A Brave (and Kind of Fun) Way to Catch Your Own Mind at Work

For the high achiever who has optimized everything ~ except the one thing running the whole show: what you think about, on repeat, without ever clocking in for the shift.

Quick game before we start. For the next ten seconds, try very hard not to think about a purple elephant wearing sunglasses.

…

If you’re like most people, the elephant showed up almost instantly, uninvited and a little smug about it. That’s today’s whole lesson: you don’t actually pick your thoughts nearly as often as you’d like to believe. Most of them just show up. Same outfit as yesterday. Same 6am anxiety spiral about an email you haven’t even opened yet.

The thinkers who’ve spent careers studying the link between thought and results tend to agree on one delightfully simple starting point: you cannot change what you don’t notice. Before strategy, before goal-setting, before the vision board, there is one underrated skill that makes the rest of it work, awareness. Just noticing what you’re thinking, while you’re thinking it.

It sounds too simple to matter. High achievers tend to walk right past “simple” looking for something more impressive. Stay with me, this one is sneaky powerful.

Your Mind Is Basically a Golden Retriever

Your mind isn’t your enemy, and it isn’t broken. It’s just enthusiastic. Like a golden retriever off its leash, it will chase every squirrel, bark at every mail truck, and occasionally roll around in something it really shouldn’t ~ usually a worst-case scenario about a text that went unanswered for four hours.

You wouldn’t yell at a golden retriever for being a golden retriever. You’d just notice what it’s doing and call it back. That’s the whole practice, not silencing your thoughts or forcing positivity, just noticing, with amusement rather than judgment: “oh, there’s that thought again.”

The Thought Behind the Thought

Here’s where it gets interesting for someone who have built an actual life out of results: every result you’ve ever produced started as a thought, repeated until it stopped feeling like a thought and started feeling like a fact.

“I have to earn rest.” Thought, repeated into fact. “If I slow down, everything falls apart.” Thought, repeated into fact. “There’s no time for that right now.” Thought, repeated into a life that genuinely has no time for that.

None of these started as truth. They started as an ordinary thought, years ago, that you never got around to questioning and it kept showing up at the door until you stopped noticing you were the one letting it in.

You already understand cause and effect better than most people: inputs create outputs. You may just not have realized your habitual thinking is the input you’ve been least deliberate about.

A Ridiculously Small Experiment

No hour-long journaling, no meditating on a mountain, just this: for one day, become a mildly nosy narrator of your own mind, the way you’d describe a nature documentary. “And here we see her, reaching for her phone before her feet hit the floor. Let’s see what thought she’s having right… about… now.”

That’s it. Catch yourself thinking, a few times a day, and get curious about what you catch ~ not to fix it, just to see it. You can’t redesign a room you’ve never actually looked at.

Most people discover, almost immediately, that a huge share of their thoughts are reruns. Worries they’ve had a hundred times, arguments already won or lost in their head, a highlight reel of what might go wrong that never seems to include what might go right.

Once you can see the rerun for what it is, you stop mistaking the thought for the truth. You get a half-second of space between the stimulus and your response and that half-second…. is where your life quietly gets redesigned.

Why This Matters More Than It Sounds Like It Should

You didn’t build your life by accident, you built it, largely, by thinking a certain way, consistently, over years. That’s good news: the same mechanism that built your success is available to build the freedom and ease you’re still missing. The only new move is choosing the thought on purpose instead of inheriting it by default. And you can’t choose on purpose what you’ve never noticed you were choosing at all.

One Question to Carry With You

What is one thought I have on repeat about time, about rest, about what I’m allowed to want , that I have never once stopped to question?

You don’t have to answer it today. Just notice it, the next time it shows up for its shift. Say hello. Maybe even laugh a little. Then decide, gently, whether it still deserves the job.

I’m Nicole, a transformational life coach at Soul Steps TLC. I work with high achievers who are ready to stop spending their best years earning a life they never have time to live. If this resonates, I’d love to connect. Your next step starts here.