“As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.”

“As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.”

If we really understood those words, it would change our lives. I can tell you the very day I got on the path to true success because it was the day that I realized that the whole process started between my ears! I was then and I am now what I believed I was.

You are who you think you are! No more. No less. In your heart or soul - the collection of your mind, emotions and will - you have created a definition of yourself and so have I. All of us do this. And our outer world continually manifests what that set of definitions in the same way that a thermostat will always adjust the temperature of a room back to its setting.

I call this "The Thermostat Principle" and you should keep reading! It's the subject of my next book.

Think about it this way. If the thermostat of a room is set for 74 degrees, what happens when the door is opened on a hot day? Right! The air conditioner will turn on and begin to blow cold air until the room gets back to the level for which it’s been set: 74 degrees. If the thermostat is set for 74 degrees and it’s a cold day outside, the furnace will kick on and blast warm air into the entire house just to get the temperature in the room back up to 74 degrees. The entire system is set up to make sure it returns to that setting – the definition of “comfortable” with which you have set the thermostat.

Our systems – our lives, relationships, work, habits – everything tend to line up to bring us back to our internal setting. When I first really, truly understood this it made me kind of sad and somber. I looked at what I felt like was a lack of productivity and a lack of success and realized that I had created my own world. For better or for worse, I was 100% responsible for what I saw as a result of how I thought.

I had set my thermostat to “Just Above Average” and left it there for years! Therefore, no matter difficult things became from time to time, I was always able to get my life back to just above average. When I would experience big successes, I would follow them up with a setback or something that would bring my life back down to just above average. If new opportunities came to me, I would habitually choose the ones that produced more just above average-ness instead of the ones that opened a door to possible greatness. My thermostat was constantly adjusting my world.

Through it all, at least my thermostat was working! I could take some victory from that, right?

So then it made me happy after I got over myself! I got happy because I knew that I was just as close to changing my life by changing my thoughts! If the way I thought and the way I thought about myself had created a just-above-average life, then elevating my thoughts could elevate my life! Right?!!

Exactly.

There’s another thing, too. If you leave the door open so that it’s difficult for the temperature to come back to the proper setting, the air conditioner or furnace will literally go all day and all night trying to get back to the setting for which they are programmed, burning up a lot of energy in the process. This is what happens in a lot of our lives. We burn ourselves out and used a lot of energy to try to change the circumstances in our lives – our temperature – but we don’t realize that it’s more productive, faster and costs us less energy to just change our settings.

My next task was to begin to search for ways to rewire my brain. "Live Big. Die Empty" contains some of the techniques that I used to start taking my life in a better direction - to start living bigger so that I could bring to fruition everything God placed in me.

You can begin to “Live Big and Die Empty”, too! Order my book and you're on your way!

Mark Anthony McCray is the Founder of "Live Big, Die Empty" a movement designed to help people live life more abundantly and walk in the purposes for which they were created. Write or call 832-566-2001 for more information and follow Mark on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/MARKMCCRAY and http://www.twitter.com/LiveBigDieEmpty