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How to Destroy Negative Thoughts

This is going to seem silly, but hear me out first.

Someone I like to follow who is an expert on mindset is David Neagle. He’s often recommending fantastic books to help you shape your mind, and one of my favourites he references often is Your Invisible Power by Genevieve Behrend.

I encourage you to watch today’s video to gather more context, but I will share the piece that really spoke to me. 

“One tells one’s troubles to weaken them, to get them off one’s mind, and when a thought it given out, it’s power is dissipated. Talk it over with yourself, and even write it down, and at once destroy the paper.”

Over the years, I have found the Brain Dump exercise from inside The Resilience Toolbox to be incredibly useful for me. Coping with the loss of my father, learning to walk again, relationship, post Olympic depression… writing your negative thoughts down on paper to get them out of your mind helps clear space for new, positive thoughts to blossom.

On the other hand, what I experienced and realized today is that I have always had so much pride and joy in having captured so much of my life’s journey on paper, but I’ve also “held on” to a lot of garbage.

I’m not quite 100% sure if I’m going to rip out all of the negative pages from all of my journals, but I gotta tell you, this was liberating today. I tore up even just a few pages from some of the crap I have had to deal with in 2020, and it feels GREAT!

Yes. It’s silly, but small things make a big difference.

If you want to be a hero of your own movie today, do something for yourself.

Rip up some old pages.

If you have negative thoughts in your head right now, write them down and rip them up.

It’s so small, but I’m telling you that it works. You may not “rid that thought from your mind forever”, but how great does it feel to even get rid of it for today?

Give it a try, and let me know how it goes.

Enjoyed this article? Here are three others to help you succeed:

How To Focus Your Mind

How To Manage Change Effectively

3 Quick Tips For Handling Stress

Download your FREE copy of my autobiography, Still Standing: When You Have Every Reason to Give Up, Keep Going here.

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