“Mommy, what should I do, I have all kinds of thoughts racing in my mind. Sometimes I think of things and I get scared sometimes with some thoughts and sometimes I get happy thoughts when I think of my possible future and sometimes I am just thinking nonsense and I am not sure why I get such thoughts? Can I control my thoughts so I can think whatever I want and not let other thoughts which I dont want creep up?” asked Neelu tree to his mother. Nishu tree replied, “Yes dear, we can certainly control our thoughts, if we train our mind. Generally, our thoughts fall in 4 categories. If we learn to identify which type of thoughts we are getting, then we are able to make conscious effort and we can make choices to divert our thoughts in the direction we want them to go. Just like a monkey jumps from one branch to another, our thoughts jump from one topic to another therefore we must learn to train and control our thoughts, so we can save time and be able to control our lives efficiently.”

“Our thoughts are of generally 4 types:

1. Positive thoughts

2. Negative thoughts

3. Waste thoughts

4.Neutral thoughts”

So just like there are some people who can tame the monkey and make it dance and perform the way the master wants, similarly our thoughts can be tamed and trained. With practice, our mind learns to think in the direction we want our thoughts to think. But first step is to identify and label what kind of thoughts are passing in our mind at that particular moment. For eg. If I think like this-”What will happen to me if I can’t get an A grade, what if I get a C grade in my 12th grade exam, I won’t be able to get into good colleges!” These kind of thoughts are labelled as negative thoughts. But we can change negative thoughts to positive thoughts immediately by changing our pattern of thinking. Once we identify that we are thinking negative thought then we can change the direction of our thoughts like this…”My mom tells me I need to remove “Can’t” from my dictionary So No! Not I can't,….but I will get good grades, I will work hard for them, I will dedicate good chunk of study time daily to studying and cut down on my screen time. I will get into good colleges I just need to remove “I can’t” from my dictionary as my mom says!”

This is one way to change our negative thoughts to positive thoughts by correcting our thinking.

Waste thoughts are like this- for eg.“Why did this happen to me 2 years ago? I made bad choices at that time.. I wish I had made better choice at that time.. I shouldn’t have done this or that instead I should have done this.” We waste our time by dwelling in past mistakes or think about same thing over and over and get stuck sometimes in our thinking pattern and waste our time as we can’t change our past and whatever has happened has happened. Some more examples of waste thoughts like “why did she say this to me? how can she do this to me?” we cannot change others and no one is in our control except our own selves, so lets not waste time judging or criticizing others in our mind. We must transform our wasteful thinking into powerful thinking. Time is valuable and knowing the importance of time there should be no wastage or leakage in our thinking pattern. We must wish well for others and save our time and energy and work on our own weaknesses and strengths.

Neutral thoughts are… for eg. “I will wear red dress to the party or Let me take my car to the mall and on the way I can also finish my groceries.”

Once we identify our thoughts we can practice changing negative thoughts to positive and waste thoughts into more goal oriented thoughts and control our mind and think in the direction we want to think.

The more we practice correcting our thinking pattern, the better we get at training our thoughts and focusing our mind on our goals and things we need to get done.