There are different definitions of metacognition but for the purposes of this article I like the Dictionary.com definition: “awareness and understanding one’s thinking and cognitive processes; thinking about thinking”. Throughout much of history, at least as early as the writings in Proverbs of the Bible’s Old Testament, the philosophy that “as a man thinketh in his heart so is he” has been oft repeated in various ways. James Allen, a Twentieth Century English author, expressed the philosophy in his book “As A Man Thinketh”. Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American Poet and Philosopher, expressed the philosophy, as “a man is what he thinks about all day long”. If we believe that philosophy doesn’t it make sense to “think about what we’re thinking about”? How can we change self-defeating thoughts if we don’t even know we’re thinking them?

Ever heard the phrase, “you don’t know what you don’t know”? That phrase very aptly explains how we often don’t know what caused us to behave a certain way. For example, you just saw a reminder that you have a company report due soon and although you know you should start on it you don’t. Later when the report is overdue you’re stressed and angry with yourself for procrastinating but you likely don’t know the exact reason you procrastinated. Wouldn’t it be better to find out what caused you to procrastinate so you can change that behavior? Metacognition may help you to identify the thoughts that were in your mind when you procrastinated—were you angry that you accepted the assignment even though you knew you were already overloaded? Maybe the procrastination was a form of rebellion against your boss who made you feel you had to take the assignment. Or, maybe you had the thought that the project had to be perfect so you needed to wait until you had more information or in the right mood—when in reality it would have been better to start the project and make corrections before the project was completed. There are at least half a dozen underlying causes of procrastination so if we want to eliminate the self-defeating procrastination habit we need to “think about what we’re thinking about”.

Once you’ve used Metacognition to identify negative thoughts, which lead to negative habits, you can use positive affirmations to create positive self-talk to change your thoughts and habits to positive ones.

How do we “get our mind right”?—First we have to recognize the negative self-talk that we may be engaging in, such as; “it’s no use—no matter how hard I try I can’t lose weight” (which is not a medically true statement except for maybe some extreme cases), “I can’t remember peoples names—I just don’t have a good memory” (some people do seem to have a natural talent for remembering things but that doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t develop a good memory) and _________ (fill in the blank with your own negative self-talk). If you listen closely to your self-talk you’ll often hear yourself repeating the same negative self-talk over and over throughout the day. Some of the things we say to ourselves over and over is so offensive that if someone else were to say them to us we would be very angry with them but we tolerate it from ourselves. Just because we sometimes talk bad to ourselves does that mean we don’t like ourselves?—not necessarily it could just be that we’ve formed bad habits of negative self-talk. So now that we recognize our negative self-talk how do we get rid of it? Since our self-talk is really just our thoughts we can’t just stop it (even in deep meditation we can only slow down our self-talk (thoughts) so instead we must replace it with positive self-talk—which is created by repetition and proper use of positive affirmations.

Émile Coué (February 26, 1857 – July 2, 1926) (a French psychologist and pharmacist) may well have been the person who introduced Personal Development based on the use of positive affirmations—at a minimum he was a very successful pioneer in the field. Dr. Coué  is not only credited with helping thousands of people overcome mental and physical ailments with the use of positive affirmations, such as his famous affirmation, “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better” he is also credited with being a major influence on 20th Century Personal Development masters; Norman Vincent Peale, Robert Shuler, and W. Clement Stone.

I’ll close this post with a reminder; if you’re going to change something in your life—you’ve got to change something in your life, and if you’re going to change something in your life “you’re gonna get your mind right—and I mean right”.