I am a sum total of my thoughts. Reining them in is the real job.

Learning to manage them has cost me years. Not the blockchain, the SAP or the content juggernaut. The monkey on my shoulder all along.

Created by Author on Ideogram

Our assessment systems are broken. They are designed for machines and not humans.

They teach you subjects, methods, formulas, the kind of thinking that can be assessed and given a number. What they do not teach you is that the most consequential thing happening in your life at any given moment is the quality of the conversation you are having with yourself inside your own head.

That the internal narrator is not a fixed feature.

It is a skill.

I became aware of my thinking the hard way.

In 2022, when the structure of my life fell away, I was left alone with my thoughts in a way I had never quite been before. No logistics of a shared life to occupy the foreground. No other person’s needs or wants around me. No ambient home-noises to soften the silence.

Just me. And the thoughts.

Which were far from good company.

Loud. Repetitive. Going over the same ground again and again without arriving anywhere, a closed loop. I would lie awake listening to them do this and feel completely unable to stop them.

The most alone I have ever felt was not from being without people. It was from being in the company of this version of myself.

Changing this was not dramatic.

No moment of enlightenment. No single practice to fix everything at once. Just the gradual learning to be a better manager of a difficult employee.

The difficult employee being the part of my brain that had decided its job was to catalogue everything wrong (some real, some imaginary), and everything else that could possibly go wrong, and present the detailed inventory at 3am.

That’s when the tears would start to wet my closed eyes. That forced me to notice the thoughts rather than just having them.

This small thing is the beginning of everything.

When you notice a thought, you create a small gap between the thought and your response. In that gap, you have a choice — believe it, engage with it, let it run, or redirect it.

Without the noticing, there is no gap and no choice. You are just the thoughts, all the way down into a black hole.

A lot of my most convincing thoughts turned out to be habits. Patterns that had run so many times that it had become my default setting of sorts.

I went back to work in the middle of this.

Which meant that learning to manage my thinking was happening simultaneously with learning blockchain, content strategy, community management — everything the job required. What I found was that the thought management was not separate from the professional learning. It was foundational.

The imposter syndrome was a thought pattern. The voice that said you are the least qualified person in this room was also a thought.

Each one more dreadful than the other.

I knew I had to break the pattern, just one thought at a time.

That I and each one of us is a sum total of our thoughts, is not a motivational statement. It is a description of reality that I have spent 50 years not fully understanding.

The thoughts I repeat most become the beliefs I operate from. The beliefs determine what I attempt, what I avoid, what I think I deserve, what I think I am capable of.

Changing the thoughts, even partially, changed everything downstream of them.

It is a curriculum I am still trying to master.

Everything else takes a second position.

……….

I write from Bangalore, from experience, and from the stubborn belief that the things nobody talks about are usually the things most worth saying. If something here landed — keep it. If it didn’t, that’s fine too. Thanks for being here. 🙏