How to change your life in 5 minutes

That’s a fairly big claim isn’t it? If you’re reading this after spotting the title you’re probably thinking one of three things right now…

1. “Jeez this’ll be good – how’s Ben going to stuff this post and this topic up”
2. “WFT? I can change my life? Really?”
3. “Whatever dude….the picture’s cool”
Now I’m not saying that you can change the amount in your bank account, live in a different house, or start dating a super model in only 5 minutes. But in 5 minutes you can change your outlook on your life and on what you experience and that will start to change your life. How you think is critical to everything you do and get in life. It’s what made “The Secret” great as a book, even though it failed to tell people that you also need to take some pretty big action on the stuff you think if you want it to happen. But I digest ….

Change your thinking, change your life.

You see the thing is, what you think is everything in your life. In order to make any sense of what’s happening to you at any given moment you have to have it go through some sort of thought process. For example, for you to process that sentence you had to think about it. The information had to go through your filter (created by your personal philosophy, past experiences and focus in that given moment) and is then processed according to your map of the world. Your current maps shape your thoughts and completely affect what you then do.
Lets look at an example. I hold a belief that everyone in life has the right to be successful and that your life is shaped by what’s ahead of you rather than what’s gone before. So if I meet someone who is contemplating a big change in their lives, I’m like “hell yeah dude, you go for that, everything you need you already have.” That’s my map. I see the world (most of the time, I mean I’m not a flipping weirdo) as one big opportunity rather than a series of massive disappointments. My life is my reality. Your life is yours. That’s why sometimes you just can’t understand some people. While you’re looking at their reality through your reality that doesn’t cater for theirs, you’ve not got a hope of understanding them.
If you can change the way you think you can change your life and how you interact with it. Here are 3 cool ways to do just that.

Change Your Perceptions

How you perceive your experiences in life determines your thoughts and so the actions (if any) you take. Right, put it this way, you’re driving to the office one morning and matey boy in the flash car next to you forces his way into traffic and doesn’t even have the decency to look apologetic.
Reality 1: He’s a prick and doesn’t care about anyone in life. He drives a flash car and thinks he’s all that. He deserves to be run off the road and skinned before being hung up by his toenails.
Reality 2: He’s clearly in a rush. Maybe he has a big meeting this morning. Maybe his family are in distress. Maybe he has just been made redundant and he’s struggling to cope.
Did you feel a different reaction in you when you read those two different statements? By simply changing your view (perception) of an experience it changes what you think and how you feel. Try it for yourself.
How about if your boss passes you over for a promotion and gives it to someone else? How would you perceive that situation? Does your boss hate you? Or are they actually under pressure from somewhere above you? Is there a previous arrangement that you don’t know about that’s influenced their decision?
Your perceptions of a situation or an experience are key to what you think and do. Most of us just stick to habitual perceptions that lead us to automatic responses to stuff.
If you fancy changing your life in 5 minutes then start becoming more aware of how you perceive the things that happen in your life and catch yourself when you feel like you’re making a judgement call on something or someone. Doing that can literally change your life in a heartbeat.