While it’s true that you are not able to control everything in your life – you are always able to control your thoughts.

And this is so important. Because our thoughts directly influence our emotions. According to Brian Tracy, 95% of your emotions are determined by the way you talk to yourself as you go through your day. If you talk to yourself in a positive and constructive way, you will have an optimistic attitude. If you think about things that make you unhappy, lower your self esteem, or cause you worry and social anxiety, you will have a pessimistic, negative attitude.

And here’s what else:

Harnessing your emotions is the single most critical component of stress-management and building resilience: qualities that will help your DAILY in your life.

Unfortunately, research shows that it’s human nature to spend more time and energy focused on negative events and feelings than positive. But it’s possible to revamp your natural mind processes to prioritize the positive.

The best way to to do this is by “Prioritizing the Positive,” a 4-step technique I invented that is heavily influenced by the Law of Substitution.

The Law of Substitution, one of the 7 Mental Laws, states that, “Your conscious mind can hold only one thought at a time, and that you can substitute one thought for another. The ‘crowding out’ principle allows you to deliberately replace a negative thought with a positive thought.”

The premise of this thought is that you can’t have a positive and negative thought simultaneously – only one can exist at a time. So to eliminate negative thoughts from your mind, you proactively replace them with positive thoughts.

This is, in fact, the only way to completely eradicate negative thinking from your mind. Instead of just hoping a negative thought goes away, it’s a much more effective strategy to proactively replace it with something positive – to Prioritize the Positive in your daily thought process.

Remember: It’s 100% within your power to choose positive thinking every day.

Here’s how to begin overhauling your thought process to prioritize the positive.

How to Start Prioritizing the Positive

Here are 4 steps to introduce you to PtP methodology.

First: Start being aware of your thoughts

Mindfulness is a key component of enacting the Law of Substitution. In order to start proactively replacing negative thoughts, you first need to start being aware of your thoughts as they occur in your head.

And this isn’t easy!

Thinking is something that we just do. Thought occur, appear and disappear in our heads thousands of times each day. But thinking doesn’t have to be a passive process. We can choose and manipulate the thoughts in our own minds.

So from this moment on, start to be aware of thoughts as they enter you mind. Tune into your internal TV programming. Just this step on its own can be revolutionary!

Second: Start recognizing your thoughts

Once begin mindful awareness of the thoughts in your mind, you can then start recognizing what kind of thoughts they are. Are they positive? Negative? Encouraging? Comparative? Anxious? Fear-based? Frenetic?

One of the big traps we fall into with our thoughts is always thinking about the future or dwelling on the past, but neglecting the power of the present moment.

How many times have you been having a conversation with a friend when your mind drifted off to what you should eat for dinner? Or have you been listening to a lecture, but worrying about all the work you have to do later tonight? Or maybe you’re sitting in an interview, listening to your interviewer talk, but also thinking back on a question you just answered – was your answer good enough? Do they like you? What are they going to say about you after you leave?

This is unpresent thinking.

Instead of focusing on the moment at hand, we spend brain power needlessly looking back at things that have already happened (which creates regret), or worrying about things that are yet to happen (which creates anxiety).

And there’s another benefit to being present too – Amy Cuddy, the author of “Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges” shares:

“When we are truly present in a challenging moment, our verbal and nonverbal communication flows. We are no longer occupying a discombobulated mental state… simultaneously analyzing what we think others think of us, what we said a minute earlier, and what we think they will think of us after we leave, all while frantically trying to adjust what we’re saying and doing to create the impression they want to see” (35).

“Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges,” by Amy Cuddy

When you think in the present, you’re able to perform in the present. You come off as more authentic, likable and confident.

Start to take stock of your mental dialogue and start to tune into the highlight reel to identify common themes. Then you can move onto Step 3…

Third: Pinpoint the origin of those thoughts

Once you start to get a sense of the content of your most common thoughts, then it’s time to map it back to its origin point – which is usually a deep-rooted emotion or a larger, ongoing concern.

According to corporate resilience training app, meQuilibrium, there are seven primary negative human emotions that shape our thoughts and actions. They are:

1. Anger
2. Anxiety
3. Embarrassment
4. Frustration
5. Guilt
6. Sadness
7. Shame

When we recognize negative thoughts, they are usually tied back to one of these core negative emotions. Negative emotions create negative thoughts (and vice versa – it’s a vicious cycle!)

When we’re able to accurately identify origin emotions that cause us to think negative, unhelpful thoughts, then we are able to address those emotions at the source. And sometimes, tuning into our physical body as well as our mental thoughts can help us accurately identify our origin emotions.

Take a minute now and think back to a recent negative thought you experienced (maybe even in the last hour!) Can you tie that thought to a base emotion?

For example, maybe if you were having a conversation about an upcoming deadline, you felt the telltale signs of anxiety.

Or, maybe you went to run an errand, but the store was out of the item you needed, and you felt the origin emotion: frustration.

This reflection is important because it helps you to realize common events and actions that are trigger points for negative emotions and thoughts. Being able to pinpoint these negative thinking triggers is an important key to replace & eliminate negative thoughts (before they have the chance to begin!)

For example, if there’s a certain coworker who you begin to recognize always makes you feel anger, you can start to proactively plan ways to minimize your interactions with them, or plan to have a constructive conversation about how to improve the relationship.

Or if you are in the habit of scrolling through social media on your phone first thing in the morning, you may be subjecting yourself to feelings of comparison… before you even start your day!

Start identifying these negative thinking triggers, and come up with ways to eliminate them from your life. This is one way to stop negative thinking, the other is of course to enable the Law of Substitution.

Fourth: Proactively replace and reframe

Once you’ve eliminated as many negative thinking triggers from your life as possible, you will have already taken great strides towards reframing your mind for positivity.

But the final, foolproof way to adopt an optimistic mindset is to learn to prioritize the positive – to stop negative thoughts in their tracks by replacing them with positive, productive thoughts.

From here, the process is easier, because it becomes a matter of changing your perspective. And verbal affirmations can be a huge help here.

If you’re not familiar with them, affirmations are phrases or sentences aimed to affect the conscious and the subconscious mind. Through vocalization, affirmations bring up related mental images into the mind, that inspire, energize and motivate… and fulfill any number of desired purposes, both automatically and involuntarily.

And affirmations can be incredibly powerful!

This is because our words – the things we choose to verbalize – really matter. The act of saying something out loud is deliberate. It’s intentional. And our brains realize that.

What we tell repeatedly ourselves is what we will inevitably think.

Here’s a way I like to use affirmations to prioritize the positive in my own life:

Each morning, when I wake up, I try (really try!) to say out loud, “Today is going to be a great day!” Even if I wake up with a pit of nerves in my stomach about an upcoming audition that day, even if I wake up stressed about a work deadline, or worried about ANYthing else. I make a conscious effort to tell myself, usually multiple times, that today is going to be a great day.

And usually, just the act of vocalizing this (multiple times) is enough to make me believe it. It really changes my perspective and my outlook first thing in the morning, which has revolutionized my mindset, and the way my days unfold.

Try to start putting this 4-step process to work in your own life to eliminate negative thinking. It will take some time, but even the act of starting (bringing awareness of your thoughts into your life) is a great act of progress!