Attention

“We cannot stop the thoughts. What we can do instead is redirecting our attention.”

From the Book ‘A Lean Mind’

When I talk about the emotions – especially the difficult ones – I get so much backlash. It is quite easy for me to say ‘let go of an emotion’, but how can we really do this?

All in all, you’ll become an open target if you tell people that can easily let go of fear, sadness, anger, and so on…

How can you let go of an emotion? How can you stop the thought chain that is clearly hurting you or blocking your potential?

Well, it is practically impossible to stop any thought. In fact, if you try to suppress or stop a specific thought, you will only think about it more.

The mind doesn’t know the negative language.

The only way to truly let go of a thought is to redirect your attention to something else.

Distracting is, of course, a way. But it is generally temporary. How can you permanently let go of a thought about a topic that is important to you?

You choose that topic, and redirect your attention to another feeling still focusing on the same topic. You give your attention to gratitude, forgiveness, reason, courage, passion, etc.

Letting go is not removing a thought or an emotion. Letting go is replacing the emotion you feel about a specific topic with another emotion.

All the Best,
Ozan

Image by Javier Allegue Barros