Reshape your questions

Not every thought needs to be entertained

You don’t need to take every thought in your mind seriously. Some thoughts are rooted in insecurity and self-doubt, and therefore delusion. The content of the thought exists only in your mind, and nowhere else.

If you’re a human susceptible to what I mentioned above, you have heard these questions in your mind before:

• “Am I capable of [x]?”

• “What would have happened if I did [y] instead?”

• “What if I don’t get [z]?”

These are bad questions. There are no real answers for these questions. We can’t possibly know until the moment in which the question becomes relevant arrives. It’s pure speculation, and we end up cornering ourselves into self-limiting beliefs.

How can we possibly know what we’re capable of without creating new information through action? Asking ourselves bad questions leads to stagnation and action paralysis.

Each thought doesn’t deserve equal attention.

We are capable of shaping the voice inside our head. Once we are aware of the voice existing in the first place, we can catch the bad questions being asked. Then you get to choose to give it attention or not.

What do we fill the empty space with? Some thought needs to exist instead of the bad questions that are puttering around in our mind. This is why life-long learning is essential. Smart people model how to think differently.Adopting super smart people as your mentors (lowercase “m”) I found to be the best way to reshape my thinking by simply learning different language to speak.

Here are some good questions I am internalizing:

• “What would this look like if it were easy?” - Tim Ferriss

• “What would I do if no one was watching? - Derek Sivers

• What would I still do if I knew I wouldn’t get paid for it?” - Derek Sivers

• “How am I complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?” - Jerry Colonna

• “What are you hearing that’s actually not being said?” Jerry Colonna

I think our first thought is an obstacle, and we have to get past it to realize there are other ways to look at the situation. Once you realize that you can get past your first way of looking at something, then you can do that — what do they call it? Systems two thinking. Thinking, Fast and Slow. You can go, “Oh, right. Okay, hold on. That was my first reaction. What are some other ways I could look at this?”

— Derek Sivers on Tim Ferriss Show

By being aware of our first thought, which is perhaps a bad question, and then intentionally subbing it out for a good question you’ve learned, you can reshape your thinking.

I would love to hear from you some other good questions that come to mind :)