The symbiotic relationship between a person’s thoughts and the eventual outcomes of their life is one that has long been critically established across different fields, schools of thought, and strata of reasonings.
It’s in the Bible:
“For as he thinks in his heart, so is he…” - Proverbs 23:7.
Long before modern psychology even began investigating the relationship between cognition and behaviour, Scripture had already presented the inner musings of a person as the foundational pillar of their true personality.
Teaching us that what a person repeatedly thinks about shapes what they believe, how they perceive the world, and ultimately how they conduct themselves within it.
Science too has agreed with this notion:
Modern research has repeatedly shown that thoughts and expectations can influence behaviour and physiological responses.
The study of self-efficacy, pioneered by psychologist Albert Bandura, demonstrated that a person’s belief in their ability to accomplish a task affects the effort they exert, their persistence in difficulty, and their eventual performance.
This principle also appears in research on placebo effects, where a person’s expectations can produce measurable changes in their experience of pain, symptoms, and other physiological outcomes.
The mind does not possess magical control over reality, but our mental processes clearly participate in determining how we experience reality and how we respond to it.
Psychologists have also concurred:
American psychologist William James, one of the founders of modern psychology, famously wrote:
“The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind.”
Successful athletes also agree:
Basketball legend Michael Jordan once said:
“You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them.”
And finally, God Himself integrated this principle into nature in how animals constantly respond to their perception of their environment:
A gazelle that detects a predator does not merely think about danger; its perception triggers a physiological stress response, causing it to flee.
A bird builds a nest because its instincts and environmental signals direct its behaviour, while a predator identifies an opportunity, assesses it, and acts.
Animals do not possess the same reflective consciousness that human beings do, but nature repeatedly demonstrates the connection between perception, internal processing, behaviour, and consequences.
The broader principle is therefore observable across different domains, and we can surmise it as:
What exists within an organism influences how it responds to what exists around it, and those responses produce consequences.
For human beings, this relationship becomes considerably more complex because we possess the capacity to reflect upon our thoughts, evaluate them, accept or reject them, and deliberately cultivate new patterns of thinking.
A thought becomes a belief; a belief influences a decision; repeated decisions become habits; habits accumulate into character and behaviour; and behaviour, repeated over time, contributes significantly to the direction of a person’s life.
This is why the condition of our minds matters greatly.
The things we think are important because they reinforce, within us, the identity we have about ourselves, others, and the world around us.
This identity then determines how we treat and perceive ourselves, others, and the world around us.
Then the consequences or the reactions that we get from ourselves, others, and the world around us will now be based on the way we had treated and perceived all three individual parties.
Simple enough to understand?
I’ll share an interesting analogy about thoughts that I internalised a long time ago because, in all seriousness, it really changed my life:
If you wear a shirt that you think is ugly, every uncertain or neutral external impulse that you encounter in that day will most likely be interpreted by you through the lens of that thought.
So let’s say you pass by a group of people who look in your direction and then laugh amongst themselves; what happens is that there’s a good chance that the first thing you’ll think is “They’re laughing at my ugly shirt.”
Are they laughing at the shirt? Maybe, maybe not. Is the shirt ugly? Maybe, maybe not. Did those people even notice you? Maybe, maybe not.
Regardless, these are three NEUTRAL and UNCERTAIN variables that you have no concrete evidence for which you can establish your conviction on, but because of your already existing THOUGHTS about the shirt, your reaction to those variables will be skewed greatly to the side of the negative.
Even though they could all be positive as well.
Apart from showing just how self-exalted many of us are in our interpretation of the world around us, it also explains the practical way insecurities work.
When you have an insecurity, it is a thought or story about yourself that has been reinforced repeatedly until it has become your identity.
It now becomes instinctive for you to rationalise every statement or action or impulse that you don’t understand or have complete knowledge about through the mirror of that insecurity that is now your identity.
“She rejected me because I’m short.”
“I didn’t get the job because I’m not smart enough.”
“God hates me because I’m a terrible sinner.”
How do you know any of this?
If she didn’t give you a reason for turning you down, and the job didn’t tell you why they rejected your application, and God didn’t reveal to you that He hates you, then do you really have any right to make categorical assumptions and believe them with all your heart?
You don’t.
But you have reinforced those thoughts in your mind to the point that they’ve become the lens with which you now see the world and everything that happens in it.
You believe you’re ugly, so that’s the reason for every romantic rejection.
You believe you’re not intelligent or skilful enough, so that’s the reason for every failed job attempt.
You believe you’re a condemned addict who can never live righteously, and that’s the reason God is so far from you.
Nobody told you this, but you believe it firmly, simply because it’s just what you THINK.
And we often can’t differentiate between the things we think are true, and the things that are actually true.
Our human minds hate housing empty spaces of vacuum when it comes to uncertainties, so we tend to fill up those spaces with things we already believe about ourselves, others, and the world around us.
Even in situations that are primarily positive, established thoughts have a way of discolouring inputs and skewing the way we perceive and react to them.
Some people have been so beaten down by their own negative thoughts and experiences that they can no longer believe statements or actions that are positioned positively in their direction.
No matter what that guy does for you, you just refuse to believe that he’s being honest with you because “all men are liars”.
No matter how many accolades you gather in life, you still feel like you’re not doing enough because your parents used to criticise you harshly for not taking the first position in your class when you were younger.
No matter how consistent you become spiritually, it still feels like you’re lacking because you keep comparing yourself to everybody around you and how “well” you believe they’re performing.
You see the pattern?
The worst part is that many of your rationalisations can be outright lies, but because you’ve internalised them for a long time, you believe them with so much veracity.
Ironically, the way negative thoughts are dragging some people down is the way some others are using positive thoughts to propel their lives forward.
The things we think hold significant power in determining our life experiences, they really do.
I see some people speak about themselves with such much negativity and defeat, and it always gets me disturbed.
It’s like what happened to you? Who or what hurt you? Why are you so broken and so lax in your brokenness?
Why can’t you see that you’ll never get out of that pit you’re wallowing in until you believe that you don’t deserve to be in it?
On this same spectrum is where we have people who lose themselves in friendships and romantic situations that are detrimental to them because they don’t know or think that they can get better or that they deserve any better.
If you think you’ll never be great, trust me, you never will.
You’ll hate yourself, others will treat you as inferior, and even the world will never present you with opportunities to reach greatness.
And even if it does, you’ll never have the courage or the audacity to grab them because you already believe that it’s not for you.
The number of practical situations I can copy-paste this simple tent into is just so unfortunate.
Think about the thoughts you have about your life right now, and I’ll tell you for free, just in case you don’t know, that is your future.
And you won’t be able to blame anybody else for it when it happens because you were the one who desired it in the first place.
Nobody can become anything they have not first conceived in their minds: you must think it first, and then believe it, and then you’ll become it through the right actions.
However, if your mind has been filled with negativity, then you’ll never be able to believe or become anything that’s bigger than the existing limitations in your mind.
One of the worst issues plaguing this generation is “mass identity”, or the “hive mindset”, if you will.
There’s a serious identity crisis on the ground, and it’s been propagated primarily by social media and the internet.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with identifying with a group or a community, but my focus is more on the internal side of said identity crisis because that’s what reflects on the outside.
Every day or with every major new trend, many people are adopting and internalising thoughts and belief systems that have nothing to do with them or their convictions, simply because they just see other people doing so.
The most unfortunate part is that many people go even further to adopt issues and struggles and traumas that don’t belong to them, and then they start projecting it onto their lives.
Take the case of a woman who followed a “story time” from a TikTok creator who narrated how her boyfriend of 9 years ended up dumping her for a woman he recently met and marrying her in less than 6 months.
Tragic? Very.
But rather than it end as a sad story for this woman, she instantly grew paranoid in her own long-term relationship and started to have serious trust issues that she had never had before.
She did this right up until the point that her boyfriend got frustrated and hurt – because he had never done anything to betray her trust – and he had to end the relationship and even file a restraining order against her because she was getting violent.
You see the point?
I’m not decrying empathy, no, and I’m also not saying that we can’t pick up lessons and new mindsets from the stories around us and the things we observe in our environment.
However, your empathy must be compassion that is coming from an alignment of the subject matter with your already established outlook on life or an alignment with your convictions.
If not, you’ll end up internalising every struggle and every movement that you come across simply because it touched your emotions and you feel guilty, sad, or angry.
The same applies to drawing lessons and forming mindsets from the thoughts and experiences you see around you.
Our minds are too important for us to surrender them to every touching “story time” or every sad narrative, especially because we can’t even always know for sure who is lying or who is telling the truth.
The internet, for example, is full of people who have been hurt and broken and are now using whatever outlet they have to channel out their frustration and their hurt to anybody who would listen.
Don’t become a basket for someone else’s pain.
The moment you do, you subject your mind to become a reflection of their world views and their beliefs, even when they clearly don’t serve you or the direction you’re headed in life.
Someone else’s experiences don’t always have to be your own.
Because it happened to them doesn’t mean it must or it will happen to you too, you know that, right?
Your thoughts are critical to the outlook and output of your life, both present and future, so you need to take them with all seriousness.
And guard your heart with all diligence.
It takes the same energy to be positive and negative, so why always be negative?
(That was supposed to be a rhetorical question, but I think I understand one of the reasons why.)
Apart from external impulses, past experiences like hurt and trauma have a way of defining the identity of a person until their thought processes concerning a particular area of life or their lives are skewed forever.
This is something that must never be understated.
It’s not everybody that you see holding a perspective or following a movement that is doing so because they just want to “feel among”.
Some people have very justified reasons for their grievances and their low self-perception.
I truly empathise with people like that, but like I always tell my friends:
You cannot allow experiences from the first 20 years of your life to determine the remaining 60 years. You simply can’t.
Are some of those experiences painful and powerful enough to define the rest of your life? Yes, many times, yes.
But is the trade-off worth it? Absolutely not.
Giving up 3/4 because 1/4 was unpleasant is a proportionally terrible deal.
You have not yet exhausted all your chances in life to succeed, so why are you giving up now?
You have not yet met every potential romantic partner yet, so why have you concluded that “love isn’t for me”?
You have not yet experienced every moment and situation in life that will open your mind to new burdens and new ideas, so how can you conclude that you have no purpose in life?
Your life hasn’t ended yet, so how are you so sure with all of your mind and heart that things cannot get better? Isn’t that a bit too harsh?
Come on, think about it.
No matter how you look at it, trading away multiple decades of the possibility of having a better life due to the undeniable negative experiences of a few decades is not a fair deal at all.
As long as you’re here and breathing, you can still win if you’re willing to.
It’s just up to you to fight for what you want.
But you already know this.
The problem is that you’re probably just so used to being where you are that you’ve romanticised the pain so much and made it a fabric of your identity.
You can’t even imagine going through the even harder pain of redefining who you think you are, because doing so seems like tearing away the core of your being itself.
But the truth is that, deep down, like everybody else, you honestly want to live a better life.
However, you can be hungry for change but not have the appetite to do what it takes to bring about that change.
And until you do, well, you will just remain in the same rut, lamenting and complaining about it.
Or even worse, rotting away slowly in it, in silence and acceptance.
There’s nothing new or extremely revolutionary about what I’ve written in this article.
You know, and I know, and we all know that you can’t be thinking negatively and expecting positive things to happen.
That’s like planting corn and expecting a mango tree; it’s just akin to foolishness.
What you think about yourself is what you will become, and what we think about and expect from life is what will largely determine most of the things life will bring our way.
Change your thoughts, change your life.
And you must be aggressive about it too; never joke or take lightly the statements you say after “I am…” or your subconscious response to the statements and actions you’re exposed to on a daily basis.
Each reinforced thought is building an identity in your mind, and whatever that identity is will determine the way you treat yourself, others, and the world around you, and vice versa.
So, the principle is simple:
Change your thoughts, change your life.
Tomorrow, August 13, marks exactly 2 years since I created this newsletter, and this is 167 articles, 6,000+ Subscribers, and 400k+ views later.
It’s been an interesting journey from then till now and, as always, I’m grateful to everyone who has been a part of it.
I don’t take it lightly.
Thank you, and we keep going. Much bigger things are on the way.
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