliency, and contentment.  Hmm, maybe we are born with a magic bullet after all.