As mentioned before, “Happy Thinking” is about dealing with unhelpful thinking patterns using “tools”. However, the tools one uses to deal with one’s mind are obviously not real metal tools like what a mechanic might use! One cannot open up one’s skull to work on one’s mind (please do not even try!). Luckily a more practical option is however available to all of us, and that is to use one’s inner voice to “talk” to one’s mind and change how it thinks. This is not as strange as you may imagine. Everyone has an inner voice which is the voice you use when “thinking” to yourself. For example when you look out of a window, your “voice” might tell you, “Wow, this view is so beautiful”. In some people, this voice is quite obvious all the time, whereas, in others, it may mostly be subtle and relatively silent. One may “hear” one’s inner voice when one reads and perhaps you can hear your inner voice right now as you read this very sentence!
We all can listen to our inner voice. For example, if I ask you to silently tell yourself the answer to the hopefully simple mathematical problem, “4 + 4 = ?”, it’s your inner voice that will speak to you and say “8”.
Many tools in happy thinking will use one’s inner voice to deal with one’s thoughts. It’s sort of like talking to oneself, but doing so inside one’s mind rather than speaking words out loud. In the next section, I will discuss with you the “pause tool” and this will make it clear to you how you can use your inner voice to deal with thoughts in your mind.