A User’s Guide to Your Mind Volume II How to Win in Love & Get Along with Each Other

It is a risky thing to love, and yet, not to love is riskier still. Equally chancy is to love with anything less than openhearted authenticity and unconditional surrender. To live fully in the here and now is to invite and accept change into our lives. When it comes to matters of love, there are no guarantees. Mature people accept the fact that sometimes things will go wrong. As financial planners say, we need to consider the benefits of taking risks and balance them against the consequences of possible outcomes.

Of course, no decision can ever predict every possible combination of events. Yet, as the happiest and most successful amongst us know, the trick in life isn’t to evade risks, but to manage them as effectively as possible. We learn to live with the risks that go hand-in-hand with the judicious exercise of free will because the results are worth it. In the end, we do the best we can, take what precautions we can, and then we get on with it. This is the intelligent approach to living and loving successfully.

We have all heard of the healing power of positive thinking. Often overlooked, however is positivity’s evil twin—negative thinking—perpetuated through our self-determined choice of holding a gloomy mindset full of pessimism, cynicism, and worry. It therefore becomes vital that we learn to stubbornly guard against and vigorously fend off this negativity, as it colors our outlook and performance, and hinders our effectiveness in meeting life as it comes. Falling into a funk is easy when we feel overwhelmed, unprepared, or simply incapable of meeting the demands of living as they show up. This is especially so when the safety net of a positive attitude to help break your descent is nowhere to be found, not to mention how tiring it becomes thinking the same negative thoughts over and over.

It is vital to understand that in reality, life doesn’t just “happen.” You are in charge of controlling your reactions and responses to everything happening to and around you. This includes giving people the freedom to be themselves, which in turn frees energy allowing you to focus on evolving into the person you ultimately desire to become. It is by focusing on where you want to be, rather than fixating on where you do not, that you redesign your mindset and reality more to your liking. It requires that you stubbornly refuse to react to negativity around you—no excuses. Regardless of what is happening, the choice is always your own to stay positive.

It has been said, “A hostile person lives in a hostile world, and a loving person lives in a loving world.” One of life’s mercies is that we can retrain our mind. We do this by absorbing new information and weaving that information into our memory, resulting in what we call learning, which leads to a deeper understanding and appreciation of our world and of our place in it. If you don’t like who or where you are, you have the choice of reinventing yourself by learning your way into a new reality.

Indeed, ongoing self-improvement is so important for life success that futurist Alvin Toffler has predicted, “The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.” In any other words, the intelligent approach is to adapt, evolve, and grow past our limitations. By applying ourselves thusly, even those of us with tendencies for approaching life’s problems in a negative and hesitant manner can learn to become genuinely more optimistic and adventuresome.

Dwelling on the negative simply serves to make us feel more unhappy and insecure. It is only by keeping a positive mindset that we can develop a conscious awareness of possessing the necessary strength to cope with our problems. When we choose to reframe a serious situation as a challenge or an experience, rather than view it as a tragedy or disaster, we further empower our mindset with fortitude and positive expectation. No matter the particular set of circumstances facing you, your interpretation of it is always self-determined.

Conscious self-determination requires centered awareness and rational thinking that leads to impeccable perception, accordingly preparing, and the ultimate taking of right action that brings us more of what we want and less of what we don’t in our experiences. It is by the overall content of our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, beliefs, judgments, and behaviors that we essentially create the world around us, with our perceptions of events and of ourselves determining how we experience life. Recognizing this inescapable chain reaction, philosopher John Locke observed, “The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.”

Think of it as a self-fulfilling prophecy. In effect, if we are a negativizing gloom-and-doomer believing that life is gloomy and doomy, we will then perceive gloom and doom in events. Our pessimistic expectation will have drawn gloom and doom into our lives so that gloom and doom are precisely what we ultimately experience, leaving us sour and dour in both personality and outlook. On the other hand, if we are a positivizing affirmative thinker believing ourselves well-equipped to meet life as it shows up, we will then perceive positive opportunities in events. Our positive expectation will have drawn optimism into our lives so that optimism is precisely what we ultimately experience, leaving us happy and cheerful in both personality and outlook. Unfailingly, perception precedes reality.

What’s more, you need to wrap your head around the idea that perception actually is reality. Essentially, whatever we think and believe feels real to us, even when it isn’t rational, accurate, or true at all. It is primarily by looking at a person or a situation from a different angle or point of view—by changing our thinking—that we change our perception of things, sometimes in ways that revolutionize our overall experience of life and how we see our self in it.

Every day we make numerous decisions. The best way to measure if the decisions you are making are good ones is to ask yourself whether your choices are bringing more of what you want and less of what you don’t in life. Our choices ultimately define us, making it vital that we come to know our own minds. Similar to a potter shaping a bowl, to develop character and build a solid reputation in the world, we are required to work the inside and the outside naturally follows. A century ago, American mystic and New Thought philosopher Ralph Waldo Trine timelessly summarized this elemental principle of life by declaring, “As is the inner so always and inevitably will be the outer.”

In essence, the great law of cause and effect is always operating, thus requiring the taking of special care to mind our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, beliefs, and judgments motivating the choices we make. If we are to make the very best choices, we must strive to consider all of the oftentimes-opposing aspects of our personhood, for in actuality we are a riot of competing unconscious impulses. This undertaking may seem a little complicated, but it is really quite straightforward: Living and loving successfully requires of us to listen when the head tells us what reason concludes, to tune into what the heart feels, and to trust what gut-instinct transmits.

These various functions of the same brain must somehow all be reconciled and applied by each of us in our own unique fashion. The way we do it determines everything, as our lives invariably follow our thoughts. Whether or not you are consciously aware of it, you alone control the angles and rotations of the kaleidoscopic mirrors within the workings of your mind. That is to say, when you don’t like the way things are, you can always adjust your outlook simply by adjusting your way of thinking.