Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy

Welcome to Day 45 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.

This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom.

Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life (Part 2)

Thank you for joining us for our 7 day a week, 7 minutes of wisdom podcast. By consuming these daily wisdom nuggets, you will digest the principles needed to help you in your quest to become healthy, wealthy, and wise as we trek through life together.  This is Day 45 of our Trek, and for the next few days we will continue our Trek to look at how changing our thinking can dramatically change our lives.

We are recording our podcast from our studio at Home2 in Charlotte, North Carolina.  The client workload and activities should be consistently busy this week.  It will be a good week to spend indoors during the day as the temperatures in North Carolina are anticipated to be above 95° for the next two weeks. It certainly has been warm this summer.

We are continuing a several day Trek where we will stop at twelve waypoints or rest areas along our trail. When hiking long distances (as our life trek is), it is always good to plan in advance where your rest stops or waypoints will be.  This will help to measure your progress and make sure that you do not get off the trail.

At each waypoint along our Trek this week, we will have the occasion to reflect on and change how we think. By changing our thinking, these waypoints will also allow us to change our lives in a positive way.

Yesterday we reflected on the first waypoint which was Cultivating Big-Picture Thinking.  It followed two days when we looked at the science and results of big picture thinking. If you missed any of the past three days of podcasts, please go back and listen to them, or read our daily journal entries. This will give you the foundation for this week’s Trek.

 

As we ended our podcast yesterday, I asked you to reflect on the question, "Am I thinking beyond myself and my world so that I process ideas with a holistic perspective?"

Did you take time to think about how you would answer this question?  To grow in wisdom each day, we should be asking ourselves the difficult questions that cause us to reflect on our lives so that we can expand our world. It is then we will have the capability to impact others to a greater capacity.

It’s time to break camp now and head towards the next waypoint or rest stop.  As we head down the trail today, let us focus on what we learn at each stop and think creatively on how this will help us to live abundantly in all areas as we are creating a living legacy.

Wise and successful people practice certain thinking habits, and in order for you to become wise and successful, you need to entrench these same thinking habits into you mind.

2. Engage in Focused Thinking

Focused thinking allows you to think clearly about a problem. This skill helps you to direct energy toward a specific objective, bring more clarity to issues, and take ideas to the next level. When engaging in focused thinking, you should select challenges or areas that are most likely to have the greatest impact.

Here are five ways that you can improve your focused thinking:

Eliminate distractions and focus on areas that will provide the greatest impact.

Devote time to focused thinking. Although multi-tasking is a popular word in today’s world, it is not conducive to focused thinking. New evidence has shown that we really cannot multitask and, for most people, working on multiple tasks at a time is really counterproductive.

Keep items of focus in view. You must concentrate on things that matter. You must keep the important items of focus in front of you.

Set milestones. When you set clear objectives, it is easy for the mind to focus.