We all think all the time. The question is: who is running the show, you, or your thoughts?

Our minds are an archive of all that we have experienced or been told or seen or read. They pull out a selection of thoughts based on our mood or attitude in quite a random way.

A great example of this is our dreams, you know, those really weird ones where the characters are both people you know and people from films or books, and the plot line is a random collection of circumstances where you are being chased or you’re the hero. It’s a story created from a whole mix of your mind’s archive that you know is not real.

But this is what our minds do all the time, if we don’t take control of the story. So how do we do that?

We consciously give our minds instructions. We set the tone for the type of thoughts we want, for example: ‘I want to remember the good bits’. And we tell our minds to dump parts of that archive in the trash bin: ‘put those negative thoughts in the trash – they’re no longer relevant or useful to me.’

We can re-organise our mind’s archive, so that the most useful and positive thoughts and memories are the most accessible. This means that they will be the ones that our mind goes to most often, thereby reinforcing them.

It takes a while – there’s a lot of mixed up stuff in that archive of yours! – but your mind would prefer to work well for you. You just have to take control, rather than letting your thoughts control you.