What are you playing on repeat?

One of the coolest inventions of the past 15 years has to be the ability to listen to any music you like on demand. I grew up when MTV still played music and I remember watching the channel for hours waiting for a favourite music video to be played. When I was in high school I had a range of mix tapes ready to record my favourite tracks when the DJ played it on TuksFM. It was so exciting, since you never knew what might surprise you around the next corner.

One of the coolest things that Apple Music does is to create a “Most played” playlist every year. It’s called Replay and it keeps track of all the songs you listened to most often during the year. I like going back 5 or 6 years to listen to the songs that were a big part of my life during that phase, since it typically brings back such great memories. It’s also interesting to see how many of these songs stay on repeat year after year. For me there will always be classic rock from the late 70’s and Tool. Oh man do I love Tool.

I started thinking about what my repeat favourites are when I recently listened to Jon Acuff talking about his book Soundtracks: The Surprising Solution to Overthinking. Not the songs I listen to on repeat, but rather the thoughts I like to loop back to when anything new, challenging or exciting crosses my mind. Acuff defines overthinking as happening when “What you think gets in the way of what you want.”

Sound familiar? Sure it does!

Think back to a time when you thought of an exciting business idea, an idea for a book you want to write, designing a cool product or service that people would find useful or trying a new activity a little outside of your comfort zone.

Now try to remember the very first thought that followed that initial idea. If you are like most people, this might have included something like:

• That has already been done, there is no use in me doing it again
• I’m not clever enough
• I’m too young or I’m too old to try THAT
• I don’t have enough money
• I just don’t have the time, it will take too long
• I can’t try that, I might get injured
• I have no idea where to start, might as well just leave it
• I’ve never done anything like that, I’ll just look stupid!

Here’s the thing: Acuff and his research assistant surveyed 10 000 people with varying degrees of success and every single one of them reported having these thoughts. Even the most successful people initially have these limiting beliefs about themselves (people that had written multiple successful books for example, were doubtful about their ability to write another good book). The main difference between those that tried and those that didn’t was that they didn’t play these limiting thoughts on repeat.

So if you have experienced this happen to you before and want to change that pattern, here is your homework:

1. Recognize these thoughts: Whenever you have an idea or think of something cool you would want to try, write it down. And then pay attention to the very next thought that creeps in to talk you out of it. Those limiting beliefs are the thoughts you want to recognize. They are likely to be sneaky and difficult to recognize, since many of them have lived in your mind since you were a kid or teenager.
2. Replace them: Once you have a better idea of what they are, you can start to mindfully replace them with more useful, true and kind thoughts. You are going to have to be very deliberate about this, since the existing pattern of thinking is likely to be very ingrained (since you’ve been practicing them for a long time).
3. Repeat the new thoughts: If you have held a limiting belief about yourself for 10 years it would be wishful thinking to believe that you can turn it around in 10 minutes or even 10 days. Changing the way you think about yourself is going to take time, but it will only happen when you practice repeating the more useful thoughts deliberately.

Next week we’ll look more at what you can start doing to not let “What you think get in the way of what you want.”

Thank you again for reading and have a great weekend!

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