Thoughts Are Things: Harnessing the Power of Thoughts to Create Your Future

Did you know that the average person has 75,000 thoughts per day and over 90% of them are identical to the thoughts of the previous day?! Instead of leaving your brain on auto-pilot, take control of your thoughts and you can start improving your life right now!

In this episode, we unpack the power of our thoughts and how they shape our destiny. Our conversation dives deep into the art of cultivating positivity, even when things go south, and how a simple conscious choice to discover the silver lining in a bad situation can steer us in a different, more constructive direction.

We also discuss the 4 Major Positive Thoughts: Gratitude, Love, Laughter, and Faith.  These emotions do not just bring joy; they evolve us into the best versions of ourselves, making us more resilient in the face of adversity. We share insights on an age-old wisdom, "love thy neighbor," and discuss how we can love the person but not their actions. We highlight the therapeutic power of laughter, and how it elevates our mood, helping us sail through challenging circumstances.

As we conclude, we discuss how gratitude, love, laughter, and faith can revolutionize the world around us and how these emotions, when expressed daily, can create a profound ripple effect.

So, pop in your earbuds and join us on this enlightening journey as we chase our dreams together!

Chapters

• 0:01 The Power of Thoughts and Beliefs
• 7:52 Love and Laughter for Happiness

Transcript

Eric: 0:01

This is the Dream Chasers Show. Hey everybody, welcome back to the Dream Chasers Show, where our mission is to inspire and improve the lives of those who dare to chase their dreams. I wanted to make one quick note about dreams because I think it's kind of interesting to me how, as kids, most of us are excited about life. We can't wait to grow up. We have this dream and this vision of something we want to be or do when we're older. Right, it might be a career like oh, i can't wait to be a fireman or policeman or emulate my favorite baseball football player. whatever. We have these visions as kids. Mine was to be a big, strong bodybuilder. I always loved Arnold Schwarzenegger and I watched all those different types of documentaries and stuff. But it's something that's interesting because, as we go throughout our lives, things start to happen to us, good or bad, and it starts to kind of change the direction of our lives. And what happens is we look up years later and we have this life that we never really anticipated. Right, we didn't really want to get into debt or we didn't want to go bankrupt. We weren't envisioning having a failing marriage or anything, instead of anything that's bad that's currently happening to you or has happened to you in the past. It's not something that we were excited for or wanting in our lives, but it happens. It happens. It's like seasons in life. Winter is going to happen. We can't always, we can't change winter, we can't make it go away, and we can't make spring go away and summer go away. It's just going to happen. We just need to learn how to deal with these different seasons in our life. So that's what I want to talk to you guys about today. And with regards to the thoughts and how strong the brain is, it's a powerful thing. It's powerful Right.

Eric: 1:59

Most of us have heard of this thing called the placebo effect, and it's where two different an experiment is ran with two different parties And one party is given the placebo, the water pill Literally, it's just a pill with water in it And then the other party is given the actual pill, the real one that's going to cure whatever illness or whatever pain that they're having, and they run the two experiments. They run them side by side And what most of the time they find out is, by the end of the experiment, the party that was given the placebo, the water pill, has just as much effect on them in the positive way, sometimes even more so than the party that was given the actual pill. This water pill has cured them Right And it's because they believe it to be working. They think that it's working and they believe it to be working and therefore it works. That's something to really reflect on. I mean, it's a big deal.

Eric: 2:59

I know it sounds a little weird, because we've all heard this placebo effect, but I think most of us don't realize how much our thoughts and our belief and our faith affects our future. It changes everything. So when we're having negative thoughts and we're thinking negatively, your body what it does is it has a feedback mechanism and it's called your feelings. So if you're feeling sad down, depressed, anxious, angry, impatient, you're going to. Maybe you're having actual like body aches, headaches, pains, nausea, these different types of things.

Eric: 3:40

If you could really trace the root back. most of the time, in fact almost all the time, it's because of your thoughts And it's hard to tie them two together because it's usually a delayed effect. You don't think a bad thought and then immediately have headaches. It just doesn't work like that. But it might take days, weeks, months, years, but it becomes like this certain thought that we have in our head this story that we're telling ourselves over and over and over again, because studies have shown that the average person has like 75,000 thoughts and over 90% of them are the exact same from yesterday. So it's just this. we just repeat our thoughts day to day, day to day, day to day, and if we're not careful we start, we could develop this negative thought process, this negative mentality, and then it starts to perpetuate it into our feelings And that's where we start getting these feelings and patience and feeling down, depressed, hopeless, these bad feelings.

Eric: 4:39

But the beauty of it is it can work the exact opposite way. If we're focusing on our thoughts, we can start to alter them and have positive thoughts. Sometimes have to force it right, sometimes we have to really look for the positive in a bad situation, but we start to find these things that we're happy about and then they start to create happy feelings and you start to feel better about yourself. You start looking in the mirror and seeing positive things about yourself. like hey, i really love my eyes today. My eyes are popping today, right, i'm having a great hair day. I really love my body, whatever. And you start to feel better about yourself And that's the way to really change because, like, for instance, if we want to lose weight, it does us no good by sitting there telling ourselves man, i just need to lose weight, i'm fat, i'm what I. these love handles are driving me nuts, right. That doesn't do us any good because it just perpetuates bad feelings about ourselves And, like the placebo effect, it's going to create more bad feelings about ourselves. So, again, like I said, the good news is we can begin to begin to change our future by think, changing our thoughts and thinking about positive things.

Eric: 5:50

And there are four major positive thoughts that I want to throw out there for you guys to kind of think about and digest as you go throughout your day. The first one is gratitude. The best way to change your thinking and start having positive feelings and changing your life is by having thoughts of gratitude. Thank you for my family, you know. thank you that I have nice clothes. I'm so thankful that I was able to. I had food on the table. I have food in my fridge. I'm so thankful that I get to step outside and breathe fresh air. I'm so thankful for whatever. there's something in all of our lives that we can be thankful for, and so that's a big one, and it can literally be anything that you're thankful for.

Eric: 6:34

And if you start to have these thoughts of gratitude, it starts to create this habit, this neuro pathway in your brain, and then you start looking for more things to be thankful for, and the scientific term for it's actually called the reticular activation system. And once you start telling yourself, hey, this is what I want in my life, this is what I'm thinking about, your brain starts to grab onto your thoughts and say, oh, they want more of that thing. And then the reticular activating system kicks in and it starts looking for things to make yourself right, if that makes any sense. I might have butchered that, but if you think about someone in your life that bad things always happen to them and oh, why me? and oh, my tire just blew out and of course this would happen. I ripped my favorite shirt Well, they're thinking about those things. And then their brain is looking for excuses for them to complain. If you want to complain about anything, it's easy to do, we can all do it. It's too hot out, it's too cold out. Yeah, it's raining too much. Oh, it's not raining enough. So pay attention to your thoughts, because your RAS, your reticular activating system, is now looking for things in your world to prove yourself correct and prove true. So enough about that.

Eric: 7:52

The next major positive thought is love. Love is the number one fixture to being happy And there's a reason that the Bible states it. I think 714 times. it's in the Bible, the word love. And when Jesus is being questioned about hey, what's the number one commandment to remember, he says the number one is love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind. And equally important to this is love thy neighbor as thyself.

Eric: 8:24

And when I sit and think about this, i'm just Sometimes I struggle with that, because when they say love your neighbor, they don't literally just mean your neighbor, they mean everybody around you, including the person who's wronged you, the person who stabbed you in the back. It's not just love the people you like. right, you got to love the people you dislike. and how hard is that? Sometimes that feels like an impossible task.

Eric: 8:52

but one of the things I tell myself is we're meant to love people But hate the sin. so if somebody wronged us, that doesn't mean we forgive them, but we need to understand and have patience with them because they're imperfect, just like we are. we have bad habits, we have faults, we've wronged somebody in one way or another, but we need to love each other and forgive each other. We don't necessarily need to forget, right. so we love the people, we hate the sin, and so when we begin to love each other, a lot of that means having compassion, patience, grace, peace, mercy, just as our father has shown us right. our own father, whether whether it's the tangible father, your actual dad or God, like they have these, these traits. when we love somebody so deeply, we have compassion, patience, grace and mercy, and so and part of that means bringing a best version of ourselves to those that we love. so that means giving them loyalty, showing them trust, kindness, integrity and being friendly, and, and it also means finding good things about them instead of finding faults. That's one good way to start to shift your mentality.

Eric: 10:02

if you're having a difficult time loving people, because sometimes it can be really hard Look for something good about that person, like, look for a good trait that you like about them, and then I'll start telling your brain Hey, i'm looking for more good traits in other people, right, the RAS starts kicking in. I instead of finding faults because they're easy to find, instead of complaining about them and spreading gossip about them. And oh, they did this. did you hear today? did that? that stuff's easy to do. the hard part is finding good things about them and spreading those things. so Remember love people, because people are what make this world go around. people Have the opportunities that you need. people you know they're your employers. people are, they're your significant other. people are important. So we want to draw people to us, not repel them.

Eric: 10:52

The next major positive thought is laughter. now, this one I've. I love this one because I love to laugh, but sometimes I find myself being too serious. So I got to remind myself Hey man, life isn't meant to be so serious. We got to laugh at ourselves sometimes.

Eric: 11:09

I think most of us have heard the phrase laughter is the best medicine and It's much more than just a saying. it's a truth and it's been actually proven through science. There's been, there's been studies about this where Where a patient was told they have x amount of time to live because they have a terminal disease, a cancer Or something like that, that that medication cannot fix and they're gonna die no matter what, but then something miraculous happens a couple months later they're healed and Doctors have literally written in their diagnosis that it was nothing short of a miracle. There was no reason that they should have came out of this. I think there's a guy called the miracle man I don't know all the ins and outs about this, but you can look it up where he was paralyzed. I mean the guy they told him he was gonna be a vegetable and he was even on a ventilator. He couldn't even breathe himself, so he all he was left with was his thoughts. no medication was gonna heal him and He just kept telling himself over and over breathe deeply, breathe deeply. I'm gonna be off this ventilator. and in fact he told himself in his Ment, in his brain, over and over, that by Christmas he was gonna walk out of there, which seemed a virtual impossibility to all the providers around. and Lo and behold, by Christmas He walked out of there on his own two feet. And I know that sounds a little bit crazy and unbelievable, but it's true. It's a real story and there's hundreds of stories like that. And it's because of what? the internal dialogue we have in our head. So Back to laughter.

Eric: 12:46

What's interesting about laughter is it's hard to have bad feelings almost impossible to have bad feelings and stress when you're laughing, right, when you're just laughing and you're smiling and you can just feel The uplifting spirit of laughter. I Think of it like this and you guys ever had like a deep, rich laugh with a best friend where you just you're crying almost and and You're just you're smiling ear to ear, your mouth hurts Like you got the muscles and your jaw hurt from smiling and laughing and you can barely breathe. But once all that dust settles, all that excitement settles, how do you feel? How do you feel? You just feel lighter, right, you just feel like a weight's been lifted off your shoulder. You just feel good, deep, deep, deep down in your soul, and it's not something that you can really like put to paper. It's not something that you can just scientifically say, oh, i'm going to try to have this feeling all the time. No, it's because it's like this rich laughter, this rich pause of emotion that is just taken over from your heart all the way out to your fingertips and your toes And you just feel lighter and you feel happier, and so laughing truly is one of the best medications that you can have.

Eric: 14:09

So find ways to laugh, find ways to smile more. One of the things that I found interesting that I read recently is smiling more with both your mouth and your eyes. And when you see other people in your past and other people on the side of the road or like wherever you're walking or at work, and you smile at them instead of just giving like the head nod like what's up, you know that just becomes like part of our day to day what's up or hi. But if you smile at them and not only with your mouth but with your eyes, because the eyes are the windows to our souls And in the Bible it says Matthew 6.22, it says the eye is the lamp of the body You draw light into your body through your eyes and light shines out to the world through your eyes. So if your eye is well, it shows what is true And the whole body will be filled with light. But if your eyes clouded or evil, your body will filled with evil and dark clouds And the darkness that takes over a body of a child of God who has gone astray. that is the deepest darkest there is. I'll let you kind of process that for a moment, but if that is interesting how the eye is the lamp of the body.

Eric: 15:28

you bring things in through your eyes. what you look at, what you watch on TV, what you watch on YouTube and now all these different social media platforms, tiktok, blah, blah, blah what you bring into your eyes, it's going to reflect out through your eyes. So if you're watching smut, bad things, right stuff that you know you shouldn't be watching, but you do anyway, i think we've all been guilty of that. I'm trying to clear a lot of that out of my life, some of the crap that's on TV. But if you start focusing on that, that's what becomes your mentality. That's what comes out of your eyes, that's what comes out of your mouth, that's what you talk about. And one of the things I think about, too, is we've all known somebody who has like a brightness, right brightness or spirit in their eyes. It's said that they have a twinkle in their eyes. And then we've all known or maybe seen someone who has the exact opposite, like movies will talk about it. some of these documentaries of serial killers where people that know them said they just had an anger or hatred or evil in their eyes. Sometimes it's described as darkness in their eyes. That's real stuff. That's real stuff. The eyes are viewers and projectors, so pay attention to what you bring in through your eyes of the big deal.

Eric: 16:47

Now I kind of want to wrap this up because this is starting to get a little bit long, but remember those are some of the big major positive thoughts Gratitude, love, laughter, and the last one. I said there's four. The last one is faith, and when I talk about faith, what I mean is believing in something that you can't necessarily see. right, And most of us attach that to God. And if you don't believe, well, i'm not here to try to sway you one way or the other, but one of the things I think about is atoms. Never seen one, never seen an electron. I've never seen the wind, but you can feel the wind. right, but you can't feel atoms necessarily. Believing in stuff that you can't see. Why? Because you've been told. it's true, we've been told that atoms exist. We've been told by scientists that they exist and we have faith that they exist.

Eric: 17:44

Another good example is faith in the roof of your house. right, most of us weren't there to build our house or the structure that we're currently standing in or the car that we're driving in, but we have faith that it's been built by smart engineers, people who know what they're doing, that the roof isn't going to collapse, that the wheels won't fall off of our vehicle. We're living by faith every day, in small ways, whether we believe it or not, whether we think about it or not, but faith makes up a huge part of ourselves, of our futures, And Henry Ford said whether you believe you can or you can't, you are correct. And so just having faith in yourself, believing that you can do something, believing that you can achieve your goals and accomplish great things, just having that faith is powerful.

Eric: 18:36

So, gratitude, love, laughter and faith Hope that helps you guys. Try to make those a daily, something that you think about daily. Make your world better, make other people's world better that come into contact with you, because really, after all, that's what we're here to do, right, spread love. So, guys, get out there, have a great day. Look forward to seeing you next time. Thanks for listening.