3 Ways To Improve Your Thinking and Change Your Life
By Craig Groeschel
Your life is always moving in the direction of your strongest thoughts.
Unfortunately, when we’re not intentional about our thought lives, we can be vulnerable to painful, destructive thought patterns.
So, what are your strongest thoughts, and where are they taking you?
Neuroscience shows us that when we think a thought, our brain builds neural pathways to make thinking that thought even easier the next time. We can get locked into repeating thought patterns. But science also shows us that our thought patterns are elastic—over time, they can grow, change, and evolve.
If you don’t like where your thoughts are taking you, change the way you think.
When you take control of your thoughts, it’s easier to embrace your God-given strengths, burning passions, and innovative ideas. These three mental shifts will help you get there.
1. Learn How the People You Look Up To Think
Most people want to know “What do successful people do?” While that’s not a bad place to start, the better question is “How do successful people think?”
We can’t always do what others do, but we can learn how they think.
Here are some ways:
- Find a leader several steps ahead of you.
Studying someone several steps ahead of you gives you the gift of disorientation. They’ll think in ways totally foreign to how you think, and you can learn to think bigger, higher, and further out.
- Watch for where you push back the most.
Whenever you disagree with someone ahead of you, that likely indicates the very place you can grow. This step enables you to be a student, not a critic—you are learning, not judging.
If you want to grow, learn how the leaders you look up to think.
2. Focus on Empowering Others
If you feel overworked, overwhelmed, and overstretched, chances are you are overestimating your own importance and unintentionally undervaluing the contribution of those around you.
When you do this, you’re putting a cap on the growth of your family, team, ministry, or organization.
The best leaders are obsessed with empowering the people around them, and they use two key strategies to do it:
- Clear communication
- Genuine trust
The people around you need to know exactly what you’re asking them to do, and they need to know you trust them to do it.
Whenever possible push decisions deeper into your team or organization.
The strength of your organization is not a reflection of what you control. It’s a reflection of who you empower.
You can have control or you can have growth, but you can’t have both.
3. Reframe Problems as Opportunities
Most people obsess about a problem rather than the possibilities.
You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control how you frame it.
Train your mind to think: Problems are opportunities in disguise.
Every crisis creates unexpected problems. Every crisis also creates unprecedented opportunities. The best leaders address the problems and seize the opportunities!
It’s easy to find reasons and excuses for why the problem is holding you back.
Apathy finds an excuse, while passion finds a way.
More Ways to Improve Your Thought Patterns
If you’d like more strategic ways to change your thinking, get my book Winning the War in Your Mind: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life. We’ve now released a version of the book designed specifically for the thought patterns and topics facing today’s teens.
Members of my team are reading through Winning the War in Your Mind for Teens with the teenagers in their lives, and are loving the conversations it’s sparking.
