Pink Bucket Thinking

A guide to choosing your day-to-day thoughts so that you get more of what you want in life!

Tony Burgess, Julie French

• Publisher: SRA Books
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781909116429
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Personal Success
• Index: Psychology

Ever felt like your thoughts are happening automatically, messing up parts of your life? If so, you're not alone! And there's another better way! Start to choose your thinking more often and you'll be more empowered and in control of what you experience and achieve. Pink bucket thinking is the particular blend of mental activity that works most effectively for you at any given time. It'll help you enjoy life, achieve more, connect, and thrive. Its power is in its simplicity. Making a positive difference internationally through their work in personal and professional development, Tony Burgess and Julie French invite you to join them on a voyage of self-discovery. A journey that will ultimately help you make the choice – to 'think' more 'pink'.

Chapter 1 – Why bother to examine your inner world?

Chapter 1 – Why bother to examine your inner world?

The way your mind makes sense of the world will define your every ex­perience. It’ll affect everything.

Your mental filters will determine what and how information is processed and how you will respond. Everything hitting your senses moment by moment has to trickle through your current inner stuff.

It has to filter through:

• • Your thoughts
  • Your ideas
  • Your attitudes
  • Your rules
  • Your beliefs
  • Your self-talk
  • Your expectations
  • Your meanings already given to things
  • Your sense of self
  • Your current emotional state
  • Your values
  • Your direction of focus
  • Your representations of your past experiences (memories)
  • Your politics
  • Your philosophy on life
  • Your sense of purpose
  • Your motivations
  • Your fears and insecurities
  • Your passions
  • Your intentions
  • Your aspirations
  • Your religious persuasion
  • Your degree of openness to new ideas
  • Your inspirations and admirations
  • Your personal preferences
  • Your habits

And more.

This filtering process helps your mind to shape the vast amounts of raw in­formation that’s hitting your senses every second into a mental and emotional representation. This RE-presentation becomes your heavily biased version of reality. Of course, it will all seem so real to you, almost as if no filtering had happened at all. It will seem as if you had direct access to the only true version of reality. In fact none of us directly experience the raw truth in our day-to-day thinking and experiences. We’re all mentally filtering moment-by-moment and representing truth to ourselves. Everyone is walking around with his or her very own unique version of reality. Each of us will experience, respond and behave according to our own particular version of that so-called truth and reality. For example, a comment by a politician on a news programme could be experienced as solid or outrageous, selfless or selfish, ridiculous or inspired … it all just depends upon who is listening and how they are filtering.

Your heavily filtered representation of reality is generally so convincing to you, it will affect what happens next. Most importantly, it can – and will – affect how much you access your special blend of resourcefulness as a unique and magnificent human being. Clearly, the degree to which you are tapping into your inner resources, will affect what you do and how you do it. Put simply, if you’re feeling unresourceful, you are less likely to come up with helpful so­lutions or you may shy away from taking useful action. However, when you’re feeling resourceful, you’ll live more fully, step into the arena of life, receive opportunities more easily and make things happen.

Imagine that surrounding your powerful inner resourcefulness you have a whole series of gates that can be wide open, partially open or fully closed. Your inner stuff in any given moment will determine how open or closed your inner resource gates are. Helpful inner stuff will open your resource gates. Unhelpful inner stuff will close them. If your inner resource gates are set wide open then your resourcefulness will be flowing fully and freely. If your inner resource gates are closed tight they’ll block the flow of your resourcefulness into your behaviours, experiences and responses. Sometimes, of course, your inner stuff may cause your inner resource gates to be partially open, meaning only a proportion of your resourcefulness would be able to flow on through.

All of this matters! It affects outcomes!

If your resourcefulness is held back, it will skew the odds against you achieving and experiencing what you want. If your resourcefulness is flowing freely and fully, it will skew the odds more in favour of you achieving and experiencing what you want. Given that mental filtering is happening in every moment, every day, every week, every month, every year and ultimately throughout your entire lifetime, you can begin to understand that your inner stuff will have a profound influence upon the quality of your experiences and the levels of achievement you attain in chapters of your life.

Noticing what is going on in your inner world (going on regular ‘inspeditions’*) will help you assess how well it’s supporting you and your life.

Is your inner stuff helping or hindering progress? Is it smoothing the way or getting in the way?

When you start to notice more about the effects of your inner stuff, it allows you to make better choices. Given that there’s an almost unlimited number of ways to mentally and emotionally represent any current circumstance, memory, or anticipated future, if your current representations aren’t working for you, you can start to consider what alternative inner stuff might work better. This is where you start to shuffle over from being in the passenger seat of your life and into the driver’s seat; where you start to steer things purposefully towards the experiences and outcomes that you really do want in life.

At an extreme, this can be the difference between living life as victim or victor. On another level, it may be the opportunity for you to simply fine-tune your inner stuff so that you’re experiencing even better results and experiences than you are already.

Let me illustrate with a simple example. If your inner stuff includes deciding ‘I can’t possibly do this’ then your resource gates will probably become partially or fully closed and the low levels o...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Thank you to you the reader
• Contents
• Introduction – A simple idea that caught on!
• Chapter 1 – Why bother to examine your inner world?
• Chapter 2 – Noticing how much of your think is pink
• Chapter 3 – Keeping yourself in the driving seat!
• Chapter 4 – Creating a strong positive self-concept for yourself!
• Chapter 5 – See the diamond in people
• Chapter 6 – Optimism, calamity and solutions
• Chapter 7 – How do you mean?
• Chapter 8 – Clarity about what you do want
• Chapter 9 – Your relationship with the past
• Chapter 10 – Let go of neediness
• Chapter 11 – Be willing to flex and adapt
• Chapter 12 – Compassion and kindness bring immediate returns
• Chapter 13 – Living in love and the attitude of gratitude
• Chapter 14 – Doing it your way when living in the pink!
• About the authors
• Together
• Other books by Tony Burgess and Julie French