Your personal theme can be changed, just like you change the theme of your browser or your computer. Your theme is built from partly what you have experienced in your life, partly what you have been taught, and partly from you genetics. These are the recurrent attitudes you approach life with. That's your theme.



If you are worried constantly, "easy to anger", take life with a "grain of salt", are "always optimistic" about what is going to turn up - these are all life themes.

You change them, like any habit, through substituting another habit for them. Yes, attitudes are habits. They are adopted by repetition.

You can control any of your attitudes, and should. Just as you stand out if you are laughing at the wrong point in a theater or crying when everyone is jubilant around you at a football game, you attitudes should be appropriate for what is going on around you. This doesn't mean you agree with everyone's reactions - but you can decide whether you want to call attention to yourself.

I covered this point of controlling your attitudes in my book "Go Thunk Yourself(TM)!" Re-programming your habits was covered in my "Go Thunk Yourself, S'more!".

Of course, I'm doing this for myself as I write this. The re-programming I've been doing in my own life has some interesting results so far. The program, as you may recall, is to play "The Secret" DVD several times every day for at least 30 days - and follow the tips and techniques in this DVD. You can also use Earl Nightingale's "The Strangest Secret".

I often listen to this as background while I am doing other work. What I've found is that my basic core attitudes have been changing. The text of the DVD has been becoming almost subliminal - listening to something like this makes it become nearly learned by rote, you often know the upcoming part and what is going to be said next. This is the exact point. If you can find a single recording which has a complete system on it, playing it over and over enables you to learn this and reprogram your life with it. There aren't a lot of these recordings, but you will find that many authors such as Wayne Dyer and Earl Nightingale said to constantly play other self-help tapes in your life, to surround you with these articles, books and so on. You are going to reprogram yourself in this fashion.

Oddly, you can do this by simply turning off your radio, TV and reading less newspapers during your day. It's interesting to see how quiet things are and what thoughts now come into your mind. If you do this, you can see what you are constantly thinking about during the day - what your "theme" is in life. You will see what your attitudes are and how you deal with things around you. Because you aren't constantly being inundated with stories of the dead, dying, or threatening - you now have time to track your own thoughts. And then you can decide whether you want to change them or not.

Reprogramming is like gradually replacing all the colored clothes with whites or vice-versa. You mostly only can pull out a single item at a time and sometimes you pull out the wrong thing - but it's ok to drop something back in. Sometimes you don't have a choice, since a white long-sleeved shirt might be entangled with a pair of jeans. But you simply take out the pair, untangle them, and then put back in the one you want.

As you play an MP3 or DVD daily, you start to give yourself a recurrent line of thought to compare your other thoughts with. What I've found is that this method will show up a regular and definite chronic line of thought in your life. With "The Secret" DVD, I'm starting to change any old patterns of self-doubt, anxiety, temper with the positive emotions I really always have cherished. Only now, I can simply keep these positive emotions in my life as a constant theme.

So in your efforts to change your own theme, you are simply changing the world around you. That's just the way it is. The only way this could fail would be in your keeping all this great stuff to yourself. But then, you'd be surrounded by people with secrets, wouldn't you? And you would have mysteries constantly appearing in your life, wouldn't you?

Your world and what you think is entirely up to you. What you experience around you is up to you. If you don't like the stress in your life, if you don't like the arguing, if you feel like you don't control where your life is heading - change it.

I've laid out in this article how you can do it. You can change your life to whatever you want it to be. You can travel, become a millionaire, live a rock star's life - anything you want. For me, I like living on a farm and having the time to do my artwork and write. You might like more action in your life - I cherish solitude. What you want in your life, what your theme is - all of this is up to you to change and sort out for yourself.

Whatever your life's theme song is - it's up to you. And only up to you. No one can change your life for you. Get one of the classics, or one of my books, or several - or listen to Dyer's tapes, or Nightingale's. Or pick up anyone else's and play them constantly for yourself, for your own personal good.

And you'll find your theme changing - so let us find you constantly humming your own theme song.