You Become What You Think About

“You Become What You Think About

All Day Long!”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

An Article by Jim “Gymbeaux” Brown, July 26, 2024 

The year was 1975, I was a Yeoman First Class Petty Officer (E6) with the U. S. Coast Guard.  I had been selected to become a Class A Yeoman School Instructor which at the time seemed peculiar since I had never attended Yeoman School.  I was known as someone who “struck” for a particular rating. In simple terms, I was placed into a position where I was able to take advantage of experienced Yeomen. If I took the appropriate mail-in courses and passed a service-wide examination, I could and was promoted to Yeoman Third Class Petty Officer. (E4)  I did that in 1966 and the rest is history.  I entered the Coast Guard as a Seaman Recruit and eventually retired as a Lieutenant with a lot of promotions in between. 

I tell you this to set the stage for the rest of this Nugget and how it relates to the Emerson quote as its title; not to brag about my career.  I just found it strange that a “striker” would become the “instructor.”  I doubt this would have happened had I not been mentored by several of the best people I have ever served with while assigned to the Eighth Coast Guard District Office in New Orleans! 

We moved Yeoman School from Governors Island, New York to Petaluma, California; a bigger change in environment would be impossible to imagine.  Governors Island was in the heart of New York City’s harbor at the foot of Manhattan and across from the Statue of Liberty.  Petaluma was huge, several hundred acres and a former U. S. Army Communication Base located completely in the country surrounded by farmlands, cows and wild deer and barbed wire fencing. 

The move was confusing to say the lease.  New facilities, lack of proper equipment (manual typewriters versus electric typewriters), new members on the base, old friends left behind.  As a result of the change of duty stations, there was a second roster of students that reported aboard and we were only set up for one such class.  The Training Officer decided that the best decision was to separate the students into two groups. One group would consist of the supposedly smarter students and the remainder would be assigned to, for lack of a better term, the less intelligent of the two groups of students. 

That was the beginning of a remarkable chain of events for me.  I was assigned to teach the “less intelligent” students.  To be honest, I had no clue what I was doing as I was doing it, I did what I thought was right – at the time.  During my 4 weeks of instructor training, we were all taught how to create lesson plans, create graphic posters whenever they were needed but more importantly, we were taught how to stand, where to stand, what NOT to do and what we were supposed to do.  That became rule #1 for all instructors.  On paper and in the instructor’s training course, that all seemed to make sense to the people who created the program but made little sense to me after trying it,  still I followed along with the training. 

Once I arrived at the Training Center in Petaluma, CA, I made a personal decision that I was not all that effective of an instructor using the techniques I had been taught.  One day at the beginning of class I made a decision “on the fly.”  I began the class as I always had, very structured, very formal, I stood behind the podium and taught the class.  Then after lunch, I took an entirely different approach.  I removed the podium; I stood in front of the class but instead of just standing there I began to walk up and down the isles with students on both sides of me.  Occasionally, I would pause and touch one of the students on their shoulder and move on.  At the end of the day, I stopped the class and asked them if they noticed anything different between the morning session and the afternoon session.  Most of the class said that the afternoon section seemed more relaxed and to my surprise, they thought of me as a real person, I was just like they were and was someone who had become what they wanted to become; not me but a Yeoman.  I then asked them which technique did they prefer?  They all said the afternoon Jim Brown, not the morning Jim Brown.  It was on that day I learned how to really teach a class.  It is not always what others think you should be doing, oftentimes it is more of how YOU respond to what the people want from you.  Obviously, I could not violate any respect due to someone who is senior in rank to me, specifically the unit’s Training Officer.  Still, I began teaching the way the students felt they had a better chance to learn.  THIS WAS A HUGE REVELATION TO ME!  HUGE! 

Back to the smart class versus the less intelligent class.  I knew what the training office had done.  They expected that if they put all the smart students in one class room, they may graduate sooner and that would enable them to get back into a proper scheduling of the next new classes to come.  I did not tell the training office what I did next, just did it on a whim.  I gathered the students together and told them what had happened and that some people felt that this class (them) didn’t have the level of intelligence to compete with the smarter students and it would take longer for them to complete the training. THAT WAS ALL THAT IT TOOK!  The students took off running and never looked back!  They finished not only ahead of schedule, they finished ahead of the smart class of students.  

This brings me back to the quote.  You become what you think about all day long!  You actually do.  I believed I had a classroom of intelligent, well-liked students and taught them to think in the same way.  Much later in life I read most if not all of the Wallace Wattles books which are all amazing reads.  He had one recurring sentence in all of his writings.  If you wanted to be rich, healthy or whatever, you knew that you could as long as “you think in a certain way.”  He did not elaborate on what that certain way was but it was obvious, just like the quote, YOU BECOME WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT ALL DAY LONG!  If you consider yourself a loser, you will be a loser if you are not one already.  If you consider yourself a winner, you become a winner even if you have always thought of yourself as a loser in the past.  So, I thought about Emerson and Wattles and came up with the following thought: 

You become what you think about most, so think about only GOOD and WHOLESOME thoughts about you and what you want and that relates to “thinking in a certain way” just as Wattles had recommended.  My smart students formerly considered to be less intelligent students proved not only the leadership wrong, they exceeded what they had believed about themselves prior to entering school.  

I don’t want to leave the impression that I was some sort of genius.  I had never been taught any of this, I did it as a reflective action and we all know, every action has a certain and almost predictable reaction.  Maybe I was just lucky but I don’t think so.  I feel as if someone or some thing guided me to do what I did and I don’t regret a moment of it.  My students thought they were all winners and they were! 

Then I began to realize I had been living what I had just done without knowing it.   I had created a plan that would eventually see me retiring from the Coast Guard as a Lieutenant after entering the service at the very bottom of the ranking structure as a Seaman Recruit (SR).  I, like everyone else, was promoted to Seaman Apprentice (SA) upon graduation from Boot Camp.  Unconsciously I began to ask questions as to what I needed to do to make the grade of Seaman (SN) the next promotion in a line that would go from E-1 (SR) to eventually Master Chief Pettey Officer (E-9) in a certain rating like Yeoman or Storekeeper etc.  In other words, not only had I established a GOAL or OBJECTIVE, I had began creating a mental plan to achieve what I had wanted.  Again, like both Emerson and Wallace suggests, I was thinking about what I wanted, I was “thinking in a certain way” and I never lost my focus on both.  I saw myself as a Chief Petty Officer which at that time was a lofty goal for sure.  For almost everyone, making Chief Petty Officer was a very special achievement!

 I am NOT naive, I fully understand that if you are not educated and believe in the Catholic faith, you will never be able to become Pope.  In the 1950s, I had envisioned myself playing basketball in college.  When you are only 5 foot 10 inches tall, the odds of either or both of these things were very unlikely to occur.  Were they impossible?  No, just very unrealistic.  You CAN become whatever it is you want to become but there are restrictions as just mentioned.  For most choices, you can consider the guidance given me by Joe Tye when he suggests that we are all given a bag of cement, a shovel and water.  We can then either build a wall to stop us from going any further or we can build a walkway around whatever walls are standing in our way.  It’s a great metaphor for life. 

Want more proof?  It is almost impossible to like everyone you meet in life.  Different strokes for different folks.  As a real estate broker, responsible for a lot of real estate agents (105 was the highest number I had ever achieved), is it impossible to like every agent that signs onto your company?  I did my best, but like in so many businesses, there was “this one person” that just made life miserable with every interaction they were involved in.  The animosity between the two of us went on for several months and I avoided talking with her and that was just wrong but it made my life a little easier.  Then I made the mental decision to “think in a certain way!”  I decided  to “love this person!”  Don’t misinterpret “love” for sexual love but rather just a true feeling of caring for another individual and support them in their believes as long as those beliefs are morally correct and also legal.  Shouldn’t have to put that disclaimer in but someone will obviously take exception to it. 

What happened next is nothing short of a miracle.  Every time I saw the agent I said to myself, “I love this person!”  I also thought what I had been teaching all of my agents to do. That was to think that they could see a tattoo on the forehead of everyone they meet that read. WCILFTP.  What does that mean?  WHAT CAN I LEARN FROM THIS PERSON.  When you marry those two thoughts, you will be amazed, as I did, the results that those two thoughts can bring about.  In short order over just a matter of a couple of weeks, our relationship completely changed and we have been friends ever since.  I changed, the agent changed and all was well in my business space and life because of it.  I had used the cement to build a wall but then I began to use the cement to build a walkway around a perceived problem.  What changed was the way each one of us thought of the other.  We began to care about the other person because we both ended up “thinking in a certain way!” 

Another example of how this all works happened when I received a call “out of the blue” from an owner of a large real estate office in Mandeville, about 20 minutes from where I lived in Slidell.  He wanted me to become the new manager/trainer for his Mandeville Real Estate Office; they had about 25 agents at that time.  First. I was honored and then I wondered how he picked me being 20 minutes away, for his new manager?  I asked. He said I had created a good resume of getting results, being an involved member of the Local Board of REALTORS® and through the “word of mouth.”  The “word of mouth” was especially meaningful to me because that is how I conducted my business, how I grew my business and how I wanted those to react that I worked with because “word of mouth” is the BEST form of advertising, EVER!  People are giving other people THEIR personal RECOMMENDATION.  The answer to his initial question was definitely yes and I took the job going form a real estate sales agent to a real estate office manager; something I had never done before, knew nothing about but knew I could handle it.  

In the very popular book The Secret, it describes how the universe works.  You put in place the Emerson quote, you become what you think about all day, and the Wallace principle of doing things in a “certain way” and miracles tend to happen.  It is actually goal setting with a purpose but most people shy away from anything closely related to having to set goals for themselves.  Setting a goal without action and without a third party to keep you accountable to what you want to achieve, is nothing more than HOPE   Dr. John Maxwell often states, “hope is not an effective strategy!”  Hope without action is nothing more than a wish and we all know how wishes work out for us.  First you must understand that like most adults having graduated from high school, I stopped reading books when I left school; just wasn’t interested.  But then…I was in a waiting room and picked up a magazine and I saw an advertisement for a two-set cassette recording of a program called “Creating Teamwork” by Lee Shelton.  I knew I was taking on a new position as manager so I thought, what the heck, and I ordered it.  I found the tapes so fascinating that I listened to them over and over again before I began my new job as manager which in effect is exactly what the tapes were all about – creating teamwork! Teamwork may not have existed or if did, how was I going to improve what was already in place.  

I later met Lee Shelton and attended one of his seminars.  He introduced me to the audience and then said “Jim could teach this seminar as good as he could” because he knew how I put into practice those things he taught.  In keeping with the theme of this Nugget, Shelton taught that the mood you are in as you enter your work space will eventually become the mood for the entire office.  He pointed out that people can immediately detect when someone is in a sour mood or a happy mood.  Therefore. if you want a happy work place, begin by making the personal decision every morning that it is a great day to be alive.  Believe that you could not be any happier.  Happiness like gloom and doom are contagious and spread through casual contact.  Don’t believe me?  Just say “hello” or “good morning” to a total stranger you see on the street or in a store and then watch the expression change on THEIR face as you do.  I have experienced this on many occasions; it just works!  Why, because I thought and acted in a “certain way!” 

The greatest compliment I could have received came from a competitor when he called and told me that he called because he was having a bad day and he new that our conversation would pick him up because it always did in the past.  Was I always happy the way things were going?  Certainly not but very few people ever knew it.  Being upbeat was the best beat to be! 

Going back to my Coast Guard career.  Most people that enlist are able to reach the pay grade of E6 over the course of a 20-year career.  The next REALLY BIG promotion is when the First-Class Petty Officer (E6) is promoted to Chief Petty Officer (E7).  Such a promotion carries with it more income, more responsibility and frankly more respect from both the enlisted side of the service as well as the Officer Corps of the service.  There is a perceived and certain degree of trust and specific knowledge about their specialty, or in my case, a Chief Yeoman (administrative work for the most part).  It was such an honor to become a Chief!  I began focusing on becoming a chief (E7) when I was still an E5 Petty Officer Second Class.  I knew that I had to first satisfy a goal that was directly between E5 and E7 and that first making E6, First Class Petty Officer.  I focused on what I wanted most.  I thought about sewing on the E6 rating badges on my uniform and then instead of relying on a hope of becoming an E6, I began to study more about my rating and took the first service-wide exam available to me and yes, I passed, and yes, I was promoted to E6.  There was a requirement that you had to be an E6 for at least 24 months BEFORE you qualified to take the exam for E7.  It was during those two months that I worked on my specialty but I also worked on my relationships with others that I served with and served for.  Trust is everything, so if you want people to trust you, you must work on creating that trust by demonstrating that you know what you are doing and they can all count on you doing the right things; especially when no one is watching. 

I only tell you this because it puts a confirmation stamp on what I believe and that is the Emerson quote as modified by Wattles.  I never lost focus on what I wanted but more importantly I TOOK ACTION to make it happen and it happened.  Not only did I make Chief Petty Officer, I was later promoted to Chief Warrant Officer which signifies to others that you have successfully been recognized as trustworthy, you can handle more and more responsibilities, you can make decisions and you have become a very trusted and respected link between the enlisted members of the service and the general Officer Corps of the service.  

I REMAINED FOCUSED ON WHAT I WANTED, I THOUGHT IN A CERTAIN WAY AND THEN I TOOK ACTION TO MAKE IT ALL HAPPEN. 

But it got a lot better and maybe that is the icing on the cake in regards to a technique for success that I had accidently discovered.  I was a Chief Warrant Officer W3. That meant I went from Chief, to Chief Warrant Officer and attained three promotions as a Warrant officer W1 through CWO3, there was only one more to attain, CWO4, the crème dela crème for an enlisted member of the Coast Guard.  How did it get better?  The Coast Guard created a Limited Duty Officer (LDO) program where they selected people within their specialty to be promoted to Lieutenant which in the pay grade list would be an O3 skipping over O1 and 02.  The highest anyone could get through this program was O4 or Lieutenant Commander.  Length of service would make it very difficult if not impossible to go beyond that pay grade as an LDO (Limited Duty Officer).  When the Guard announced the new program, my Commanding Officer encouraged me to apply.  Just his encouragement put an exclamation mark on my career because I doubted, he would have recommended such a leap unless you have proven to him that you deserved it.  Once again, I put the theory to the test and became laser focused on making the best application I could to be considered as one of only TWO members each YEAR, to receive this type of promotion for my specialty.  As it turned out, I was selected and eventually retired from the service as a Lieutenant (03).      

 Always keep in mind what Zig Ziglar taught, “If you think you can or if you think you can’t, either way you will be right!”  I believe that may have first been said by Henry Ford.  The choice is yours!  

YOU GOT THIS! 

Recommended Reading List of Wallace Wattles:

The Science of Getting Rich

The Science of Being Well

The Science of Being Great

How to Get What You Want

 

Get them all in one book at:  Amazon.com, search for Wallace Wattles