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I was about 22 when I was introduced to the book The Secret by Rhonda Byrne—and so many things about it just didn’t make sense to me.

One thing that was really hard for me to understand at the beginning was the idea that “you are not your thoughts.” It kinda cracked my head. How is that even possible?

I think my thoughts. I am this human being, I am this body, I have this brain, I have this mind. So if I think my thoughts then how am I not my thoughts?

I also didn’t believe that we can create our lives. I was brought up believing we are the way we are because we were born this way; we inherited genes and were born into a life that is kind of predestined and breaking out of it is super hard. I was conditioned in my thinking.

In my case, it was completely true that my thoughts were not me—but I did become my thoughts.

I inherited the thinking of my parents and close family. In my family, negative thinking, gossiping, and being a pessimist were the base of everyone’s personality, so I guess you’re not surprised to read that most of my life I interpreted my experiences as negative. Thinking back now, I see how often an event or experience itself could be neutral or even good if only I could have been able to think differently about the situation and myself.

What I’ve learned is our personality creates our personal reality.

I believe the Law of Attraction is much more than you manifesting things into reality just by a single thought, the way Athena sprang out of the head of Zeus. I do not mean it in a sense that you close your eyes and strongly think of the idea of having free coffee and when you open your eyes back up, a cup of coffee has magically appeared in front of you. In my experience, it’s a mixture of your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, emotions, attention, and even behavior. In other words: your personality.

“Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.” ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

My dad is a kickboxing trainer and I used to train with him and enter championships when I was in elementary school and even during university. I used to really suck at it, and for years I often ended up last. I did all the trainings, ran extra laps, followed strict diets, enrolled in boot camps but nothing helped. My skills improved and I was performing great on the trainings but I was a failure in the ring.

Before my fights, my dad used to research my opponents and tell me how hard it would be to win because they were world champions, or she was Russian and they are unbeatable or I could be in better shape and my left hook was weak and I drop my right hand while I’m defending. I could have been the best participant in the whole competition, but I could just not win because I believed what he said. For him, this way of dealing with things was inspiring and boosted his confidence, but for me it did the opposite—it scared me sh*tless.

Until one day, he couldn’t sit behind me as a coach and someone else had to replace him. This guy kept telling me how good I was, what my strengths and best techniques were, and how I had good stamina. He told me I was strong and the opponent was a beginner, so it would be an easy technical K.O. for me. Guess what? I won my first championship, against a Russian European champion!

I didn’t change anything but the way I thought and felt about myself, and the things that usually made me scared didn’t exist for me because I wasn’t being reminded about them.

If you think you’re a failure, you’ll feel like a failure, and then you’ll act like a failure. As long as you give attention to the thought that you’re a failure, you’ll continue to experience this reality, which then reinforces your belief that you must be a failure. This is called a thought pattern.

As you keep thinking the same thoughts, producing the same emotions and performing the same actions, you continue to live by the same experiences. To change your life experience you have to rewire your brain and change your core beliefs and thought patterns—the way you’re thinking.

Science says that every time we have a thought, our brain instantaneously fires circuits to signal another part of the brain to release chemicals and then we get an emotional arousal from the thought that we think—and as we enter a new emotional state it influences how we act. These thoughts affect our bodies through the feelings and emotions they create.

If we keep thinking positive, uplifting, loving thoughts, we will often feel positive and even limitless. If we keep thinking negative thoughts, we will often end up feeling negative, sad, anxious, unlovable, or unhappy. As we continue to pay attention to the initial thought, it reaffirms the emotions we experience, which energizes the thought and we end up thinking more thoughts equal to the feeling, generating a loop of thinking and feeling.

How we feel directly influences how our body reacts, which directly influences how we behave, what actions we take, and what we experience in life.

If we are unconscious about our negative thought patterns, we will find ourselves becoming more negative, more judgmental, more critical, more unhappy as life goes by because the feelings become so familiar that they keep firing and strengthening the same circuits in the brain. These thoughts then become natural and we start to run on autopilot, our default mode. The same is true when we think positive thoughts; we experience positive feelings which loop us back to think more of those positive thoughts.

The circuits we build in our brain will determine if our cup is half full or half empty. In a sense, we become addicted to our thoughts via our feelings, and these circuits get hardwired in our brain. When we finally become aware of these thought processes, we are no longer on autopilot and can make changes.

Stoic and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote: “A man’s life is what his thoughts make of it.”

Poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “A man is what he thinks about all day long.”

This is how our thoughts create our reality.

But the good news is it also means that all our problems are not problems if we change how we think about them. Our problems are nothing more than our emotional and physical reactions to our thoughts about the problem.

Often when we want to change our reality, the life we live, we invest in things outside ourselves but the key to any lasting life change is inside our head. If we can observe and change our attention or perception, we can change our emotional reaction, which then changes our physical reaction, which ultimately changes how we act, hence who we are (our personality) and how we experience our reality.

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