Lesson: Decision Making & Happiness with Kevin Fishner

Step #8 Focus: Prune away all negative thoughts

I learned about controlling my thoughts through reading about Buddhism. It was interesting to me to see unhappiness in others while seeing pure bliss in monks. Their lives are so simple, and you have to be curious about how can they find true happiness in a simple life while others in a more rich technological environment are so unhappy. I found that they prune their thoughts of all negative feeling, so when you're only thinking about happier things, you're going to be a happier person.

Taking that approach and applying it to my decision making is I try to strip away, one, decisions that I really don't have control over. So getting worried about the weather, plenty of people do that, and you have no control over it so why bother? Or even more future thinking for myself is family and children, it's a decision that I don't have full control over right now. Certainly I will in the future, but since I don't have control in this second, I try not to think about it as much.

I started to compartmentalize my thoughts after reading about the Buddhist practice of pruning negative emotions and negative thoughts from their brain. So the way that I do it is whenever a negative feeling starts to overcome you, you immediately block it out and focus on happier things. The amazing part about this is they're so happy in their simple environment, while we see unhappiness in a more technological advanced society.

The way that they approach it is something that I've taken by pruning negative thoughts, but also pruning personal futuristic thoughts for myself. So thinking about things like family or children, yes, it's something that I certainly have control over in the future, but in this very day, in this second, I don't so I try to prune that thought away from my daily process so I can focus on things that I do have control over.