Thought Management 101: Wake Up and Be Happy

By Gene Teglovic

This book explains how to use the power of simplicity, combined with Eastern spiritual concepts and modern psychology, to help you begin the process of proactively managing your thoughts. It is a must-read for anyone on a path of personal and spiritual growth.

The principles in this book are a synthesis of ancient wisdom traditions and modern-day self-help techniques, which combine spiritual and practical methods to help you change your thinking process, and improve your life.
Most of us go through our lives without knowing how critically our moment-to-moment thinking impacts our overall happiness and life satisfaction. The simple fact that we create our lives with our thoughts, for the most part, has somehow been pushed to the psychological, spiritual and mystical realms, instead of being integrated into our day-to-day practices.
Because we are not shown how to constantly observe and manage what we are thinking as a critical life skill, we end up with our thoughts on autopilot, creating events in our lives that do not serve us.
Thought Management 101 is all about breaking out of pre-conditioned, culture-driven thinking into regular awareness, observation and management of your thoughts.

These concepts are not difficult to understand. Yet, most of us are not used to putting a little time, attention and energy into managing our thoughts. This book is a great place to start. It looks at thought management from the layperson’s point of view, making it an excellent supplement to any other self improvement work you may be doing.
Please note that this book is not a substitute for psychological counseling, addiction therapy, or any other work you may be doing. It is a wonderful complement.

We could all use some help managing our thoughts. Why? Because thought management is the key to a happy, healthy and successful life.

Are you happy most of the time? If not, chances are you're not managing your thoughts well. It's time to start.

This exciting new book about thought management helps you take your thoughts away from the influences of media and other people, so you can begin to understand how critical the control of your thoughts is to your happiness and life satisfaction. It explores the basics of human thought and gives simple methods to:

1) become aware of what you are thinking,

2) observe your thoughts, and

3) manage your thoughts in critical areas of your life.

Embedded in this fascinating new approach to examining and changing current thought patterns are a simple meditation technique, a reflective "giving of thanks" perspective, and practical life examples such as working with thoughts about driving.

Reading this book will change your perspective about how you think, and about why managing your thoughts is the key to happiness. It is an excellent supplement to any psychological therapy work you may be doing, such as anger management, overcoming depression, addiction counseling or other self improvement efforts.

The book, blog and related writings on the related web site will help you take your thoughts away from the influences of the media and other people. They will help you begin to understand how critical it is to become aware of, observe and manage your thoughts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gene Teglovic
• Release date: May 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9780982667712

Gene Teglovic

Gene Teglovic has lived through the trials and tribulations of life and has come out on top. He is living proof that our thoughts do indeed create our world. Raised in a poverty-stricken broken home, Gene rose above his circumstances to become a successful corporate leader who semi-retired at a young age, with the purpose of getting this message out to the world. In addition to the wide variety of modern roles Gene has served in his life, including veteran, student, university professor, husband, father, divorcee, engineer, and corporate manager, he has studied the ancient Eastern wisdom traditions for three decades. He has practiced and taught meditation for 20+ years, and is a mentor and life coach, helping all who are open for growth and improvement. Gene holds a Bachelors in Information Systems, an MBA with international business focus, a Masters in Telecommunications, and two patents. He has written several published books, as well as hundreds of technical articles and documents. He connects with fellow seekers around the world through his social media pages, blogs, and web site. This book is the start of a revolution in self-help, using the powerful impact of simplicity combined with spirituality to manage thoughts. It is a must-read for anyone on a path of personal and spiritual growth.

Book preview

Acknowledgements

1. Thanks Carolyn Quan for your encouragement, editing help, book cover art and fantastic work on the website. You are one of the most talented and beautiful people I have ever known.

2. A huge thanks to Kyle Smith, critic and editor extraordinaire!

Preface

How often do you consciously think? Most of the time, thinking is something that just happens to you, like your heart beating or breathing.

We memorize a lot of information in our lifetimes. We take in the stimuli of the world through our senses, and store them in patterns in our brains for later retrieval. We’re sent to school as youngsters because our culture has decided over the millennia that we need to learn basic sets of life skills to function in the world. We stuff predefined sets of information into our brains as we grow up, and we pile memories of things that happen to us on top. As a result, we all end up on different paths, living out our lives in billions of unique ways.

Unfortunately, we are not taught as children how to think consciously, or about the process of thinking itself as a basic life skill. We are only taught what to think. Nature and nurture shape us as we ride along in life and accumulate memories. Then the science of psychology and/or the penal system jump in when someone goes off the rails as a result of a lifetime of unconscious thinking. Unobserved thoughts and resultant errant behaviors finally come to a head, and we have issues to deal with. Behavior-correction professionals of different shapes and sizes, many with the best of intentions, try to figure out what is going on in our minds or simply lock us up after the damage is done.

Nothing happens in the physical world unless it is preceded by a thought. The energy of the physical world does not convert into matter unless a conscious being directs it. No creation, no destruction, no birth, and no death. Nothing. This often-ignored fact of nature is becoming more and more empirically proven in sciences such as quantum physics.

Everything you do, feel and experience in life, and every action you take, is preceded by one or more thoughts. These thoughts are combinations of your thoughts, the thoughts of others, and the thoughts of something far greater than humans; something beyond the capacity of the human mind to comprehend. How do we sort through this deluge of information and energy that is ever-present in our lives?

Even though we all have the ability to control our thoughts, most of our thoughts are executed in an unconscious mode based on previously conditioned thought patterns, or driven by the world outside ourselves at the subtle direction of others who control our environments. As a result, most of us are suffering unnecessarily while living out our lives in a hypnotized, semi-conscious state of social conditioning and memory shackles.

If you’re suffering unnecessarily you’re probably not very happy. If you’re living under the hypnosis of social conditioning, as some call it, you may think you’re happy at times, but you’re probably just going through periods of pleasure and suffering, mostly unhappy. And you’re constantly questioning why your happiness never lasts.

Living in a state of unhappiness is not required, regardless of the hand you’ve been dealt.

Why do you do the things you do when you wake up in the morning, day after day? Why does anyone do anything? If you boil it down to the basics, it’s pretty simple. If you keep asking yourself why you do the things you do, day in and day out, eventually the answer comes down to one simple fact: You want to be happy, and what you are doing is a means to that end. You want to be serene and blissful. You want no worries. You want to be full of energy, creative and healthy. You want to be at peace. You want to be HAPPY. Everything you do is an eventual means to this end.

Examine the things you do and have done in your life, as well as the things you avoid doing. Going to school. Washing your body. Eating. Going to work. Making love. Buying a house. Raising kids. Playing a game. Watching a movie. Reading a book. Having a beer. Pursuing the next rush, be it a new toy or relationship or job. Avoiding the situations and people that make you think in a different way. Anything. Keep asking yourself why you do what you do. When you can no longer answer the question, it comes down to a means to one end: You think doing so will make you happy.

So what’s the problem? Why aren’t you happy all the time? Or at least most of the time? It is because you are not proactively managing your thoughts. It’s that simple. But simple doesn’t mean easy, and this simple answer is not an easy one to put into regular practice because we haven’t been taught to do so.

Can a book like this hope to address the complex human question of happiness using thought management? Humanity has struggled with this question since the beginning of our species. The science of psychology was born and thrives around this question. Self-help gurus make millions from their promises of techniques to help us figure out why we are not happy. Psychologists, psychiatrists, licensed professional counselors, pharmaceutical companies, entertainment industries, co-dependent relationships, drug dealers and hordes of other professionals reap the profits of our unhappy states. Entire subcultures and industries, legal and illegal, feed off our desire for pleasure with the promise of happiness, with everything from video games to mood-altering substances to pornography. Religions promise it, politicians allude to it, and corporations push more things at us that imply it, to get yet another piece of our energetic output: money.

So we could say happiness is a pretty popular subject. It is the most important thing you think about all day long. Most of us are misguided about what gets us there. We’re stuck in cycles of seeking pleasure and avoiding suffering, and it seems most of us will not break free in our lifetimes.

What’s fascinating about this dilemma is that breaking free is pretty simple: It comes down to becoming aware of your thoughts through observation, accepting what is happening in the present moment, and then managing your thoughts from a place of acceptance.

The easiest way to make all this happen is to constantly stay in touch with the part of yourself that is not your thinking mind. Do you even know it’s there? That’s the first step. Once you’ve done that, observing thoughts becomes easier and clearer. Then, from a place of awareness, you can begin to see the inevitability that accepting things the way they are is the key to freeing up your precious energy. You begin to take the control of your thinking mind away from its default unconscious state, and the external forces that keep it there. Finally, with constant conscious observation, thought management becomes possible. Manage your thoughts and you manage your happiness. And your life.

Once you are able to easily manage your thoughts and make it a regular practice in daily life, you will experience little or no unhappiness. Those unhappy moments and periods of negativity caused by errant thoughts will dissolve as quickly as they come. After working with the concepts in this book, you will be able to easily and effortlessly observe your thought process and control your happiness from that state of awareness. Really. Anyone can do it. We just haven’t been trained to do so in our culture. Yet. And that’s only because no one has taught us.

Why don’t professionals in the mental health industry teach us how to manage our thoughts as the main purpose of psychotherapy? I suppose some do in the end. Perhaps a very subtle yet widely practiced goal of the mental health industry is to prey off our unhappiness. Perhaps if we were all happy, we wouldn’t need mental health help. This isn’t to say that wonderful, caring people do not exist in that realm. Only that there may be an easier way. Think about that. Let’s hope this book can help you. It helps me.

Introduction

The concepts presented in this book are nothing new. Ancient wisdom literature, religious mysticism, modern-day self-help gurus and loads of other organizations and individuals have examined and worked with these concepts for decades. This book just says it in a different way. That’s the beauty of wisdom: The core doesn’t change, only the wrappers do. I hope this wrapper appeals to you.

This book will give you ways to manage your thoughts without spending thousands of dollars going to professionals and medicating. I’m not saying that professionals and medications don’t serve a purpose or are inherently bad. I’m just saying there may be a simpler way for those of us open to looking at things alternatively. Try it.

So what do I know? Who am