How to Take Control of Your Life

Humans give a high degree of their attention to changing their outer worlds by using mechanisms to control it but there’s an easier way.

I dated a woman with obsessive compulsive disorder years ago. She was the most methodical person I’d ever met when it came to organization and planning. Her entire life was scheduled seemingly down to the minute. All of that scheduling served her well when it came to getting places on time. Yet her life still seemed incredibly out of order.

For all the external organization, inside she was a wreck. We spend so much time making sure our outer lives are in order. Ensuring that we are taking care of our bodies, that our environment is pleasant, and that we are where we need to be when we should be there.

Yet for all this external organization of our lives, how much time and energy do we focus on our inner worlds? Despite the fact that 95% of our brain activity is unconscious (habits and patterns, automatic body function, emotions, personality, beliefs and values, cognitive biases, and long-term memory) and 45% of our behavior is habitual, the majority of people only ever engage their inner world when they are daydreaming to their thoughts.

If we have no input on that high a percentage of our brain activity and behavior, we’re essentially passengers in our own lives. The disarray in the world around us starts to make sense. The planet is being run by passengers. The good news is there are simple steps you can take to engage and eventually take the reins of your inner world. By doing so you’ll be taking control of your outer life.

“Reality is created by the mind. We can change our reality by changing our mind.” ~Plato

Quantum physics has proven what Plato proclaimed millennia ago, our experience of reality is generated from within. All successful manifestation programs are built around this fundamental principle. That our thoughts generate our emotions and together our thoughts and emotions are the building blocks of our experience of reality.

It makes sense that what you think most of the time and how you feel when thinking it will decide what your life consists of. Look around you. Our lives are nothing more than an accumulation of the things we consume and where we focus our attention. If it wasn’t initiated by a thought then it was initiated by using your imagination to visualize something. We must think about or visualize something before it can become a reality.

The lifehack is that it’s much easier to change our outer lives by manipulating the inputs rather than the outputs. Controlling your thoughts and emotions is just the beginning of what you can do once you have access to the inputs, but this is a crucial place to start and one that can have easily verifiable results in a short time.

In order to have access to the inputs, we first need to go inside and learn how to use the system. There are plenty of user manuals across various cultures and traditions. However, there are common themes among them that make it easy to get started.

All of these ancient systems, some of which are being revived today, others which have been practiced by indigenous cultures through the years, give us similar techniques when it comes to learning to create your reality by controlling your thoughts and emotions. While some of these techniques are impractical in 2023, I’ve distilled the essence of some key ones that can still be easily used in a busy modern world.

“When you control your thoughts and emotions, you control everything.” ~Marshall Sylver

Controlling your thoughts can be a lot harder than you would expect. Our minds are very easily distracted, constantly paying attention to external stimuli for cues about everything. Genetically inherited traits, paying attention to your surroundings, and doing what others in the tribe were doing were essential to the survival of our hunter gatherer ancestors.

What was once a key skill for survival is hardwired into our programming. Only we’ve evolved. Now the skill of giving your full attention to one thing at a time is the skill that will help us succeed the most. Why? Because we are no longer animals. The next stage for humanity is evolving into fully conscious beings.

Only when we give our full attention to one thing are we conscious. When we put distractions aside and delve inwards we can enter the flow state more frequently and create our best outputs. The first step to making this your default mode is to learn how to do it at all. Take 15 minutes a day to yourself and find a quiet place where you can sit and close your eyes.

During this time your thoughts will race and try to take your attention elsewhere. Anywhere. That’s because the brain is used to stimulation for survival. When you close your eyes it will do everything it can to get you to open them because it thinks you’re hurting your chances at survival. Just watch the thoughts go by without engaging them one way or another.

Soon enough they’ll slow down and happen less. Eventually with enough practice you’ll be in full control of your thoughts. Then you can move onto the next phase, affirmations and mantras, or nada yoga. Many people start there but if you can learn to still your mind and get a grasp on your thoughts first, your manifestation practice will have drastically more powerful results in a fraction of the time.

“Control your emotions or they will control you.” ~Chinese Proverb

While your thoughts direct traffic and send signals out, our emotions bring that which resonates with our feelings back to us. Thinking about something alone will eventually attract it back to you, but feeling a strong emotion caused by a thought will attract it much faster. While being able to control your thoughts will make controlling your emotions much easier, it’s crucial to get a handle on your emotions before then.

The first step to controlling your emotions is to be aware of them as soon as possible. The practice mentioned above will also assist with being aware of your emotions, but for now, just make a determination to notice them as soon as possible after they arise. Most people go throughout their day unaware of what they are feeling on a subconscious level, creating their external worlds without ever realizing it.

Once you begin to notice when your emotions start, you can work on changing the negative ones. The best way to do this is to rationalize it. When you’re feeling a negative emotion it will always be because of a memory of a negative experience or the fear of having a negative experience in the future. Yet only the present exists, so if you’re feeling a negative emotion it’s because of something that doesn’t exist. The thing that makes it hard is this typically happens at a subconscious level.

Transfer this information from your subconscious mind to your rational mind by journaling or speaking it aloud and recording it. Do this enough and you begin to change your programming. Once you can stop negative thoughts and negative emotions when they arise, you can do powerful nada yoga and affirmations. Where you become the mantra. You can feel your brain being rewired as you do them. You just need to work through the stages and you’ll be having powerful transformative experiences in no time.

Be the driver of your life or you won’t know where you’re going until it’s too late.

Your life is your vessel to create and experience the reality of your choosing. You can be what you want to be and you can do whatever it is you want to do. The only thing preventing each of us from creating and experiencing the life of our boldest most euphoric imagination is us.

We pretend things outside of us limit us, but they don’t. It can be fun to play that kind of victim game for a while. To test the boundaries of the universe’s compassion for us. But ultimately, the most compassionate thing the universe can do for us is to force us to grow. The time for humanity to play victims is over. The time for us to be the powerful creators we came to this planet to be is now.

It starts by controlling your thoughts and emotions but where it ends is yet to be determined. Once humanity goes inside and awakens to its true potential, the sky isn’t the limit, it’s just the beginning. Humanity has shown what it is capable of doing in the external world. It’s quite impressive, but can we really think of ourselves as impressive if we can’t close our eyes for five minutes and control our thoughts? If we can’t control how we feel or how we react to stress and other external factors?

95% of brain activity is unconscious and 45% of behavior is habitual. Yet we know humans are by and large not spending a whole lot of time exploring and cultivating this internal world. Is it any wonder that the external world has become such a messy place? We create and build from the inside out. It’s no different when creating our experience of reality. You can take fifteen minutes today to go inside and create. To be the driver of your life.