“It’s not all in your mind but if you don’t control your mind, then the rest doesn’t matter.”
Embrace the Within.
Do you get a lot of emails? I get a lot of emails and I spend a lot of my time just deleting emails that I don’t want. I get bombarded with all these emails that I don’t remember signing up to get and I don’t ever read much more than the heading when they appear in my inbox. For years I have just sat passively and deleted them. That is until today. Today, I started to scroll down to the bottom of those emails and click the unsubscribe button. Rather than mindlessly letting these emails appear daily and deleting them daily, I chose to purposefully get rid of the clutter because I like my messages to be meaningful.
There is a lot of spam out there hitting my inbox. And now I find a need to scroll down to the bottom and hit unsubscribe. I am not going to choose to get emails from all over the place and merely delete those messages, I am going to get to the source and cut that off. For years I have needlessly wasted time just deleting emails when I could have simply scrolled to the bottom once and clicked unsubscribe. How much time have I wasted with those emails filling up my inbox? How much energy was wasted daily deleting these meaningless messages? How many meaningful messages got lost in the mix with the mindless scrolling and deleting? I will never know BUT I can assure you there are lots.
The world is full of solicited and unsolicited messages filling up our inboxes and spam folders. So many messages on billboards, radio, television, YouTube, Spotify, Hulu, Facebook, Twitter, and all places near and far. There are so many messages that are not meaningful. So many messages that I try to delete. So many messages that can get overwhelming. So many messages that bombard your mind. So many messages that influence you in all the effective ways and hack your mind and ruin your soul.
For years I have been studying and teaching influence and even I fall for the techniques because the techniques are well-crafted, tested, and easily replicated. The techniques work and are repeated and even those that study the process get worked. It’s overwhelming. All the information, all the messages, all the advertisements, all the bullshit, is so overwhelming that it makes life more difficult to understand. The background noise overwhelms the meaningful and the overwhelming abundance of garbage information and garbage products and garbage ideas just gets to be too much for me to decipher and make meaningful. So, my brain goes back to what it’s programmed to do. It takes shortcuts and goes back to the paths of comfort and routine.
And that is where I needed to change. You see, I can cut down on the spam in my inbox. I can cut down on the messages I receive. I can avoid so much technology and influence BUT I can’t eliminate that supply. I can shut down as many sources as I like and just as a hydra another set of heads will appear in its place. So, the change needs to come from both external and most importantly internally. I needed to change my brain to another routine. I needed to change my thoughts to not fall into having another cigarette. I needed to change my thoughts to not eating another fast food option. I needed to change my thoughts to not hitting the snooze button. I needed to change my thoughts. Changing the routine and the paths of my brain took time. IT wasn’t an easy process. BUT it was something I could change. I used to waste so much time working on changing the ways of the world when I should have kept my focus on changing me. And that is what I am working on today. I am going to keep unsubscribing from the meaningless in the world and changing myself into something meaningful.
Have the day you want. I hope you find whatever you’re looking for.