10 Shifts You Can Make to Overcome Default Thinking

Photo by Javier Allegue Barros for Unsplash

Default thinking is keeping you stuck.

Your life experience has ingrained in your brain a particular set of opinions, attitudes, beliefs, and “truths” that you return to over and over again. Evolutionarily speaking, these defaults are useful. It’s efficient to know intrinsically and immediately which way to turn when you leave your driveway and whether or not you like blue cheese. It would be laborious to run through life having to relearn, reprocess, and decide anew at every juncture.

But creatively, psychologically, and emotionally, the consequences of default thinking can be stifling. When we accept our default thoughts as truth, especially when they are in the form of negative self-talk, we get stuck in the same old, same old. We have no reason to grow, explore, or believe that we are made for more.

Want to nurture a growth mindset? Want to drop the negative vibes? Work with these 10 shifts to get you unstuck from default and unleash the expansiveness of your mind.

1. Keep a negative self-talk journal. I have all of my clients keep a journal like this to remind them that the dialogue inside their head is usually not serving them. What do you say to yourself day in and day out? Is it supportive? Or is it something so mean, that you would never even say it to someone else? Test it out. Write down something negative you just said to yourself, then say it to someone else. “You will never make anything of yourself because you’re not good enough.” No? Too brutal? Ask yourself why you are so willing to speak negativity over yourself and see what comes up.
2. Flip the script. Once you write down your negative thoughts, take each statement and flip it to the positive. So, “I’m a terrible mom” becomes “I am a strong and loving mom.” Did you just feel a weight lift off your shoulders when you did that? The power of a single thought is tremendous, isn’t it? How many thoughts can you flip?
3. Turn it into an affirmation. Choose a few of the most meaningful positive statements from flipping the script and use them as affirmations. Write them on Post-Its and put them in your car, on your fridge, or on your bathroom mirror. Say them out loud every day (it will feel weird at first, but just trust me on this one). You can absolutely rewire your own brain, and this is a powerful method to do this.
4. Ask yourself, “Is it true?” I love The Work of Byron Katie as a tool for flipping your thoughts around and I believe everyone needs to read Loving What Is. When you are confronted with a negative or default statement in your head, really dig deep and ask yourself if it’s true. I mean, do you know absolutely, positively, without a doubt that you are a terrible mother and you have video and receipts to prove it? Chances are, you won’t have the evidence to back it up.
5. Ask yourself, “What is it costing you?” This one is from Mel Robbins and it goes pretty deep. So, maybe you can’t think of a positive thing to flip that thought to, or you can’t convince yourself it’s not true. But what is it costing you to allow this thought to linger in your head? What are you missing out on by believing this? How is it affecting the way you show up every day? Yep, this is one shift you need to sit with for a minute, because it’s a doozy.
6. Change the people around you. Our thoughts are usually self-generated, but they can also be influenced by the people around us. The saying goes, you become the average of the five people you keep closest to you. If you are surrounded by negative people, guess what? You get stuck there too. You have two options here: lose the people, and replace them with friends who have a growth mindset, OR, retrain the brains of the ones you love and want to keep. A fun way to do this is in the book How to Wake Up by Toni Bernhard. She and her husband call one another out when they are grousing and spreading negativity into their space. They gently exclaim, “Complaint!” with a smile, to remind the other person to rein in the negative, flip the script, and let it go. Try it out with a loved one the next time they begin a treatise on their hatred of how cold winter is (which no one can do anything about!), and see what happens.
7. Just sit. If you’ve been following me for any length of time, you knew this one was coming. Get yourself a meditation practice. And before you run off thinking you can’t do meditation, just know these three things: anyone can meditate anytime, anywhere (you don’t need a Buddha statue and a candle to do it); even meditating for 30 seconds is beneficial; and meditation is NOT about not thinking. It’s about sitting with your thoughts and releasing them without judgment. ABC news correspondent Dan Harris is doing a hero’s work on this right now, showing people that meditation is accessible, simple, and not nearly as woo-woo as it may seem.
8. Doodle! I’m lucky enough to be married to a professional doodler, Roy Zoner, and our house believes in the power of a doodle. Doodling releases your mind from its eternal judgement zone. There are no right or wrong answers in a doodle, so you can experience what it’s like to think freely, generate garbage ideas, generate brilliant ideas, and then throw it all into the trash. Sunni Brown’s The Doodle Revolution is like a Bible in our house.
9. Pick up some inspirational reading. If you don’t have it in you to change your own thoughts, try letting someone else’s positive thinking populate your mind. Try reading just a few pages and then creating an affirmation from an idea that resonates with you. I like The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo and anything every written by Pema Chodron.
10. Get outside. When all else fails, go back to your source. We live in a world where we are separated from the place that made us. We work in climate-controlled, fluorescent lit offices. We sleep without seeing the stars. We even wear rubber soled shoes so we can’t feel the earth beneath us. No wonder we get stuck sometimes. Get outside. Reconnect. Breathe. Feel the ground beneath your feet. Tell me what phase the moon is in. Listen to what the wind is trying to say. Understand what Rumi really meant when he wrote, “You are not just a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in one drop.”