Profitable Thinking

I frequently ask you guys to observe your own thinking day by day , minute by minute , and this I ask to be able to change . The bigger outcomes , because only you have control over your momentary decisions that have a ripple effect , that create overall a large-scale result in your life .

So if you want your life to change on a bigger scale , you have to start thinking differently in each moment , and this is where your control lies . I personally started noticing big changes in my life when I taught myself how to think differently from moment to moment and when I taught my clients to do the same thing .

But even bigger results started to show up when I could see the patterns of my thinking on a larger scale . If I was dealing with a toxic person and I was able or unable to deflect that situation , then how much time afterwards did I spend in constructive thinking of that event ?

And that's how I came up with the idea of profitable thinking and that's how I came up with the idea of profitable thinking . That's the type of thinking you engage in when the end result is profitable to you , and it could be profitable in terms of money , time , emotional connection , spirituality or any element that you consider important in your life .

I hope by now you guys understand that you deliberately decide what to think in each moment . Hope by now you guys understand that you deliberately decide what to think in each moment .

But profitable thinking contrasts to this a little bit , because it asks you to zoom out and look at the bigger picture of the patterns of the thinking you're engaging in over a longer period of time hours , days or even months .

When you're not utilizing mind management techniques and when you're not doing your thought outputs and deliberately choosing what to think , you're keeping your brain on default factory settings . You're using it right out of the box without any updates . A human adult brain has the capacity to upgrade after the development of the prefrontal cortex .

This makes your brain one of the most important and versatile tools . Doing daily writing exercises and recognizing what you want to discard and what you want to keep this is the first step . Discard the default that creates pain and adopt something that's profitable to you , creating more and more awareness about your thinking patterns and then choosing what to think .

Decide deliberately how you want to show up and practice it in your daily life . Now , at this level of self-coaching , it sometimes takes weeks to get a hold of this practice . So give yourself some time and room to stumble around for a while . I can notice where people are thinking to their detriment and where are they engaging in constructive thinking .

They come to coaching and tell me all about the facts in their life , how they are bad at communicating and wish they had the right genes to make them good at communication . Newsflash , there are no genes that cause bad communication . There are no genes that cause shyness or introversion or whatever it is that you think is holding you back in your life .

You are creating evidence for your bad communication over time , while operating on the default thinking . Under a mountain of evidence , you've proved to yourself that you're a bad communicator Looks like a fact . The opposite of this type of default thinking is purposeful thinking , but even on a larger scale than that is profitable thinking .

So the first part of profitable thinking is mental hygiene . You can't prepare a clean meal in dirty pots . It can't happen . You can't perform a clean surgery in a contaminated field . You have to perform mental hygiene to be able to separate default and purposeful thinking . I'll give you a painting example , since that's one of my favorite hobbies .

Each time you start to paint , you have to prime the canvas . You have to prepare the field . You might have to mix the paints . You have to have some idea of what you're working towards . All of this prep work goes into painting way before the painting can even start .

Also , kind of like , you have to have an adequately structured house so you can start decorating it . You will not be able to make a house look welcoming with crumbling foundations , chipping paint , dirt and dust everywhere .

You have to create the priming of the brain by cleaning out the dirt and the junk and then you can start towards the process of profitable thinking , which can be equivalent to creating a great piece of art on a blank canvas or decorating a welcoming home on a strong foundation . For this mental hygiene to properly happen , you have to write things out .

You have to take your thoughts out of your mind until they display on a piece of paper where you can observe them in real time without prematurely erasing them or eliminating them , because the brain has an extremely efficient tendency of hiding painful thoughts .

Unless they're out of your brain on a piece of paper , you'll not be able to recognize the dirt that you're carrying around . You will not be able to engage in proper mental hygiene . This is an absolutely essential first part towards profitable thinking .

Take everything out of your brain and onto the paper and decide deliberately what you want to put back in your brain and you want to continue to think . This is different than just journaling , because in this process you actively participate in future thinking . In journaling you're passively writing things down .

You close the journal , feel better momentarily and regress to default thinking again . Point of thought . Output is writing in a journal is the active process watching yourself thinking . This takes you out of the default mode and into observation mode .

You become the watcher of your thinking and then you can decide what you want to and don't want to continue to think afterwards . This creates a clean space for you to pick and choose what you want to leave behind and what you want to put back in your brain .

You put everything out on paper and then put selective things back in your brain when you do enough of this process , then there will come a time when you are engaging in profitable thinking most of the time , meaning you will be out of the default mode on a more consistent basis and for a longer and longer period of time .

Daily thought outputs and daily mental hygiene keeps your brain primed , cleaned out and adequately prepared for ongoing profitable thinking . This prep work and watching yourself think strictly from an observational perspective , without judgment , and being able to obtain strict , objective data from your thinking takes a few weeks to accomplish .

But I have faith in you , I do believe you can do it and it can be done alone . I do provide a PDF for you guys that is available for you to download for free on my website and I will leave the link in the show notes . And this process can not only be done alone . This is the most fundamental and life-changing skill of self-coaching .

Real , noticeable outcome of profitable thinking will be that you will stop looking for answers outside of yourself . We are trained to always look for experts , gurus , experienced ones outside of us to tell us the answers . With engaging in profitable thinking , you will learn to trust your own answers and your own wisdom , and your own wisdom .

So for my more seasoned clients , I teach this technique where I tell them for everything you ask me , you have to come up with the answer for it . They ask me a question what do you think my next step should be ? Where do I go from here ? What do I do now ? And I ask them what do you think the answer to that is ?

And , to their own surprise , they give me the answer . It's not like they don't know . They know it . They have always known it . They just don't give themselves access to it because they're not aware of how profitable their own thinking is . I am not more qualified than you to answer your questions about your own life .

No one else is more qualified than you in that regard . Trust me , I am not going to always be there to answer your life's questions , and you're prolonging the time it will take you to become an expert at your own life if you keep asking others .

You have your most profitable answers available to you If you have engaged in mental hygiene , switching from default to upgraded thinking and then making this upgraded version your new norm . This is the stage of profitable thinking .

So watching yourself think is the primary skill , and we need to have that accomplished for the foundational steps of coaching , like I've already described to you guys . The higher level work is where you create an inventory of how much time in your day as a whole you're spending towards thinking about a particular subject .

You can make it into categories Are you mostly thinking about work , are you thinking about family , or are you stuck in thinking about when you locked your keys in the car ? In undergrad ? That's where I spent most of my thinking in a day .

Luckily , it doesn't happen that often anymore because I have keyless entries , but I used to always lock my keys in the car and because of that I had quickly learned to keep a spare in my wallet or with a friend , so I was able to fix the problem fast . But then I would spend the rest of the day thinking about having made that mistake .

The pattern of my thinking for hours and days after the event revolved around sulking over the mistake , catastrophizing the event , spinning in my head about how could I make such a stupid mistake ?

All that led to was only gathering more evidence that I make a lot of stupid mistakes , eventually leading to a belief that I was unintelligent , creating so much pain , a belief that I was unintelligent creating so much pain .

To numb that pain , I would drown myself into studies just to cover it up and I would put conditions of my self-acceptance All of that work just to prove to myself that I am not unintelligent when I was actually creating evidence for my unintelligence with my default thinking , it was such a vicious cycle and it is a vicious cycle in most of our lives .

For me at that time I would work hard to get an A , just so I would have some grounds to create self-acceptance . And in this story there's good news for people who have a tendency to spin out of control , like I described , proving their own lack of intelligence as a product . I have great news for you .

This spinning out of control on default , this type of expensive thinking , the one that's costing you your peace of mind , mental health , money , resources this is proof for you that you have a high processing power in your brain .

You are just using that power to spin in destructive thoughts Again , creating evidence for unintelligence in my case , or might be something else in your case . But with mental hygiene and working up to the method of profitable thinking , you will realize you can use that power towards creative thinking . You are intelligent .

You are just using that intelligence towards self-destruction . You just have to use it towards creating profit . For this higher level , profitable thinking , you have to take a bird's eye view of the day and again think about your thinking on a broader scale , hour-to-hour , day-to-day or a week-to-week basis .

It's about seeing general tendencies rather than a singular focus on a moment . Then you will see that patterns will start to emerge and where you've been allocating most of your mental real estate . This method is about taking notes on what's going on in your brain on a broader scale .

Once you recognize the pattern , then you can categorize it if it's profitable or if it's costly , and from then on you can decide what to change . You're not going to know if you're engaging in costly thinking if you don't observe it .

If you spend an entire afternoon thinking about how much you hate the new neighbor who put up an ugly fence in their backyard , that makes your backyard looks ugly .

This type of thinking on a regular basis is costing you time , mental and emotional energy and , by extension , it's costing you money , because the more time you spend in fruitless thinking , the less time you're spending in contributing value to the world . I am not saying change your thinking from my backyard looks ugly to . It looks so pretty .

I'm not suggesting your thinking about your backyard looking ugly is wrong . I'm saying if it is keeping you from creating a productive result , it counts as pointless , unprofitable thinking . This thinking is never going to create a result of you coming up with a solution of how you can have a backyard that you actually like .

It will never result in you recognizing where your control actually lies . It will just keep you in blaming the neighbor . Profitable thinking is taking account of how much time you're spending in thinking that makes your life easier , more enjoyable and more productive .

It could be that you want it filled with connection and spirituality or any other value that you deeply honor .

Give yourself plentiful time to engage in this type of thinking , with a caveat that if you haven't successfully trained in mental hygiene , your brain will have a tendency to go to negative thinking immediately and revert to spending all of its energy into blaming the neighbor or your work or your childhood or whatever your object of blame is .

In that case , you just gently redirect every time you observe yourself going into costly thinking . Practice taking command of your mind and redirecting it to what you want it to think . This type of profitable thinking will keep your brain from going down a self-destructive path .

And there's another way you can engage in that , and that is to equalize the time that you're spending in consuming information with the time you spend in creating answers with your brain .

Modern education system gets us really good at inputting information in the brain , but you have to spend an equal amount of time in creating the answers or generating ideas for yourself . Don't be alarmed if your ideas are not the best quality in the first few attempts .

Every single research in the field of personal development suggests that great ideas don't just spawn on you in the first attempt . People who come up with great ideas have been working on strict , profitable thinking time for a long period until an idea comes into place that eventually has a big payoff when it comes to creativity .

Engage in prolific output , come up with an abundant stream of ideas and eventually you will come up with something that is a raw form of a good idea and that you can continue to refine , that contributes great value to your life uniquely and to the world .

Cut down on the time you're spending in learning and equalize it with the time you spend in dishing out your own ideas . Give yourself time to write ideas , give yourself great open-ended questions and write their answers . I myself really look forward to my times when I can just sit and write things down .

When we learn different things from different sources , brain can have a tendency to keep that information in silos . But when you engage in profitable thinking , you can mix and match information from different inputs and create something completely different and uniquely yours .

I let my stream of thoughts run wild on a piece of paper and if at any point I observe myself going towards costly thinking , then I just gently redirect myself back with instructions . That that's not where we're going today , brain . We're just going to continue to be constructive and creative . This will be the most important time you can spend in writing .

This will become one of the most important times that you spend towards your self-development . Now for some great , open-ended questions that you can ask yourself during your profitable thinking time . First , and one of the most important yet simple question is why ? Why am I living in this city ? Why am I married ? Why am I single ?

Why am I choosing to eat this lunch ? Why is a great question and , if asked with non-judgment , reveals a lot . If you don't like the answer to any of the whys , then just engage in more profitable thinking and you can figure out how to change it without blame or shame . Another great open-ended question is how , how am I going to figure this out ?

Most of the time , when we ask how , we've already subconsciously answered it with I don't know how , like I don't know what options I have , I don't know what's available for me In a profitable thinking exercise , when you ask yourself how you do not engage in I don't know . I don't know is just not an option .

If it keeps coming up , then just ask yourself if I was a person who knew the answer , what would it be ? And just slow down enough in that moment to hear the answer . Your brain will give you the answer . All you have to do is to take account of what exactly it offers . You Believe it or not . The brain has been giving you answers .

You've just been rejecting them faster than it can come from your subconscious mind to your conscious mind . Trust me , the answer is there . What would my future self decide , three years from now , on this decision that I'm trying to make today ? Sometimes we spend so much time on the most trivial decisions , like what kind of haircut or what kind of outfit .

It costs us so much time to fix that . You just ask yourself what would my wiser self , three years down the road , decide about this ? I ask myself this question frequently when deciding among some of the most mundane , trivial decisions to some of the most important decisions in my life .

Think of your brain power as a commodity , just like if you have a sum of cash and you decide to invest it in stocks . If 50% of it was invested in stocks that were a flop and 50% of it had a good return , then the 50% of your original cash was profitable to you .

You only have a certain amount of cash , a certain amount of mental capacity to be able to think . You have a certain reserve of mental energy . So if you continue to invest more and more of your mental energy in a losing stock , how could you expect to win in life ? Willfully and deliberately invest your mental cash flow in profitable endeavors .

The only difference between costly thinking and profitable thinking is a conscious decision between the two . I have tons and tons of journals that are just spilling with my ideas that I synthesized with the information that I already have in my head from books or from training or from my life experiences .

Trust me , you have the same capital and use the reserve of your mental capacity in profitable stocks . Profitable thinking this process requires a lot of self-love . When I go back and I look at the journals , I never , ever say to myself oh my god , what a horrible idea . What was I thinking ? This is so useless . Why did I even write this down ?

I don't talk to myself like that . I just don't allow that kind of thinking in my brain .

If an idea I generated didn't result in a direct profit , I look for how it could have led to other great ideas , or at least when I wrote it down , it got out of my way . This is the process of development creativity . You have to go through a prolific output to come up with one great idea .

So don't disregard any amount of output during your profitable thinking time . Don't call it pointless , because what seems pointless to you now has come out of your brain , so that you can then generate a million other great ideas .

Engaging in mental hygiene , systematically cleaning out one room , one area of your life , then zooming out to take a look at the general picture , diagnosing the bigger picture and patterns of your thinking . This is the process of building yourself up to the highest level of profitable thinking , because this is what your mind was created for .

With that , I pray to Allah SWT for all Muslim women to be able to claim their highest mental capacity . I pray that Allah open avenues for all of our profitable thinking so we can fulfill our individual purposes in life that we're supposed to be serving in this world .

May Allah make this life profitable for us , with whatever profit means to us it could be money , relationships , adventure and , above all , profitable in our spirituality and connection with the divine , so that we can turn in this profit on the day of judgment and truly collect the ultimate reward . Inshallah , please keep me in your du'as .

I will talk to you guys next time .