When you are in the business of helping people get things done a natural by product is you get a lot of things done. I had this misconception that getting more done, being more productive, and on top of my goals was going to make me happy. And in many ways it did but there was also an undercurrent of general dissatisfaction. I wondered if this was the curse of being ambitious but I couldn’t accept that. So if I couldn’t accomplish my way to a feeling of fulfillment and well being, how instead would I get there?

It was obvious to me that my dissatisfaction was not a product of my outside environment. Too much had changed over the years for the better for that to be the case. So it had to be a product of my inner world. Specifically, my thoughts. No matter how much I accomplished or abundance I experienced in my life, I still had a voice in my head telling me, it’s not enough. I’m not doing enough, I haven’t made enough, I’m not there for my kids enough. I’m not enough.

So I set up an experiment, which I called my Thought Experiment, many of you might remember when I blogged about it more than a year ago now. In it I tracked everything that I thought might influence the quality of my thoughts.

I tracked things like meditation, visualization, gratitude, journaling, exercise, sleep, coffee & alcohol consumption, time in nature, time with my kids, time away from devices. Everything that I could think of that might influence the quality of my thoughts. I used my accountability session to make sure I kept tracking even when it got hard. It got really hard. Old wounds and hurts started to come up in boatloads and I even stopped blogging about it because I thought it would be too heavy for other people to read. However, I made it through those hard parts. In the process I shed a lot of my old thought patterns and the awareness I gained from watching my thoughts with vigilance was my first step towards experiencing the joy and happiness that was right there in front of me.

Awareness is the first step to change but it’s not the whole story. The one thing that I kept hearing loud and clear, from books, from spiritual leaders, from my own knowing is you are responsible for your thoughts. It wasn’t until I took responsibility for my thoughts that I really started to experience the happiness and joy that was right there in front of me. Stay tuned for part 2 where I explain just how I did that.