Bounce your thoughts

Bounce your thoughts

If you've ever coached or worked with kids who play basketball, you
know that most of them have a tendency to dribble with only one
hand—the one attached to their dominant arm.
When you notice a child doing this, you might call him aside and say,
"Billy, you're dribbling with just the

one hand every time, and the defender can easily defend you when you
do that. Your options are cut off. You need to dribble with your other
hand, too, so that he never knows which way you're going to go."
At this point Billy might say, "I can't." And you smile and say, "What
do you mean you can't?"
And Billy then shows you that when he dribbles with his subdominant
(weaker) hand and arm, the ball is all over the place. So, to his mind, he
can't.
"Billy," you say. "It's not that you can't, it's just that you haven't."
Then you explain to Billy that his other hand can dribble just as well if
he is willing to practice. It's just a matter of logging enough bounces. It's
the simple formation of a habit. After enough practice dribbling with his
other hand, Billy will learn you were right.
The same principle is true for reprogramming our own dominant habits
of thinking. If our dominant thought habit is pessimistic, all we have to
do is dribble with the other hand: Think optimistic thoughts more and
more often until it feels natural.
If someone had asked me (before I started my journey to
self-motivation that began with Napoleon Hill) why I didn't try to be
more goal oriented and optimistic, I would have said, "I can't. It's just
not me. I wouldn't know how." But it would have been more accurate
for me to just say, "I haven't."
Thinking is just like bouncing the basketball. On the one hand, I can
think pessimistically and build that side of me up (it's just a matter of
repeatedly bouncing those thoughts). On the other hand, I can think
optimistically—one thought at a time—and build that habit up.
Self-motivation is all a matter of how much in control you want to be.

I read somewhere that we humans have up to 45,000 thoughts a day. I
can't vouch for the accuracy of that figure, especially because I know
some people who seem to have no more than nine or 10. However, if it
is true that we have 45,000 thoughts, then you can see how patient we
have to be about turning a pessimistic thought habit around.
The overall pattern won't change after just a few positive bounces of the
brain. If you're a pessimist, your bio-computer has really been
programmed heavily in that direction. But it doesn't take long before a
new pattern can emerge. As a former pessimist myself, I can tell you it
really happens, however slowly but surely. You do change. One thought
at a time.
If you can bounce it one way, you can bounce it the other.

I'm reading: Bounce your thoughts