Daily Gratitude: How do you “think” about things? Most people actually have pictures in their mind, not words. Try this. See if you can just think of the word “car”. How’d you do? I bet you either saw an image of the word sitting in a dictionary, or more likely you pictured some specific type and color of a car. We are visual people. Seeing the word “car” doesn’t really make you feel one way or another. Perhaps you have bad memories of a boarding school teacher yelling at you or another student for an incorrect spelling. But many people will feel something almost automatically if they see an actual car – perhaps one they want or one they had in the past. These feelings just pop up. Then we normally assign a “good” or “ bad” adjective to those feelings. In many cases next comes some sort of action. That action may simply be telling another about their great desire to have a blue Lamborghini. Sometimes the action is to figure out something they need at the store and to go get it just to be in A car. If it’s something you want, those feelings cause you to take one or more actions. This leads to results. This may sound inconsequential but if you sometimes wonder why you did something, you should be able to trace it backwards. It’s the feelings part that tends to get us in trouble and once we recognize that, and know where the feelings lie in the process, we can do something about it if the results aren’t what we desire. Always go back to the thought and the subsequent feeling.