It’s Just a Thought: Emotional Freedom through Deliberate Thinking

By Thomas M. Sterner

Ever wonder why you continually think about this, that, or the other when you’d rather be enjoying a moment, pursuing a dream, or completing a project? Author Thomas M. Sterner knows you are not alone and offers methods for thinking, rather than being thought. As Tom’s thousands of clients know, directing your thoughts instead of being directed by them is possible and transformative. He outlines liberating ways to first observe and then master your thinking, allowing you to:

• recognize unhelpful historical and present-day programming
• understand how the conscious and subconscious minds interact
• experience the relationship between heart and brain

The skills Tom teaches prove that we are not the thoughts and emotions that can overwhelm us, and that on any given day we have the power to connect to who we really are and achieve what we really want and need. Filled with inspiring examples and practical action steps, It’s Just a Thought exposes our limitations and handicaps and gives us the tools to make overcoming them a joyful process of empowerment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: New World Library
• Release date: Feb 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781608688302

Thomas M. Sterner

Thomas M. Sterner is the founder and CEO of the Practicing Mind Institute. As a successful entrepreneur, he is considered an expert in Present Moment Functioning, or PMF™. He is a popular and in-demand speaker and coach who works with high-performance industry groups and individuals, including athletes, helping them to operate effectively in high-stress situations so that they can break through to new levels of mastery. Prior to writing the bestseller The Practicing Mind, he served as chief concert piano technician for a major performing arts center, preparing instruments for the most demanding performances. An accomplished musician and composer, he has also worked in the visual arts and as a recording studio engineer. In his downtime Tom is a private pilot, avid sailor, and proficient golfer. He lives in Wilmington, Delaware, and enjoys spending time with his two daughters and in his recording studio.

Book preview

Introduction

If I were to ask you the simple question, Are you happy? what would your answer be? How would you know? Where does the information come from that lets you answer my question accurately and honestly? Your answer might be, Well, sometimes I am and sometimes I’m not. Sometimes I’m sad and sometimes I’m angry.

Does the information that tells you how you feel always come from the same place? Do you know where that place is, and do you have any control over it, or does it just happen to you regardless of what you would prefer to experience? What is happiness, sadness, or anger? I think we can define them as feelings or emotions that are preceded by and intertwined with our thoughts.

When you think, you create a thought, but where does emotion come from? Is it an inseparable part of the thought? For example, when you feel anxious, you are having anxious thoughts. So is the anxiety in the thought, or do you have a choice of how you interpret and experience the content of the thought? The answer is yes. You do. If the experience of the thought were absolute, then everyone who had that thought would feel the same way, but we know that isn’t true. If I told you that tomorrow you must stand up and speak in front of a thousand people, depending on who you are, your response may be to experience horrific anxiety, but the same thought might make someone else very excited. The thought and the situation are the same, but each person’s interpretation of the thought is very different, and so are the emotions that are experienced.

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, I often heard adults comment, Well, you just can’t control your emotions or your feelings. I was captive in a world where people actually believed that. In those days, there really was no such thing as neuroscience to prove otherwise, and disciplines such as psychology were quite primitive. Today, we have come to understand much more regarding how our minds work and why we think and act as we do, but what we now claim as cutting-edge information is actually not new. So much of what we are now discovering has been common knowledge in Eastern thought systems for centuries, but when I was growing up, our Western empirical scientific methods had not yet produced the hard research data that would allow us in the West to invest our belief in the internal experiences that those in the East were describing.

So again, is it possible for us to choose not only how we interpret our thoughts but even what thoughts we have? The answer is yes. We live in a wonderful time where our understanding of the different aspects of our mind — the conscious, the unconscious, and the subconscious — gives us the tools necessary to become a super thinker, someone who can say, I use my thoughts and I don’t allow my thoughts to use me. This gift, this skill, has always been possible, but for those in the West, it has only presented itself through our ever-expanding research in very recent decades. This book explores what we now know about why we behave as we do and how to develop the skill to craft the behavioral changes we desire. We will learn the mechanics involved to master our thinking and become the thinker of our thoughts instead of the one being thought.

For me, it has been a decades-long journey to discover and understand that most of the time we are victims of our automated thinking rather than the master creators of our thoughts. To truly appreciate the power that our current science offers, I feel we need to look back in time just a little bit to better understand how far we have come, and I will share some of how my journey into this fascinating study has evolved.

Many in my parents’ generation grew up very poor during the Great Depression. At that time, finishing high school was generally considered a full education. Knowledge of the East and how their philosophies viewed the world was totally outside of their experience. It should come as no surprise then that, when I was growing up, it was outside of my experience as well. Then, during my freshman year in college, a close friend gave me the textbook from his Philosophies of the World course and told me, I think you’ll enjoy this. Well, he was right. I couldn’t put the book down. For hundreds of pages, it described the history and concepts of the different Eastern and Western thought systems. This was the beginning of my understanding of why I was so impatient to reach my goals and why so many times I gave up on them. It was the catalyst that changed my whole concept of how I could experience accomplishing any goal, even a task that I wasn’t particularly fond of. It started me along the path of rewriting my internal programming, which changed me from being an extremely undisciplined young adult with a constantly agitated and scattered mind into someone who was referred to as always calm and one of the most disciplined and focused people my friends and family had ever known. The difference it made in how I experienced life was extraordinary, and this catalyst sparked the need to write my first book, The Practicing Mind.

As a working adult, after I finished college in the late 1970s, I began noticing that the Western business model, with its attachment to profits, was collapsing in its ability to compete in the global marketplace and even on our own soil in America. That model was obsessed with the moment that the goal was reached as opposed to the process of achieving it. The process was seen as a necessary inconvenience that had to be endured at best, and certainly not as the hidden key to success.

American automobile makers, once kings of the industry, were struggling to match the consistent dependability that Japanese car makers produced. The average consumer took notice and was willing to pay for that quality and consistency. At that time, my industry was the piano business, and Japanese pianos were of such superior quality that they put all but a few American piano manufacturers out of business. At the turn of the twentieth century, there were over three hundred piano manufacturers in the United States. By the 1980s, there were just a few. American piano retailers were fighting to get Japanese brands on their floor to sell because without them they couldn’t compete. All the piano retailers had to do was open up a Japanese piano and show the customer the quality of the workmanship, as compared to an American piano, and the sale was done. A piano is a lifetime investment, and the relatively small additional price for a Japanese brand was irrelevant. American piano manufacturers were either clueless or unwilling to deal with the reasons why their products were inferior.

Japanese pianos only came in a few cabinet styles, black and a few generic wood finishes. This was because the Japanese viewed the piano first and foremost as a musical instrument. After all, when you purchased a violin, you didn’t ask if they had it in cherry or walnut. You just wanted a superior instrument. American manufacturers, in contrast, tried to bolster their falling sales by offering their instruments in many cabinet styles, like a piece of furniture, and treating the fact that it was a musical instrument almost as an afterthought. They missed the point, and the difference in quality became so great that piano technicians sometimes joked that American pianos were made out of the crates that Japanese pianos were shipped in. Since then, the American piano industry has never recovered. Through the 1980s the electronics industry followed a similar path. During this same period, all the popular, high-end stereo systems, the ones considered status symbols, were made in Japan.

How were the Japanese able to create such a total and legitimate monopoly in the marketplace? The magic formula was really quite simple. The Japanese operated under a completely different mindset. They focused on the process of creating the instrument, the car, or the stereo components instead of the perceived end product. Conversely, the American mantra was, We can’t be paid until it’s made, so get it done. In other words, the process of manufacturing the product was viewed as a necessary exercise, one that cost money and should be expedited and trimmed down to its bare essentials so that the profit from sales could be realized as quickly as possible. The goal was to make as many as possible in the least amount of time and at the lowest cost.

In contrast, in Japan, you worked a manufacturing job for life, and the expectation was for perfect work, not the quantity produced, and you were