Hello, dear friend! Welcome to this new episode of the podcast Marchez Avec Johan. It is a pleasure, a happiness, an honor, a pride to have you with me today for this little stroll.
And today, I would like to talk to you about one of our greatest freedoms if not our greatest freedom, because that's where it all begins, as I say in the title of the episode. The greatest of our freedoms is to be able to choose our thoughts, to choose what we think about. Choosing what I think about now is a key, it's the greatest of my freedoms. And it's a key because everything starts with a thought in fact. If we think about it carefully, if we think about it in detail, everything starts with a thought. Good thoughts lead to good actions and bad thoughts lead to bad actions. If there were no bad thoughts, imagine if there were no bad thoughts, well no bad action would be possible, no anxiety would be possible. So, you see where the source of what is negative is ultimately. The negative comes from bad thoughts, quite simply.
So, it gives us, when we understood that, it doesn't seem to be something exceptional, but yet it is, because when we understood that, we understood that guiding our thoughts, mastering our thoughts, was the best way to master ourselves and to master our emotions and our actions. So, it goes through mastering your thoughts. If you master your thoughts, you master your emotions and you master your actions.
So, of course, and we will see this later, we must do it early and quickly, because bad thoughts tend to gain strength very quickly and to quickly become anchored. A bad thought tends to germinate more quickly and to intensify more quickly than a good thought, unfortunately. But despite everything, it gives us an enormous means of influencing our emotions, our actions, our success, etc.
And there's a great quote that I love from Martin Luther, who was obviously a Protestant reformer, who said, "You can't stop the birds from flying over your head, but you can stop them from making a nest on your head." Now, that's probably not the exact quote, it's a paraphrase, but I find it really inspiring actually, because here the iraq whatsapp number data birds are the bad thoughts or the outside influences. And what he's really telling us is that we can't stop them, we can't stop the bad thoughts, we can't stop the bad outside influences, but we can stop them from residing in us, from settling in our heads. Again, it's an image that shows that we can control our thoughts, that we can manage our thoughts and that it has a huge impact on our lives, quite simply.
And a few years ago, there was a sentence that had influenced me enormously. Well, it is so simple, this sentence, so easy, so simplistic that one can wonder how it can influence someone. You see, it is always this kind of thing always very funny. We say to ourselves: "No, but wait, it is so simple that it is almost stupid". And yet, it is often the simplest things that are the most powerful. And so, this sentence, it comes from or it was pronounced by Earl Nightingale, who was a famous American speaker and author in the field of personal development, one of the inventors of modern personal development, and who said: "You are what you think about", so, you are what you think about. In French, it is a little less pretty, it is a little less simple, but it means the same thing: you are what you think about. If you think positive, you are someone positive; If you think negative, you are a negative person.
And you can do the experiment with me, you can pause the episode and do this experiment. Try to think of a positive experience, try, there you think of something positive. Can you be sad when you think of a positive experience? Well no. When you think of something positive, you can't be sad, unless you directly think of something negative. If you think of something negative, of course, you can be sad. And if the negative thought replaces a positive thought, then you can become sad or negative.
But this is where it gets interesting. You have to keep in mind that you can't think about two things at the same time. You can't have a negative thought and a positive thought at the same time. It's impossible. Our brains aren't made for that. You can't think about two things at the same time. And so, a negative thought can be replaced. And if you replace it, you might as well replace it with a positive thought and immediately.
Again, the idea is to do it very early, because I was saying it earlier, but it is important to insist, if you let the negative thought settle in, it will become too strong and you will have difficulty getting rid of it. It is a little bit like what Martin Luther said when he spoke of the bird that makes its nest. If the bird arrives and you prevent it from making its nest, well you manage to chase it away, to chase the bird away, so, to chase away the negative thought, well you have to do it right away, because if the bird has landed and started to make its nest, then it is very difficult to remove it. And so, this image of the bird, this metaphor of the bird, it shows clearly that it is very difficult to remove a negative thought that has made its nest, that has become embedded in us. So, the idea is to do it very early. As soon as we feel that we have a negative thought, well we try to replace it with a positive thought.
This is a concept that Robin Sharma talked about in his book The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari. I really liked this book at the time, even though I'm a little less of a fan of Robin Sharma's writings today, I really liked this book. It's what he calls "opposite thinking." You have a negative thought, you replace it with a positive thought.