Thoughts Aren’t Facts

It is important to trust yourself, but it is equally important not to trust yourself in certain situations. Do you constantly hear a nagging voice in your head? It is important to realize that that voice is not you. It is just your stream of thoughts. You are not your thoughts—they are temporary, and they change. Rather, you are the conscious observer of your thoughts. Your brain spits out thoughts all the time, and some of them can be lovely, and some of them can be ugly. It is your job to decipher which ones serve you and which ones do not. When a thought arises that is critical, you don’t have to believe it. You also don’t have to push it away and ignore it. You can approach it with curiosity and gently accept it, and then say to yourself, “no, thank you, not for me.” Say, for example, you think “I am not good enough to have this job.” You can react by saying to yourself “it is interesting that that thought arose for me, but I actually do not want to accept that as truth.” Scary thoughts don’t have to be threatening—you can simply say to them, “thanks, but no thanks.”