60,000 Words in Your Head
It's said that on any given day approximately 60,000 words go through our head, but even more interestingly, 95% of those words are the same as the ones that went through your head on the previous day.
My new journal that I bought in Melbourne, for inspirational and creative idea writing 
Depending on how you look at it, you can learn a lot from this fact. It suggests that we should think less about our past, it suggests that we should spend more time thinking of new ideas, but what I find particularly interesting is how it links to the idea of why writing things down on a piece of paper increases the likelihood of us achieving what we want.
When you write something on a piece of paper, it sends a message to your brain telling it that whatever you're writing down is more important than the other 59,999 words that go through your mind that day. It subconsciously says 'this is important, so remember it'.
With that in mind, and given that every thing we own, do, and create begins in the form of a thought, it makes a lot of sense to write down everything you want to do, change, remember or achieve. As your mind will prioritise its importance and subconsciously find ways to make it happen, at least more so than if it remained as just 1 in 60,000 insignificant words.
Of course, writing things down isn't the only way to signal a thought's importance – you can also repeat it, or dedicate more time thinking about it, but writing it down has the added benefit of making it tangible. It's not an electrical signal in your brain or a sound wave floating in the air, a piece of paper with your thoughts written on it is an object that exists in the real world.
If you've ever dipped your feet into the realms of personal development, you'll probably be familiar with 'life coaches' and gurus asking you to make 'idea boards', create 'dream books' and record your thoughts in a journal, which are essentially ways of converting your thoughts into real-life objects in an inspiring way. While I personally find these approaches somewhat fluffy on the surface, I respect the psychological explanations behind why they work.
Note: If you are interested in understanding why these things work from a scientific perspective, read up on autosuggestion.
Here's something to think about. When you're learning a new language or a scientific formula, you're often advised to write the equation or translation down in a textbook or on a post-it. This is an age-old trick that has been proved to heighten your memory or understanding of whatever you're learning. This follows the exact same rules as above.
Yesterday was my first day in Melbourne, where I'm living for the next six months, so I decided to take the opportunity of creating new habits to start writing more of my ideas and thoughts down.
Every time I open my journal I'm hit with a list of goals, an array of inspirational quotes, as well as a constant reminder of what I already have achieved, and what needs changing.
As the quality of our days are determined by the quality of our thoughts, I can't imagine how this won't help me in some form to get closer to the things I want to make happen. It reminds me to make every action I make a step towards the things I consider important.
"Repetition of affirmations to your subconscious is the only known way of voluntary development of faith"
On a final note, I picked up one of my all time favourite books last night, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, and read a quote under the chapter on Faith, which read "Repetition of affirmations to your subconscious is the only known way of voluntary development of faith".
To put this into context, Napoleon dedicated 25 years of his life studying tens of thousands of successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs to create one of the best-selling books of all time detailing how to achieve riches (not just the financial kind). He identified that a combination of desire and faith (having a clear desire of what you want and believing you can get it) are two of the thirteen fundamental principles.
This quote suggests that the only known way of believing something voluntarily is to repeat it over and over to ourselves, as regardless of what it is, we will eventually begin to believe it. I'd like to think that by writing something on a piece of paper and seeing it over and over acts as a strong affirmation and helps us firmly believe the things that we'd like to solidify our faith in, even if it's 'I will run the marathon'.
Write something down that you want right now. Even if you don't think it'll help, your mind may appreciate the extra signal, and who knows what knock on effect that little signal may have…
