Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right

—Henry Ford

Our attitude shapes our world. While we cannot always control what circumstances we will experience, we do have power over our response to these circumstances. In the following story, which is a composite of hundreds of stories of my clients, Mary demonstrates how a change in attitude changed her world.

“I’ll never get thin,” Mary wailed. “I’ve tried hundreds of diets, and nothing works! My body is built to be fat. I’ll never be thin again. Never!”
I nodded. “You’re right.”
“What?” she asked.
“You’re right, Mary. It’s true. You believe you’ll never get thin, you constantly repeat it, and thus it is so. Isn’t it amazing how easily we can create our own realities?”
“Oh, gimme me a break,” she said. “I’m not fat because I think I’m fat. I think I’m fat because I am fat. Not saying it doesn’t change anything. Don’t give me that positive mumbo-jumbo. A person can’t think themselves thin. Trust me. I’ve tried that, too. It didn’t work. Nothing works.”
“Okay,” I replied. “I accept that. Nothing works. You cannot think yourself thin. No diet will help. You’re stuck in this state of misery and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s completely beyond your control. That’s what you want, that’s what you’ve got. Congratulations. Now, what else can I do for you?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t pull that act on me—and don’t go putting all this on my shoulders! I tell you, I’ve tried everything. Nothing works.”
I sighed. “I don’t want to upset you any more than you already are, but if I didn’t tell you the truth, I wouldn’t be doing my job. You cannot lose weight because you believe you cannot lose weight. If you believed you could, your body would comply with your belief system. It would have to. That’s the law.”
“Ridiculous!” she snapped. “What law? There is no such law. Nobody can control their body just by believing.”
“Really? You’ve never noticed how thinking positive thoughts and feeling happy makes good things happen? And being in a funk where you can’t stop repeating negative thoughts makes you feel like the world is falling in on you?”
Mary’s eyes grew icy. “I wouldn’t waste my time. Life doesn’t work that way. People can’t control their lives. Things happen and we have to deal with them. That’s God’s plan. For some reason, He wants me to be heavy for the rest of my days.” She shrugged. “I just need to accept that.”
My solar plexus cramped. I remembered once renting the space where Mary now lived, once believing things simply “happened” to me without my input or that it was “God’s will.” I took a deep breath and tried again.
“I do know what you’re going through,” I said. “I’ve been there. I had cancer and heart disease. I recovered from both and learned from both. I learned that I was responsible for putting my body into the vulnerable condition where it could get sick, and thatI could not only reverse those conditions but the thought-emotions that got me—”
“Oh, please!” she interjected. “Don’t give me that boloney! Maybe you can stress yourself into a heart attack, but life is stress, right? And you get cancer from cell mutations and heredity and the environment.”
Oh, boy, I thought. A little knowledge… “I didn’t ‘get’ cancer from my environment,” I replied. “I created the environment in my body that allowed my cells to mutate.”
“How?”
“Look,” I said, “most of us let our thought-emotions happen randomly, unconsciously. I know I did. Without conscious direction, they controlled me—until I stopped and thought about what I was thinking. When I did, I could refocus my thinking in a positive direction. Your weight is the same thing. How does it make you feel?”
“Crummy.”
“Exactly. So you focus on feeling crummy, a negative thought-emotion, instead of on how great you’d feel being thin. All your thoughts and conversations are about how you can’t lose weight, right?”
“So?”
“So, you stay heavy. Your body manifests your thoughts.”
She blinked at me. “I think about losing weight all the time. If my thoughts controlled my weight, I’d be skinny by now.”
“No, you wouldn’t, because you never think about feeling great and skinny. You think about how you can’t lose weight. You program yourself to stay heavy. Your body cannot release the pounds because you’ve told it, over and over again, not to. Henry Ford said it: ‘Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.’ You believe you can’t lose weight, so your body doesn’t release the excess. Bingo! You’re right. You control your life without even realizing it.”
“What a horrible thing to say! You don’t know what being fat feels like. I’ve tried everything! Shots, pills, everything! Nothing works! It’s not fair! And it’s not my fault,” she wailed.
“Mary,” I said, “this isn’t about blame. It’s about belief. And I know exactly how you feel. I used to be forty pounds overweight.”
“You? Forty pounds? You’re lying. How did you lose it?”
“It’s true, I promise. I was enormous, a big, bloated, sick tub of flesh. Nothing I tried worked. I knew I’d be fat the rest of my life. And so I was, all day, every day, right up to the moment I decided I could and would get thin. I announced to myself, to God, to the universe that I wasreleasing the weight. Not going to release it— not that sometime-in-the-future trap—I was getting rid of it, right then, that moment and from then on. I decided to believe. And the pounds started dropping off.”
She snorted. “Buncha New-Age, airy-fairy bull—”
“Mary, look at me!” I stood up. “And look at how I was before.” I pulled an old photo out of my wallet and showed it to her. Her eyes widened. “Yeah,” I said. “I was fat and flabby. Couldn’t walk half a block without panting. Had to use a motorized cart in warehouse stores. Couldn’t stand in line more than a few minutes. I knew I was a mess, and I knewit was too late to lose weight or get fit or change my life.”
“I know that feeling,” she muttered.
“Well, then I learned my brain is good for things beyond what I learned in high school and college.”
She laughed. “I was never any good in school.”
“Me, neither. But that doesn’t matter because I learned that focusing my thought-emotions to manifest positive changes in my life is a far more effective use of my brain than merely storing facts. I learned that deciding to be positive, focusing on the positive, and directing my thought-emotions toward positive impressions could give me the life I wanted.”
She looked more closely at me. “Keep talking.”
“Our minds are so strong, Mary, and we have a God-given capacity to manifest whatever we focus on. If we believesomething bad can happen to us at any moment, something bad will likely happen. But if we believe we are healthy and thin, our body has no choice but to manifest that reality. It’s the law.”
“Once I understood how to focus my thought-emotions,” I continued, “I decided I was thin and healthy. That’s what it took: a decision to accept a belief. Before I knew it, I started acting thin and healthy. My body, directed by my thought-emotions and actions, dropped the weight and became healthy.”
Mary slapped the table. “Hah! You almost had me until you started talking in circles.”
I sat back. “Fine, Mary, you win. You’re obviously comfortable being miserable. Every ‘woe-is-me’ you utter reinforces it. You claim being thin would make you happy, but you can’t get thin, so you can’t be happy. A self-fulfilling prophesy.”
“Go to hell.”
I shook my head. “No, I won’t join you there. But I will give you a hand up. Ford wasn’t the only one who talked about thought power. Remember Ben Franklin? ‘God helps those who help themselves.’ And Norman Vincent Peale: ‘It is a well-defined and authentic principle that what the mind profoundly expects it tends to receive.’ D’you read the Bible? It’s right there in Mark 11:24: ‘Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.’ And Proverbs 17:33: ‘A joyful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.’”
She did not reply.
“You can do this, Mary. You can change your life. You can lose weight, be healthy, enjoy the wonders of the world. But you have to want to, decide to, and believe that you can.”
Mary stared at me. still without speaking. Then she said, “I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” and left.

***

I was just closing up my office for the night when Mary reappeared in my doorway swinging a rope and handcuffs. I gulped. Four weeks earlier, she had told me to go to hell as she stomped furiously out of our previous conversation.
“Hello, Doc,” she murmured softly. “I need to talk to you.”
“Why the rope and handcuffs?” I asked.
“That’s what I came to talk with you about.”
I decided not to panic because reacting with fear instead of love would only make matters worse. “Have a seat, Mary,” I said as I turned on a lamp that emitted a warm glow of light. I handed her a bottle of water from the fridge, which she took (a good sign, I thought). then she twisted the rope and cuffs, tangling them. together. Good, I told myself. That would make it difficult for her to tie me up or handcuff me.
But then she burst into tears. “See what a mess I’ve just made here?” she wailed. “It finally dawned on me that this is what you were talking about—I’ve been doing this to myself with my thoughts my whole life! Of course, I couldn’t lose weight when I said so every day. Yeah, I really got some of what you said to me the other day.”
Whew! “What made you decide I might be just a little bit right?” I asked.
“I think this is the first time I’ve actually been so desperate I was willing to stop and examine the patterns in my life and how much they’ve held me back from what I really want. I can see now that I was focused on what I didn’t want—the excess weight, the constant misery. Et cetera. I feel like I’ve been hit with a 2 x 4. A good hit, but a painful revelation. Obviously, I was fighting a natural law, and the law won every time.”
I had to smile. “You can’t win against universal laws,” I reminded her. “Whatever you focus on comes to you. It’s so enlightening, though, once we finally face our own truth and realize that what we’ve focused on in the past is what has created our present. Knowing that truth, however distressing it is, is the good part, though, because it means we can create a new tomorrow today. Even if we don’t like the way our life appears at this very moment, we just have to realize that it’s only a reflection of our past thoughts. When we consciously stay focused on what we want rather than unconsciously returning to the old thought patterns telling us we can’t have what we want, what we really want can become a reality.”
“The ‘secret,’ as everyone calls it,” I continued, “is to remember that once we return to unconscious thinking, we become convinced things cannot change, so they don’t.”
Mary dropped the rope and handcuffs. “I hadn’t realized that most of the time when I’m not concentrating on work-related issues, I’m not really aware of what I’m thinking or feeling. On a subconscious level, though, I’m busy feeling bad about myself and how I can’t lose weight. I try to catch myself as often as possible now when that happens. I know I should be able to do it more often, but I’m really trying to stay positive all the time.”
“Hey, you’re doing a fantastic job,” I replied. “You’re becoming aware to stay aware—that in itself is a major accomplishment. Remember, our power lies in the awareness of our power, so every moment of new awareness lends you more power to continue to be aware. It sounds like I’m talking in circles, huh? Well, I want you to understand how important our words are—all of them. It may sound silly and a bit over-dramatic to ask you to watch all your words, but our power is such that we become what we say, we become what we think, we become what we do.”
“And your point is?”
“A minute ago, you used three words that have the power to hold you back, so I’d like you to be aware of them and think about replacing them with different words or thoughts. The first one is when you talk about losing weight. What do you do when you lose your keys?”
“I look for them until I find them. I hate it when I lose things!”
“Ooh, listen to what you just said. You hate to lose things. Most of us look for anything we’ve lost, and the subconscious is not selective. Will you look for the weight when you lose it?”
“Good grief, no!”
“Well, then, it might be better to say you’re ‘releasing’ or ‘letting go’ of your excess weight. Just don’t look for it to find it again if you don’t want it back.”
“Okay, I see your point. The other words?”
“The word ‘try’ always gives us a cop-out. Remember Yoda in Star Wars?‘Do or do not. There is no try.’ When you ‘try,’ you’re telling your subconscious you’re fighting an uphill battle, that the odds are against you. Why not replace that word with ‘I’ll do my best’?”
Mary sighed. “Okay, no more trying,” she said. “What’s the other word I should get rid of?”
I almost laughed. “Should. ‘Should’ is a good word to avoid because it’s associated with guilt, and guilt is a very powerful negative emotion whose whole purpose is to hold us back. Anything fear or guilt-related shuts out the ability of love to squeeze its way in there.”
“Exactly!” Mary shouted. “That’s why I brought the cuffs and rope. They’re my reminder that I’ve been my own worst enemy. I’ve been strangling myself and holding myself back to the same thought-emotions I had as a teenager, when everyone teased me for being so gawky and heavy and growing so fast.”
I nodded. She was getting the lesson. “So,” I said, “you’ve concentrated on how the events from your past have affected you and you projected all those thought patterns right into your future—which has kept you living in the past. Gets you kinda dizzy, y’know.”
“How do you stay focused on the here and now instead of the past?”
“It takes time,” I said. “And quite a bit of work to stop thinking about a million things at once, which is where all sorts of unconscious thoughts invade our space. As soon as you become aware that your thoughts are unconsciously drifting, immediately take control of your thoughts and focus where you want your thoughts to be, which will attract whatever it is you consciously want. The more you become aware that your thoughts are straying, the more you will stay focused on what you want. That’s when you’ll notice your power growing.”
She shook her head. “I’m getting MEGO syndrome. You know, you’re making My Eyes Glaze Over.”
I grinned. “Cute. We’re so used to living our old patterns, it’s confusing, but it’s really simple. Live in the present—in the now—and your past cannot invade this space and affect you negatively. Stay aware so you don’t sink into your past, and you’ll stay in the present.”
“Like it’s so easy… how, oh great master, how do I do this? Become more aware? Stay in the present?”
“Over and over again during the day, stop yourself and ask, ‘What am I thinking about right now? What am I feeling right now?’ As soon as you do that, you’re in the moment and aware of your thoughts. If they’re negative, you can immediately flip the switch and turn them around. If your old patterns are really ingrained, it’ll take work. But it’s so worth it. It’s no fun living unconsciously and always attracting what we don’t want. That’s why it’s so important to stay conscious so we can create the life we do want. You want to be thin, so pick the weight you want to be and think that’s what you weigh. You’re already there.”
“I’d be lying to myself.”
“No, you’d be programming yourself to accept the truth about who you really are rather than unconsciously accepting the lie you previously programmed yourself to believe.”
“This sounds so exhausting!”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean…this sounds so invigorating.”
“Yes, it is. Release the rope and handcuffs. See yourself as you truly wish to see yourself—the real you. Do you remember the old children’s song, ‘If You’re Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands?’”
“Yeah…”
“Every time you catch yourself falling back on old thoughts, sing it to yourself, but change the words to, ‘I Get Healthier and Thinner Every Day!’ It will not only stop those negative thoughts, but the silliness will make you smile—and happiness is like an antidote to past negatives.”

We really do have a choice in life. We can choose to be happy or sad, healthy or sick, strong or weak, beautiful or ugly, bitter or kind…it’s all in our mindset. So remember that you can’t plant a negative thought and expect to end up with a positive result any more than you can plant a turnip seed and end up with a tomato plant. Be conscious, be happy, be what you want to be!