Making the world a better place starts and ends with you.  Our natural inclination is to figure out how to change the thinking of others to make the world a better place.  It is all that trying to change each other’s minds that has led us to the place we currently find ourselves.  The world is not falling apart, we are just going through a time of struggle. As a matter of fact I would say for most of us, we have no problems right now in this present moment.  The only problems we have come from our memories of the past and worries about the future.  If you can clear your thoughts and just pay attention to this exact moment, you will discover that you have no problems right now, but you may have thoughts about what you may have to deal with or what you have done in the past.  They are not creating any problems in the present moment, your thoughts creating the problem.  I am not trying to trick you into believing nothing bad will ever happen, I am trying to show you that what makes our world good or bad has a lot less to do with what is going on out there, and more about what is going on inside of us.

Think about all the things you have worried about in the past.  How many of those things actually happened? Of all the things that did happen, how many of them were as bad or worse than you thought they would be?  Take some time and think about that.  You will find that I am telling you the truth when I say it isn’t as much what happens to us as what we think about what happens to us that makes our world worse.  This same phenomenon leads us to believe the world is undoubtedly falling apart. The truth is that our thoughts about the world are falling apart.  We are no longer confident that we can overcome the challenges we have.  There is no truth in this because if we look back across history, there has never been a period where some group of people weren’t being victimized and believed that the world was going to end.  It didn’t end, it kept going, and things got better as a whole.  Think about all the people killed in the name of religion in the middle ages. Slaves being traded across the world. Think about the countless numbers killed in Germany and across Europe in WWII. This is not going on for a vast majority of people in the world right now.  Our standards have increased and violence has decreased. We don’t burn witches at the stake anymore.  Fewer people in the world are starving today than during any period in history.  More people have fresh water to drink, and fewer are dying preventable diseases.  When we think about the state of our world we always think about how terrible things are, but we never look at the realities that clearly show that some conditions in our world are clearly improving.  

This brings me to the purpose of this blog post, and that is to make your world a better place, all the while making the world at large a better place. In order to overcome our negative mental biases, we need to become more aware of what thoughts are motivating the way we live our lives. In order to do that we can develop a consistent mindfulness practice, which gives us practice on focusing our attention where we want it, while acknowledging our natural thoughts but not reacting to them.  Creating this distance between thought and action gives us the opportunity to question our thoughts.  When we recognize our thoughts, and sincerely and rationally question them, we find that most of our thoughts are just stories with no real basis in truth.  Once we clear these thoughts away, we can then choose to think and act in a new way. 

I provide Mindfulness Based Life Coaching and I have yet to have someone who didn’t benefit from bringing practical mindfulness into their lives. This is based on the fact that if you get control and discipline over your thought life it will transfer into your outward world.  Most people who go through this process don’t “need” a coach anymore because they have gained clarity and discipline in their thought life.  When you are in control of your thoughts and actions, you are in effect in control of your world.  When your world gets better, it makes the world better for the people who are in your world. One of the significant people in my life used to trigger me nearly every time we were together. Once I became aware of the thoughts firing off, and created distance between thought and actions I no longer reacted.  This made the world around me better.  Imagine if we were all in control of our thoughts and actions, and were no longer judging others, because we came to realize how many of the things we believed were not true. 

The bottom line is that if you want to make the world a better place, it all begins in the six inches between your left and right ears.