Inside Out

To make the point more practical, let’s say our thinking is like cooking. The ingredients of a certain recipe are all the thoughts combined to make that reality, that dish. If a recipe didn’t turn out well, no cook would try to disassemble the completed dish, pull the ingredients back out individually and then try to figure out what was wrong with... See more

The only way to become insecure is to think about the life drama of me, myself and I. When I’m not thinking about myself personally, I am naturally secure, and can respond to anything in life with confidence, good cheer and a clear head.

Trying Becomes The Thing That Distracts You

Judy distinguishes between trying and focusing: trying means constantly questioning your performance, which overtakes the task itself.

She realized her "trying" was insecurity — worrying about not being good enough or forgetting steps — rather than doing the work.

That worry prevents you from responding... See more

When we are focused on creating and maintaining confidence from the outside-in, we are forced to make an effort to think about ourselves a lot. How am I doing? How do I look? Who’s noticing? What do they think? What should I do now? Confidence appears to be a special, personal state that requires us to calibrate our individual performance... See more

With each change in thought, there is a corresponding change in the experienced reality of the thinker of that thought. When people see the one-to-one link between thought and experience, they gain perspective on life. Changes in their experience of reality no longer look as though they are precipitated at random by outside events or forces.

Between them and their goals were minefields bristling with thoughts of previous failures, of their shortcomings as human beings, of things that were wrong with them, of people who had hurt them or people they had hurt, of fears they felt they could not overcome, of past traumas they couldn’t stop recalling again and again. Every time their freshly... See more

The principles give the power of experience to the person, not to life events . A “devastating” life event is a thought-event as soon as it has passed, just as the news of a virus is a thought-event for each person as soon as it is broadcast

"Once you understand that the nature of your thinking is variable, it won’t make sense (when you’re struggling) to apply a strategy to change something that’s not damaged and is designed to change on its own. Strategies require doing; doing requires thought; thought is what creates struggle. You wouldn’t smoke cigarettes to cure the lung cancer... See more