Do you have your thoughts or do they have you?

At the heart of our weekly mindset shifts is the belief that your mindset impacts whether or not you use the skills that you have. If you have the capacity to be soft and flexible in your mind, let's call that your ability to be creative. Creative, then your ability to think through situations, your ability to feel things out, and your ability to physicalize action with strength and agility and grace and precision becomes more possible. So we're going to get right to the heart of that this week by talking about the ability you have to suspend your thoughts.

How often do you say or hear others say, oh, I have an idea? It's a great feeling to have an idea, isn't it? When a situation is asking for a creativity, for a fresh idea or tactic, a pathway becoming lit through the workings of your mind. And yet, we know we spend a lot of our time stuck standing with our nose up to a brick wall. Without the map to move forward, the creativity needed is squelched dry as we become trapped in our own one directional thought. Physicist David Bohm says it well. Normally our thoughts have us rather than we having them.

To suspend one's thoughts is not to get rid of them. It's not even to quiet them, but it's to realize that you are not tethered to your thoughts, right? Your being, your experience creates them, but you are not your thoughts. Let's do a little physical representation of this to really help you understand with maybe a louder part of your presence, your muscle, your physical being. So if you're sitting in a chair, go ahead and hold on to the bottom of it. Okay? If you are sitting on a couch, go ahead and grab onto the arm, grab onto a cushion, and then hold on to it.

Like if you did not, you would float away. So right now, I'm pulling down into the seat of my chair, and I'm sitting back. I'm pulling my shoulders up to my ears. Hold on for three. Make your muscles shake for two. And one, let go. Do it again. Hold onto the base of your chair and grab onto the couch cushions. Squeeze in. Three, two, one, go. Pull everything in. If you do not hold on to where you are seated right now, you will float away. Three, two, one, let go. Can you feel a difference between when you are holding on and when you are simply seated where you are?

Are you still in the same space? Yes. Physically, we can represent what suspension feels like. Hopefully right now, as you are seated in this chair or this couch or wherever you find yourself, you feel the opportunity to let go, to allow something else to hold your physical presence. Now be glad, right, that we did the chair hold, rather than, hey, let's hold the squat for a minute. You are in the same shape whether you are in a squat or whether you are seated. And yet one invites you to do other things, to feel other things, to experience other things, while one brings you into the moment of saying, I need to hold this shape with all of my muscle and all of my being.

And with that, I am pressed up to that brick wall. And so, just like when you let go of holding onto the chair, you are still seated. Suspending your thought is not removing yourself from the thought, but allowing your thought to exist without your 100% focus on it. Can you make the connection between those two things? Imagine those times when you're like, gosh, I need a fresh thought. I need to think past my current situation. I have felt stuck for a long time. My current mindset is not bringing me joy.

It's not bringing me fulfillment. Brick wall, can you make the connection there? And I'm in this squat. I'm holding on for dear life. I want to stand up and shake it out, but I need to stay in this squat right now. And all of a sudden, what else are you thinking about within that squat moment? How often do you stop breathing? How often do you stop thinking about the efficiency of your form and your placement? Or how you can maybe shift your mentality to go ahead and hang into that space where you need to be?

Or perhaps realize that that squat can be let go of whenever you desire. So what is this brick wall? Well, this brick wall is the absence of creativity. And the absence of creativity is normally created by the fear. Judgment. Self judgment, right? The. If I let go of this, if I let go of this thought, which I have held onto and I have fought to make true, if I let go of this squat, which right now is the thing that I've been holding on to, if I let go of it, I will judge myself as not worthy, as not capable, as not strong, or worse, that this whole time, everything that I've been fighting for has been a lie.

So let's be honest. That brick wall, which stops us is actually kind of comforting. That brick wall is often the part of our experience that says, hey, stay within this safe space. Yes, this thought may stop you, but this thought also keeps you within the thing that you find comfort in. So our exercise today is going to be practicing letting that brick wall, that fear of judgment go for a moment to consider. If we let go of the stale and stagnant thought. If we allow ourselves to see our seeing, to witness our thought, rather than grasping it like that chair, what can we begin to imagine in a different reality?

And the other side of that fear of judgment is our creativity. So let's be creative right now. Open your journal and grab your pencil, find a clean page, and write down these three questions. Question number one, what is your brick wall big thought? Question number what else could exist? Question number three, in that alternate existence, what first action could you take to test it out? So, your journaling exercise this week is based off of a study that Howard Gardner did at Harvard called Project Zero.

In this study, he was developing intelligence tests for young children. What he found was that most children were at genius levels. By the time people got to the age 20, the percentage of people who are still at genius level, it was about 10%. And then as children got older and older, into their twenties, thirties, forties, the genius level dropped down to under 2%. What Gardner ended up realizing and hypothesizing was that it was this brick wall mentality, right? This squelching and choking of creativity, that stopped people's ability to be creative.

They found that people were getting better and better at saying, now, that's stupid. Now, that could never be because. And so this exercise is derived from that. As you think about your brick wall moments, question number one. This is an exercise you can come back to again and again and again. So, question number one, what is your brick wall big thought right now? It could be about work or about family or friends or about the world. It could be about your passions, your talents. It could be a big thought that only you see as a big thought.

What is it? Number two, what could be an alternate reality to that thought, right? Suspend that thought for a moment. Don't get rid of it. Just let it hang there. It will not go anywhere. Like that chair underneath you. What else could exist? And then, question number three. As you consider that alternate reality, what is an action that you can conceive taking? I'll give you an example. For the longest time, I used the phrase, I am not a runner. I ran. But I found that if I said, hey, I'm not a runner, and I'm running, that this would be a way that I could maybe inspire others to do the same.

Yet what did it leave me with? With a bunch of people who then started doing this awesome act, this thing they never thought they could do, and they would still say, oh, but I'm not a runner. I didn't like that. So then I shifted I was like, okay, if I'm not going to say I'm not a runner anymore, I guess I have to say I am a runner. And then an action that grew out of that question number three was me redefining what it meant to be a runner. This little process changed me from running into a brick wall.

I'm saying I am not a runner, but I am a runner. And I'm not okay with saying this untruth when in reality, I am doing something that at various points in my life, I never thought I would be able to. And as I suspended that thought for a moment, I realized there was a different path for me to get to a similar place. That freed me, that freed my creativity to go ahead and place my energy into the world in a bigger, brighter, clearer way. And so you have the opportunity here to do a challenging thing, to look at that brick wall.

Big thought. And to suspend it for a moment, to resist the urge to wrap yourself in judgment. And in that second question, to go, what else could exist? And then when you bring that other existence into clarity, to give yourself an example of an action, and then to try that action out and to see what happens to that initial brick wall, big thought. It may bring that thought into more confidence and clarity. Bravo. It may make that brick wall crumble down into dust to a place where you do not even remember that it once had the power over you that it did.

But as you find yourself here, as you find yourself in this suspended thought, our hope today is that you see you, the curator of thought, the curator of feeling, the curator of action. These things are not you, but they are of you. You transcend them. You are stronger than them. So what happens when you make this shift and free yourself of the weight? Come back to this exercise again and again, and feel free to reach out to me, to walk through this exercise with you in the conversations that it presents.