Intentional Versus Diagnostic Thinking
1 November 2006Essentially every thought you have is to some extent or another, intentional. By that I mean you’re sending your intent, or energy, out into the universe to be returned to you.
Every minute, every day, every thought, is like an order to the universe. My brother once jokingly said to me after I got something from the universe that was exactly what I had asked for, but not the ideally what I wanted: The universe is like an engineer, you get exactly what you ordered.
Think of the universe like a really powerful computer, but with a terrible search engine. If you’ve ever looked at an online phone book for the name “Simth†you’ll get no results. Even though you can shout: I meant ‘Smith’! I guess there’s a lot of truth to the old adage, be careful what you wish for!
Intentions are focused and amplified when we affirm, meditate, and visualise. But that doesn’t mean you can neglect all the thoughts you have throughout the day. All those small things add up! You can’t just eat one healthy salad for lunch and then nibble on cookies the rest of the day.
Knowing that any and every thought you have is essentially an intention, it’s important to note what emotion you’re putting into your thoughts. If you really want something but are afraid of it, your fear will be returned to you. If you don’t believe you’ll achieve something, that intention will influence what happens to you as much as it will influence what you do. Fears and disbelief will sabotage your goals faster than any other thought, emotion or action. This is why it’s so important to keep your thoughts on positives (what you want, what you can do, how good you’ll feel when you’ve reached your goal) and way from the negatives (what you don’t want, what you can’t do, how crappy you’ll feel if you fail).
If you’re reliving a past ‘failure’, you’re suffering unnecessarily. You made a mistake, and lost out on something. We’ll call that one unit of loss. Now, for every time you think about that and go “damn!†you’re reliving the loss, and lowering your self esteem by one unit. How many times are you going to relive the same loss? 50? 100? That’s 100 units of emotional loss for just 1 unit of actual loss.
Where does diagnostic thinking come in? I mean, we’ve all been thought that we should learn from our mistakes. But mulling over a problem in your head without any sort of direction or purpose doesn’t help. More often than not, we’re not looking to learn from our mistakes per se, but more so berating ourselves for screwing up in the first place.
When we do this, we put a lot of emotional weight behind thoughts such as “I’m such an idiot†and “How come I keep making this mistakeâ€. When you say “How come I keep making the same mistake?†you’re sending out the intention for the universe and you to repeat the same mistake so you can see why you’re making the same mistake. If you’re looking for reasons why you’re a loser you’ll find plenty of examples.
With diagnostic thinking, it’s important to untangle your emotions from the event. This is why I’m such a fan of setting aside a certain block of time to do diagnostic thinking and focusing all your energy on the one issue at hand with a solution orientated – not blame finding - mindset. The steps I’ve found most beneficial are:
- Set an intention for the diagnostic session. A good example would be “to discover what I can do better the next time.†A bad example: “to see where I messed up big time.â€
- Write down the areas you could improve on. You’ll note here I didn’t say the areas you failed or screwed up. Since you’re looking into areas where you believe you let yourself down, there’s no point in adding the extra burden of beating yourself up again. You suffered once. Don’t allow this (expand out of here)
- Write down the ways you could handle the situation better in the future. If there’s any areas where you were unclear with what your aims were, or what outcome you wanted, now’s the opportunity to clarify those goals
- Write down all the positives/favourable outcomes (or mini outcomes) you got from the experience. It is said that there are no failures, only learning experiences. Well if you’re not taking the positives from a situation you’re not learning, are you? A class is a waste of time, no matter how valuable the content, if you don’t take something from it (and apply it!)
- Finish up the diagnostic session with new intentions and affirmations.
Â
There was no scolding yourself during the diagnostic session. That doesn’t help anyone. Least of all yourself. Diagnostic thinking should always end in new intentions, otherwise it’s really just reliving the failure, but in a focused manner.
As to when you actually do diagnostic thinking, that all depends on the situation. If it was a major event (and only you can decide if it’s a major event) it might be a good idea to wait a day or two before you look into it. If you’re too emotional or close to the coal face it’ll be hard to remain detached and not berate yourself. Of course, with practice, you’ll be able to do diagnostic thinking closer and closer to important situations and eventually you’re ability to observe yourself in these critical situations will develop. This is what Jung referred to as Observing Ego.
Diagnostic thinking can be done on a day to day basis, or weekly basis. This is essentially what you’ll do with a life coach, or with any other positive support group. I really believe this to be a beneficial exercise, especially if you want to step up a gear in your life. Without it, you can go on for months or years without realising ways in which you’ve been sabotaging yourself.
If you’ve spent most of your life being unaware of your intentional thinking, you won’t have much control over it when you begin. But the very fact that you’re reading this will make you more conscious of your intentional thinking. An important point is that when you slip (and you will) is not to beat yourself up over it and say something destructive like “I knew I’d fail at this!â€
As you become more consciously aware of it, controlling your intentional thinking does get easier. At which point achieving your goals becomes easier and easier, as you can more efficiently align your thoughts and emotions with your intention. Then you’ve only your actions to concern yourself with!
(As an interesting footnote: saying intentional thinking doesn’t work is sending out an intention into the world looking for proof that it doesn’t work and that you’re really a victim. What do you think you’ll get back if you send out that intention with certainty?)
No comments yet