As the Holiday season and the year is coming to a close, it is a time to reflect and the best place to start is our mind. We all have a wonderful mind that takes an extremely beautiful and complex world and lets us interact with it. Too many people believe that the interaction is not on their terms—they react, hope for the best, let other events or people control them, and play the victim. I hope that you choose the opposite.

With so much going on in this world of billions and the constant information overload presented to us our brain creates filters to keep us sane. Through action or inaction we pick the filters. The very easy example of this is when you buy a new graphite black/grey Toyota 4Runner and then suddenly you see other Toyota 4Runners everywhere.

You never noticed them before but it now seems like they are everywhere you look. You have changed your filter and are now paying attention to this information that was always there. Want to be happy? Look for confirming evidence. The secret is that is was always there. Want to feel like your body is young and new? Act like it.

With every bite of food be thankful and ponder on how this meal will make you grow, bring you health, repair you, and let you operate in health and pleasure. When you wake up and feel run down, sore, achy, and beat up from training just think about how much it has done for you.

The reps, the poundage, the repetitive movement, and the stress that you have placed on it. We commonly forget what wonderful things our body does for us and we only push it more like an unfeeling taskmaster. Take a moment and look back on what a wonderful blessing your body is and the joy it brings you in training. We all love to train and see what we are capable of.

Our mind has this idea of our performance and our body translates that electrical impulse into a physical reality. Without changing our filter to look for this confirming evidence we could very easily become negative about our progress. You should be consciously changing your filter from one of negative to positive. Change your filter and give it a positive emotion as well.

I kinda threw in there the positive emotion thing without much explanation. The emotion is one of the biggest components to this filter. It will not be easy. My articles are short and the application is long. You will fall. You will get discouraged. You will allow your old filter and old emotion to take over. That is fine. Notice your filter. Notice when you did not select it properly and then grow. Filters are the key to happiness.