Whenever you feel pressurised or stressed because of a problem, your mind is busy trying to work out a solution. It tends to go over the same thoughts again and again. People talk about ‘cudgeling their mind’ or ‘racking their brains’ which makes it sound like a kind of torture! And in one way I suppose it is – it certainly doesn’t feel nice.

This happened to me the other morning. Soon after waking, my mind started buzzing over a problem with the design of a training programme. I could see a gazillion options to move forward and they kept parading themselves for evaluation. I went from one to another and back again, trying to choose the best one. The parade got faster and faster and my head went into a complete spin.

After an hour or two of this, I was getting worn out. It all seemed so complicated and I was not a jot nearer to a solution. So I decided to give up. I saw the futility of what I was doing and just decided not to bother with it anymore. With the decision made, I felt a sense of relief sweep in. Then I got on with something completely different – I think I put the bins out

As I went through the rest of the morning, I got on with other things and my mind was no longer bothered by the problem. Yet, sometime in the afternoon I suddenly saw the solution. There it was as clear as day! And I hadn’t had to work hard to find it – it arrived all by itself.

I realized afterwards that giving up when I did had made space for new thinking – fresh thoughts that I had not yet thought. The solution arrived as a fresh thought – inspiration!

This experience is also an insight into the question that I’m often asked – how do you ‘let go’ of unhelpful thoughts? The answer is that you can let go by giving up.

Giving up is not half-hearted; it’s the full monty. You do it when you are at your ‘wits end’, in other words, when you are fed up with the unproductive thinking going round in your head.

You know when you have really given up (not just kidding yourself) because of the feeling of relief it brings. Then you can get on with living life more lightly, knowing that new thoughts can arrive at any moment. And it’s these new thoughts that provide by far the best solutions.

But don’t just take my word for it – try giving up for yourself. Let me know how you get on

One evening after dinner, just as I was pleased to be indoors out of the rain, the phone rang. It was my son saying that his car would not start. He said he was at the swimming pool, so I set off on the 5 mile drive to help him.

The rain seemed to be easing and I began to anticipate a dry interval to get his car working again. But when I got to the pool, I couldn’t find him. I drove slowly around the car park a second time and he definitely wasn’t there. When I called him on the phone, I found out that he was at the pool in a different town!

I will admit to more than a moment of frustration – I was cross with myself for not checking. But I could see no other option than drive the 10 miles to the other town. Worse still, the sky looked ready for another downpour.

Fortunately it was at this point that I remembered the key principle – all my experience is created by my thinking. Remembering this turned the ten mile trip into a revelation.

To be honest, at first I was still feeling cross and frustrated because of what had happened. In other words, I was thinking about how past events should have been different – how I made a wrong assumption; how I should have checked the location; how I’d made a wasted journey, and so on. It was this thinking that was creating feelings of anger and frustration.

When I realized what was going on, somehow those thoughts loosened their grip on me. There seemed little point investing in such thinking if all it did was make me feel bad.

So for a few moments my thoughts about the past faded and I was able to notice the delightful shades of green in the trees and hedges, and the impressive layers of scudding clouds. I began to feel calmer.

But soon my thinking moved into the future – how was I going to get my son’s car started? Perhaps between us we could push-start it. Or maybe we could use battery leads and jump-start it. Or perhaps we would have to take the battery home and recharge it overnight.

While my mind ran through the options, I became switched off from my surroundings. Because I was totally preoccupied by the future, I was missing the present. At the same time I could feel anxiety building. Then, for the second time, I realized what was going on. It seemed so obvious – my thoughts about the future were creating the experience of anxiety.

The more this dawned on me, my thoughts about the future seemed to shrink. As my mind became less busy, I could feel the calmness return. And I was able to connect once more to the beauty of my surroundings.

During the rest of the journey, my feelings oscillated. When I became aware of building frustration I knew my thoughts had returned to the past. When instead I could feel anxiety welling up, I knew my thoughts had jumped into the future. But the sweet spot was in the present, when my mind wasn’t dwelling on anything in particular. It really surprised me just how good I felt in the middle of all the ‘hassle’ of the evening.

The upshot was that when I eventually arrived at the right place, my mind was calm enough to see the best option straightaway and we successfully started the car – so the story does have a happy ending.

More importantly, the story shows how we don’t have to work at feeling good or finding peace of mind – it’s our default setting! And we can only be diverted away from this when we become absorbed by the thoughts that bring unwanted feelings.

So look out for the next time you feel good for no reason!

This is important because when we feel stressed or overwhelmed with work or life, hope is the antidote. Going further, hope is also the solution to helplessness, resignation and despair.

If it was really possible to tap into an endless supply of hope, how much difference would it make to you?

In its most powerful undiluted form, hope is much more than wishful thinking. To have hope means ‘to expect with confidence’ – in other words, to count on a certain outcome. But given our inability to predict the future, how can this be?

Before we get to the answer, we need to remember where the experience of hope comes from. If you’ve been reading these posts for a while, you’ll notice a recurring theme: every experience we have comes from the thoughts we are thinking at the time. So the experience of hope must come from our thinking. So where do our thoughts come from?

Well, there’s no doubt that many of the thoughts you think are those you have thought before. Some are welcome, others less so. Either way they spring from your accumulated knowledge and experience. But what about new thoughts, thoughts you have never thought before?

Some people claim they bubble up from the unconscious mind but this is not very convincing. It implies that every new thought we have ever had and will ever have is already there.

Another attempt to explain where thoughts come from rests on the description of how the brain works by making new neural connections. But while this explains the biological changes that take place, it does not account for the origin of the content of thought.

In contrast, many spiritual traditions describe some kind of universal source of thought. They use different words – such as collective mind, universal intelligence, life energy, God – all of which attempt to point to the ever-present but formless source of thought.

Such a source is infinite and therefore gives us the potential for unlimited new thoughts. This is where we come back to hope. When you are not stuck on old thinking, new thought will always flow into your mind. You can be sure of this – you can count on this outcome.

Can you remember a time when you have had just the idea you needed ‘out of the blue’? It happened when you were not busy thinking about the problem but rather when you were thinking about nothing in particular, hence ‘out of the blue’.

So whatever problem or challenge you face, there is always the assurance that you can have fresh thoughts about it at any time. And these fresh thoughts are how solutions will unfold to you. This means that the potential solution is only a thought away. This is how you can be full of hope – hope-full. You are not on your own – you have an unlimited source of new thought to draw on!

All you need to remember is that new thought will automatically flow into your mind when you are not busy with the thoughts that are already there. A quieter mind is all it takes.

What he found particularly infuriating were people who repeatedly tapped their pens or flicked through their papers when he was making a presentation. This behavior threw him so much off his stride that he found it difficult to even think straight.

I’d like to share my answer with you because it actually applies to any situation that you find stressful or annoying. But first, here’s an analogy.

We all know that fire is a powerful force. It can bring huge benefits: it cooks our food, heats our homes and powers our transport. But fire can also be tremendously destructive, even life-threatening – think here of forest fires, man-made explosions and volcanic eruptions.

Now, imagine a box of matches. When struck, each match becomes a tiny fire. If it is fed with fuel, such as petrol, it will soon turn into a major blaze. If instead it is doused with water, the water would put the match out although it’s likely to leave a soggy mess.

Whenever a thought enters your mind, it is like a match. You can give it the fuel of your attention and it will soon grow into something much bigger. Alternatively, you could pour water on it by trying to suppress it. The question is: which option is the best choice?

The answer can be seen by going back to the senior executive. It became clear from our conversation that when he saw colleagues shuffling papers or tapping pens, the thought that arose in his mind was ‘my work does not matter – it’s not important’. The trouble started when he gave this thought most of his attention, just like adding petrol to a match. The resulting inferno in his mind burned up all his concentration and motivation – no wonder he found it hard to continue his presentation!

Suppose he had tried water instead? Then his attention would have been diverted away from his presentation by the mental effort of trying to suppress the thought. And just as any firefighter will tell you, water can cause much damage all on its own.

Fortunately there is a third option. We know that when a match is struck, it only has limited life on its own. Its energy is soon exhausted because, when the matchstick is burned through, it will automatically extinguish itself. A thought is exactly the same. After it enters your mind, if it is given neither the fuel of attention nor the water of suppression, it will soon fade away.

So my suggestion to the executive was to notice when he started to feel negative because a negative feeling is the signal that an unhelpful thought has been ‘struck’ (in his case it was the thought that ‘my work does not matter’). The critical point is not to pour on petrol by giving it serious attention; let it fade away like a single match with no fuel.

I know this works because I have done this in many different situations. By not fuelling the thought behind the negative feeling, the thought fades away and is automatically replaced with fresh thinking.

The good news is that when you begin to feel negative about a situation, you can choose how to respond to your own thinking – you can add petrol, pour on water or do nothing. Don’t just take my word for it – try it out over the next few days. You may even like to share your experience with other readers with a comment below.

Enjoy the experiment!

Of course, their reality was just as colourful as ours. The sky had a thousand hues of blue; the grass was as fresh a green; a lover’s eyes still sparkled like a kaleidoscope.

Our ancestors shared with us the same human perception of colour. It may surprise you but this can be a guide towards our most inspiring mental functioning.

You see, our ancestors shared with us an interesting trait: the perception of colour varies throughout the day. Check this for yourself – sometimes you are acutely aware of colour and other times you miss it completely. When did it last happen to you?

Perhaps you see your car catching the sunlight in the car park and notice that the shade is nearly the same as a car nearby, but somehow the colour has more warmth in it. In contrast, you stop to buy a coffee and do not register the colour of the vendor’s clothes. We all do things like this. We tune into and tune out of colour every day. I’d love to hear your examples (you can post a comment below).

So, what does this tell us about our general mental functioning? Well, obviously we detect colour through our sense of sight. We could describe this in terms of the physical structure of the eye and the optic nerve that connects with the brain. But this misses the key point: our sense of sight is turned on or off by whatever else we are thinking at the time.

This is how you can walk past a friend in the street and not notice them (perhaps you remember the toe-curling embarrassment?!!)  We apologise with something like ‘I’m so sorry – I didn’t see you there – my mind was somewhere completely different’. And this commonplace expression captures the truth beautifully.

It’s true with our other senses too – which feeds the old joke that when a man is reading the newspaper, he goes deaf!

The more serious point is that you’ll inevitably turn colour on and off. This is not a problem in itself but it is an indicator of your mental landscape. When you are in tune to colour, the indication is that your mental activity is relatively light and spacious, excellent for creativity and inspiration.

But when you are tuned out to colour, and living in black and white, the indication is that you are preoccupied mentally. This is a warning that you may be stuck in a mental rut.

Now here’s the key principle – awareness brings choice. Becoming more aware of when colour is on or off brings the opportunity for you to choose. You could think of it like traffic lights: colour ON signals a green light to continue; colour OFF is a yellow ‘mental rut’ warning – do you really want to follow your current line of thinking or drop it?

The good news is that you don’t need to make this another task on your list; simply notice what happens. With growing awareness you’ll find that you automatically tune into colour more often. You will literally be coming to your senses. And with this you’ll spend more time in your most creative and inspiring mental space.

Let me know how it works for you…

Now, even if you have never played tennis, there is something important here. When it’s in your best interests, you can challenge your own umpire! This could be at work or at home. It works like this.

We know that many things we do are habitual. Habits can serve you well; they can streamline action and conserve effort. You also know that some habits work against your best interests (you can fill in the blanks here!).

The most insidious habits are habits of thought, well-rehearsed mental pathways that lead in a downwards spiral. You know the kind of thing – you clip the kerb on the drive to work so you criticise yourself for slipshod driving. Then you go on to recall other cases where your action has been less than excellent. As the list builds in your mind, you begin to see a clear pattern of careless and slapdash behaviour. The only conclusion is that there is something wrong with you. It’s obviously deep-rooted and you’re never going to be able to fix it. And that fills you with bad feelings.

This type of thinking is not rational; neither is it helpful. It may be a pile of nonsense but we take it seriously. Because we have rehearsed these mental habits over the years, the results can develop quickly. One minute we are driving along quite happily, next minute we are feeling terrible at the bottom of the spiral.

But what happens if we recognize it for what it is – simply a stream of thinking. Then we have a choice. We can either believe that what we are thinking is the undeniable truth or we can choose not to take the thinking so seriously. The thoughts may linger briefly but without the oxygen of attention they will fade, replaced by different thoughts.

In recent months, I’ve found that sometimes I can catch the very moment I’m about to step down into the spiral. Recognising I could choose to carry on investing in my train of thought or I could use McEnroe’s famous line has enabled me to avoid unnecessary suffering. Even when I miss the first opportunity, the growing bad feelings are a sure sign that it would be in my best interests to stop taking my thinking seriously. When I do this, the downward spiral becomes more of a quick dip than a deep plunge.

As human beings, we think all of the time. Perhaps the ultimate choice you have is how you relate to your thinking minute by minute – whether you buy into it or whether you challenge the umpire. Either way, the consequences are yours.

The weather right now is so unseasonal that somehow I can’t take it seriously. If it were the depths of January it would be different because then the days are short, the nights long and dark and all nature appears to be dormant. Thoughts of spring would be far away.

But now, at the end of March, we know that this must be the last gasp of winter. Under the white blanket there are daffodils and primroses in flower; the buds on trees and hedges are ready to burst open; and the birds have already been practicing their courting songs.

If the seasons are a metaphor for our own lives, we all go through periods of winter. We experience these as cold and dark, with our life-energy close to zero. It can seem that winter has become permanent.

But if we take our winter thoughts less seriously, by giving them less attention, we’ll begin to see signs of life. We’ll rediscover that under the snow there are the shoots of new growth, buds swelling with fresh life and brave blooms already showing. Then we can feel confident of coming out the other side.

We can be sure that our personal winter is a passing phase, soon to be succeeded by the warmth and joy of spring.

Life can take us so far down a certain track that retracing our steps seems impossible. After all, we’ve invested much time and energy reaching where we are; we have relationships embedded into our way of life; we have financial commitments to meet. Life can become molded like a worn-out shoe; it may not be comfortable but it is familiar.

The good news is that there is hope! My favourite quote from George Eliot gets to the heart of it:

It’s never too late to be who you might have been

You see, what actually stops us making the changes we want is not the circumstances we are in but the thoughts we have about those circumstances. If we think it is impossible to change path, then impossible is exactly how we experience it. If we think that a relationship stops us making changes, then that is what we experience. If we think it is too late to change – it is!!

Liberation comes from realising that at any time you can have a new thought. In the blink of an eye, you can have a new thought and there is a never-ending supply of them. And for each of us, all that keeps new thoughts away is the attention we give to old thoughts.

How can you know if you are giving lots of attention to old, stale thoughts? Because if you are, you will feel stale. Your feelings are a great indicator of what you are thinking.

So whenever you feel dull, listless, drained or defeated, you are re-thinking old thoughts. They may seem so ‘important’ that you ‘have to’ keep thinking them. But when you withdraw your attention from them, you immediately open up space for new thought. And with new thought comes new possibilities.

This is what inspiration really is: fresh thinking that awakens, energises and motivates us. We all have the built-in ability to be inspired because we can all receive fresh thoughts. It’s only our obsession with worn-out thoughts that keeps us stuck. It’s never too late…!

As an example, let’s use a typical problem from the work context – a difficult boss (although what follows applies to any problem). The first thing to notice is a crucial distinction. The behaviour that your boss shows is a fact while the problem you experience with that behaviour is individual to you. In other words, problems are not objective facts; they are subjective experiences.

Because all our experiences are created first by the thoughts we are thinking at the time, for a problem to exist means that you have to be thinking a certain way. You already know that when something ‘takes your mind off it’ the experience of your problem temporarily goes away. Only when you start to think about it again does the problem become real once more.

The solution cannot lie within the thinking that creates the experience of a problem; keep thinking problem thoughts and the problem just gets bigger! This is at the heart of the well-known quote from Albert Einstein:

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it 

The solution can only come from new thinking – inspiration. So the question is: how do we get new thinking?

Well, this is where you can rely on your natural ability because new thoughts will always come when you stop crowding your mind with old thoughts. So if you want a solution to your problem, give your mind a break. This means a proper break, not simply moving on to think about another problem.

Start the break by framing a question such as: how can I best deal with the behaviour my boss is showing? And then leave it alone; go and do something completely different, preferably something you know does not need lots of thinking.

As your mind becomes less busy, new thoughts will begin to occur to you. Let them arrive without over-analysing them, as if you’re watching them pass by. You will recognise the solution thoughts by the good feelings that come with them – feelings often referred to as heart-warming or gut instinct.

Perhaps, as you have been reading this, you have remembered a previous occasion when you found a solution to a problem. At the time you may not have been aware that you were using the mechanism described here but you can be sure that all the ‘circuits’ are present. Your natural gift for creating a solution is just waiting to be activated!

I can say yes to all the above and, of course, there are hundreds of other possibilities. Yet, paradoxically, we can learn more from the anomalies – the times we are inspired for no apparent reason. Has this ever happened to you? Here’s a story of how it happened to me.

It was a dull, wet morning and I was attending a course in London. This was the third day that I had been commuting and because it was now Saturday, instead of the weekday crowds, there were just a handful of people waiting for the train.

Collar up, I sheltered under the canopy. Outside its reach was a dirty puddle, its surface pock-marked by each raindrop. On the opposite platform, the greenery that clung to the fence was soaked and bedraggled and, in the gulf between, the tracks lay dark and greasy.

Then, completely unexpectedly, I was overwhelmed with the joy of being alive. It was if my senses were suddenly switched to full volume – I was thrilled by the scent of freshness; I was able to hear the exquisite singing of a blackbird; I could feel energy surge through my body. My eyes welled at the sheer beauty of the scene; I felt so glad to be part of it.

At the time, I couldn’t explain how this happened and for many years afterwards it remained one of those anomalies. While it ‘made sense’ to be inspired at the top of a mountain, this didn’t apply to an ordinary railway station!

But over the last year or so, I’ve come to realise that whatever experience I have is created first by my thinking. Whether this is conscious or not doesn’t matter – my thoughts are the origin of my experience. This is true for you too and every other human being.

As being inspired is a particular type of experience (a very rewarding and life-affirming one) this too must come from our thinking. Somehow, at that rain-soaked station, my thinking led me to the inspiring experience.

Now comes a tempting but ultimately fruitless folly – to attempt to control the thoughts we have. We can’t – by the time we realise they are thoughts, we’ve already thought them! Neither can we think ourselves into inspiration by will-power – I guess you’ve already proved this to yourself – becoming inspired is not an intellectual process.

Fortunately we have another priceless human characteristic – a built-in bias towards inspiration. Whenever our thinking gets less busy, our nature is to find inspiration, just like a compass needle will naturally find north when interfering magnetic forces are removed.

This is what happened to me waiting for the train – my interfering thinking died down enough for my natural bias towards inspiration to be revealed. Whenever you are inspired, the same is true.

Remember that you are the creator of inspiration. Rather than your world inspiring you, you inspire your world!