60-Second Mind Shift: What is the one thing you would teach the world?
Supporting you to free your mind so you can live from your heart!
If you could teach the world one thing - just one - what would it be? And if you knew it might actually help someone, would you share it?
– Shasheen Shah
If you’re open to it, I invite you to take a quiet moment and really sit with this question:
What’s the one thing you’d teach the world?
If something comes up for you, I would love it if you replied to this email and shared it with me. Reading your responses would be a gift, and, with your permission, I’d love to anonymously share some of them to benefit others. Because we can all learn from each other.
I’ll go first.
If I could teach the world one thing, it would be this:
You are not your thoughts.
You are the one who is witnessing your thoughts.
You are the one having the thoughts.
But you are not your thoughts.
Why does this matter?
For me, learning this and experiencing it in real time changed my life.
I had spent most of my life identifying with my thoughts and believing them. I thought they were me. But once I was taught the skill of observing my thoughts instead of being them, I saw I had a choice if I wanted to engage with that thought or not.
What I noticed observing my thoughts was that many of my thoughts were negative, judgmental, and limiting. They were constantly telling me what I wasn’t, what I couldn’t do, or how I didn’t measure up. I came to learn that these thoughts weren’t “truths”, they were part of my brain’s survival programming. And while that programming had kept me alive, it hadn’t exactly helped me feel at peace. Most of the time I felt pretty bad: anxious, lonely, down, often all at once.
Then I learned about something called negativity bias, the brain’s built-in tendency to focus more on the negative than the positive. This shows up in all kinds of ways: comparison, scarcity, paranoia, deflection, excuses, you name it. In coaching, we often refer to this as “Monkey Mind” thinking. The symptoms differ from person to person, but the root is the same: the survival brain trying to protect us.
Most of our thoughts are just noise from this part of the brain. We are not those thoughts.
And if I could teach the world just one thing, it would be to deeply know and experience that.
Now, you might be wondering, if we’re not our thoughts, then what are we?
That’s a bigger conversation (and one I’ll explore in another article). But for now, just start by noticing the thoughts…and noticing the one who is noticing. Then, and this is what has helped me the most, start to acknowledge those negative thoughts by actually praising them. The brain takes its job to keep you alive very seriously by piping in these negative thoughts. And if you can let your brain know you hear it and thank it for working so hard, you'll notice it calm down a bit. Here's to experiencing more peace and compassion day to day!
Step By Step,
Jessie