Be the Pilot of Your Mind

This blog post was originally a transcript from a podcast recording. Listen to the full episode below. Subscribe today!

Hello friends! How are you this week? I’m back in Dallas from a lovely 2-week getaway to South Padre Island. I absolutely adore traveling but how amazing is that feeling when you crawl into your own bed on that first night back home? It’s just the best, isn’t it?

As much as I love to travel, it has been nice to get back into a routine again - I’m not sure about you but it always takes me a few days back home before I feel like I’m back in a routine and ready to start working and being productive again.

This week has been interesting for me on the work front, because on Monday, I started my first day as a Marketing Consultant for an education software company! If you’ve been following my story, you may know that my ultimate goal is to grow this online space and work with women in the Jet Set Society community full-time, but my professional background has always been in Marketing Communications.

Back in college, I got a Bachelor’s in General Business Management, then I went on to get my Master’s from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland in International Business. So, I’ve always been business oriented but I really love the creativity that marketing brings to the table. And consulting and coaching go hand-in-hand, so I’m excited to be flexing my consulting skills alongside my coaching skills now.

As grateful as I am about this new job opportunity, I’ll admit that this week has been a bit touch-and-go for me to mentally get back in the swing of things. I’ve been trying to find a good routine for consulting part time and working on The Jet Set Blonde part time. As a result, I’ve been waking up sort of feeling like I’m on the wrong side of the bed for the past couple days. So that’s what I want to discuss with you today. How to get yourself out of your funk and back on track to being the pilot of your mind.

Consider the Plane as Your Mind

Have you ever had a morning where you just don’t quite feel all together? Maybe you’re feeling a little depressed or anxious or moody or just plain off? I definitely have those days - and as I mentioned earlier, I’ve been experiencing that feeling the past two mornings. We all experience these “debbie downer” days from time to time. It’s a fact of life, even for those of us who practice mindfulness and self reflection.

This week, as I reflected on my own “off” days, I thought, maybe it’s because of my new job. Or maybe it’s because I’m not on vacation anymore. But I had to stop myself. Because I was looking outside of myself to find the reason why I was feeling the way I was. Our outside world does not truly create our feelings. It’s our thoughts around those things in our outside world that are creating our feelings.

And, let me just say that I’ve tried to control my outside world. I failed miserably in trying to do this. Back in late high school / early college, I developed a severe eating disorder and my entire life revolved around controlling my outside world. I was doing everything in my power to look beautiful on the outside and win all the awards and get the best grades but I was still miserable inside.

That’s because I neglected to look within and manage my thoughts properly. At the end of the day, all you can really manage is your mind. Not your spouse, not your family, not your friends, not your teachers. Only yourself.

And this is great news because think about what would happen if the outside world truly did manage our feelings? It would be pure anarchy and chaos in our minds, right? Because we’d be subject to an outside world that we have zero control over.

So it really is good news that our internal thoughts create our feelings. Because of that fact, we can learn to manage our thoughts in order to better manage our emotions. And when we practice that, we become the pilot of our mind.

You’re probably now thinking to yourself, what in the world does Brittany mean? What does it mean to become the pilot of your mind? It’s an analogy. Consider the plane as your mind. And all the passengers coming and going through that plane are your thoughts. Some passengers will be pleasant and happy. Others will be crazy and out there. But the pilot of the plane knows that there’s a final destination to get to, and that pilot doesn’t change the direction of the plane on the whims of her passengers. No, the pilot keeps the plane focused and on course.

And that’s what I want you to work on becoming after our discussion today. You will have crazy passengers on your plane sometimes. But when you can manage those thoughts and your feelings to stay on track of your final destination, you’ll become the pilot of your mind, and you’ll become unstoppable.

Every Plane Needs a Pilot

A plane without a pilot would be out of control. Think of how many action movies there are when the pilot gets killed, then the plane goes out of control and starts to take a nosedive. That’s what your mind looks like when it’s not properly managed.

Every plane takes off with a final destination in mind. Yes, technically it may take off, do a loop, and come back to the same spot, but every pilot has a clear vision of where she wants that plane to go and where it will land in the future.

As the plane is in the air, the pilot is constantly monitoring their progress. There are checkpoints for the pilot to review to make sure that they are maintaining the course. These are your guiding values or guiding principles that you’ll continue to check on to ensure that you are reaching your goal. It’s how you’ll know what’s important to you, and it will provide guidance on the expectations you hold for yourself.

Maybe you value discipline. Or integrity. Or maybe you value human connection. It can vary from person to person (or plane to plane) but these are the checkpoints that keep your plane on course.

Can you see the picture I’m painting here? If you can imagine your brain as a plane, you can see how critical it is for that plane to have a pilot that’s flying it to its final destination. Without this clear vision for where you want to go, you’ll remain grounded and unable to move forward.

So consider your vision for the future. Where would you like to be in a year? What will you have accomplished? What does your perfect day look like?

Then also consider your guiding values that will help you get there. What was important to you as you set out to accomplish those goals? What expectations did you hold yourself to?

Before we go any further, we need to get really clear on what you want your life to look like. What do you want to create in this life? What goals do you want to focus on next and what guiding principles matter to you most?

Without vision for your future, you can’t step into the role of pilot.

So, to become the pilot of your mind, you need to know what you want to create for yourself.

And this is where a lot of women feel one of two ways. They either feel confused and say that they don’t know what they want or they have so many goals, that they can’t decide on what to focus on.

Every Passenger is a Thought

Now let’s talk about those passengers. Not all passengers are created equal. All those different passengers that board and deplane are the thoughts that run through your mind on any given day. Some of those thoughts are awesome and encouraging and make you feel strong and motivated, right?

But then there are those other thoughts that are the problem passengers. You know the type - the passengers that are “sawing logs” next to you, getting belligerent on mini liquor bottles, or kicking your seat again and again for hours.

Those are the passengers that need to get kicked off the plane. Simply put, they don’t belong in your plane. They don’t support where you’re going and what your final destination is. They don’t support the same values that are guiding your plane. So they just need to get escorted out.

But to do this, we’ve got to take control of our plane as the pilot and set the focus for all remaining passengers on the final destination. When we have that focus that the pilot provides, we can generate enough momentum to go down the runway and take off.

So we have to reign in these thoughts, and kick out the ones that don’t serve us.

Does this make sense?

Okay, I hope so. For me, this illustration helps a lot because when you consider those action movies with planes going down without a pilot, all hell breaks loose. And it becomes pretty clear of the type of scenario that we don’t want for our lives.

Managing Problem Passengers

Now that I’ve painted this picture, let’s talk about how to really deal with these problem passengers. At first this week, I was blaming my anxiety because of my new job.

But after doing a brain drain of all the thoughts in my head, it became clear that it wasn’t the new job itself causing any problems. It was my thought spirals and fears that were creating this unsettling feeling inside me.

After identifying the thoughts running through my head and writing them down on paper, it was obvious that these thoughts were out of alignment with my final destination. They were thoughts of self-doubt and fear and anxiety that didn’t help me reach my goals. Bottom line, the thoughts were not serving me.

My desired emotion was to feel confident and productive, but these thoughts were not helping me feel either of those emotions. Instead, these thoughts were making me feel depressed and making me want to curl up in a ball in bed and pull the covers over my head.

When you can write these thoughts down and get them out of your head and on to paper, you can step back and evaluate it better. Ask yourself, “Is this how the pilot of my plane would speak to herself? Are these thoughts helping me get to my final destination? Is this how she would best use her time?”

The answer will probably be a resounding, “NO.”

The pilot needs to remind her passengers where they’re going in life and what they are trying to achieve. If certain passengers are out of alignment with this course, they need to get off the plane.

If there are passengers saying, “This isn’t good enough. This will never work. You’re not cut out for this. You’re wasting your time” - the plane is going to go down. This is what an unmanaged mind looks like.

But it’s up to the pilot to respond with, “If you’re not going to support what we stand for and where we’re going, you don’t need to be on this plane. Time to de-plane and find somewhere else to hang out.”

Once those problem passengers have been kicked out, start upgrading those remaining supportive passengers to first class. The thoughts that support your desired outcomes should be the ones remaining on the plane, sitting up in the front. Upgrade those passengers to be close to your pilot and keep them in the front lines, where they can encourage your pilot to keep going.

In stark contrast to problem passengers, supportive passengers sound like, “This is so great. This is going to be so impactful. You’ve got this. Keep going. This is worth it.”

Those thoughts serve you. Those thoughts align with your mission. It’s all about aligning your mind with your desired outcome. When you can keep that in check, you’ve become the pilot of your mind.

Consider if you had left all those problem passengers on board, grumbling to your pilot. You’d surely crash, right?

It’s a Daily Practice

That’s why we have to work on this day in and day out. I wish I could tell you that this is a one and done sort of thing. But it’s not.

Sometimes, those feelings will stick with you for a while. There are some days where I feel depressed the entire day. Sometimes longer. And on those days, I just have to say, “Oh hey depression. Guess we’re gonna hang out together today.” But I try really hard not to let those feelings affect what I have to get done on that day.

It’s a daily practice. Seriously, I work on managing my thoughts every single day. I have to because when I don’t, I can spiral out of control pretty quickly. I’ve lived with depression for over a decade, and some days are better than others. On the days that I stop managing my mind, my thoughts get really dark. And those problem passengers become mental terrorists.

If the pilot listened to those mental terrorists repeatedly, again and again, the plane would come crashing down. Because we start to believe the nonsense we tell ourselves. We start looking for evidence to support all of the negative thoughts.

Your brain is lazy and it doesn’t care the type of thoughts you think. Either way, it will search for evidence to support your thoughts, whether they’re positive or negative. So if you continue to listen to the negative thoughts, your brain will find evidence to support it, and you’ll crash. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Have you ever heard that quote by Henry Ford?

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.”

— Henry Ford

I love this quote because it’s so simple, yet so true. Your brain will look to find supporting evidence of whatever you believe, whether you believe you are able to create something or unable to create something.

I like to think of that evidence as the flight crew. Your flight crew supports your passengers. If you’re listening to negative thoughts, the greater number of unhelpful flight attendants will occur. But if you focus on your positive thoughts - the ones that encourage you - your flight attendants will be at your side as evidence supporting the fact that you are capable of reaching your final destination.

When we step back to monitor our thoughts from a more objective place, we can start to see which thoughts are serving us and which ones are not. When you become aware of your thoughts, you can fight your way back out of those dark places and replace those problematic passengers with supportive ones.

The reality is, we are going to have problematic thoughts. It’s impossible to stop thinking thoughts; we can’t control it when thoughts randomly pop into our heads. The average person has between 12,000 and 60,000 thoughts per day according to the National Science Foundation. With that many thoughts, we’re bound to have negative ones. In fact, the National Science Foundation found in that same study that 80% of those thousands of thoughts are considered negative.

Just because you’ve been flying around with a negative thought for years, maybe even since childhood, doesn’t mean you have to keep it around. Because guess what? New management is in place, and your plane doesn’t tolerate problem passengers any longer.

Our thoughts are optional. Yes, we will have all sorts of thoughts. But the ones that don’t serve you can just pass on through. Let them pass by as a fleeting thought. Only keep the thoughts that work for you. Because when you’re the pilot, you get to kick whatever thoughts out of your plane that you want. Keep the ones that work for you and toss out the rest.

So bottom line - we’re going to have negative thoughts. It’s how we manage those thoughts that will determine how we feel, what we choose to do and what we choose not to do.

Don’t punish yourself for having a negative thought. It’s not a bad thing to have a negative thought. It’s human nature. Random thoughts will pop up and some of them will be negative. Don’t punish yourself for that. When that happens, it’s not a time for you to freak out and get upset and beat yourself up for it. Instead, you can just think to yourself, “Does that thought serve me?” If the answer is no, accept that it’s not a good fit, release them, and move on from it.

Decide upfront what your final destination is and what types of thoughts will support that mission. Determine upfront what core values you’ll need to get there. Then start filtering out anything else that doesn’t align with that.

This will probably feel hard to do at first - especially for those who have been carrying around problem passengers for years. But I promise you, if you keep practicing, you’ll start to notice that those negative thoughts pop up less and less, and in its place supportive thoughts will grow in its place. And those supportive passengers will multiply and before you realize it, you’ll have a whole plane full of passengers and flight attendants who are excited for where you’re going and what you’re creating.

And when a negative thought does pop up, you’ll know that it’s optional and you don’t have to hold on to that particular thought. Then you can move on and keep your focus on what you truly want to create in this life.

Summary

So to do a brief recap, we first need to get really clear on what we want to create in life and what we value in life. Once we know that, we can start to identify the thoughts (or passengers) that run through our head (or plane) on a daily basis. As the pilot of the plane, you get to determine which passengers belong with you in the plane and which ones don’t. Then you have the power to graciously escort those problem passengers, no matter how long they’ve been with you over the years, off of your plane so that you can focus on reaching your final destination.

As the pilot of your mind, you need to ask yourself, “Which passengers do I need to de-plane? Which passengers should I upgrade to first class?” Then, with those supportive passengers, start flying in the direction of what you want to create in this life.

Your travel guide,