By Kim Ades
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What is the strength of your mind muscle? Think about it. I mean really think about it. Your mind is the strongest muscle in your body, and it reigns supreme over your whole life.

It determines your level of success, how you spend your time, with whom you spend it, how you live your life and to what degree you enjoy all of the elements that make up your life. It includes your career, relationships, health, wealth, family, recreation and overall well-being. If your mind muscle is not strong, then all other elements are in jeopardy.

As a writer and life coach, I'm asked everything from, "What should I tell my boss to get a raise?" and "Should I switch careers?" to "How do I make my son take showers more often?"

All of these questions are important, but all allude to the same false premise: "If I change my circumstances to make the people around me do what I want, then I will be happy." There can be no greater deception than to believe that circumstances or other people are responsible for your happiness. Your thinking, and nothing else, is responsible for your happiness.

Is your thinking generating the kind of happiness you always imagined? I can almost guarantee that there is at least one area in your life in which your thinking is out of tune with what your really want. The question is what to do about it.

At Frame of Mind Coaching, we often insist that coaching clients write in a personal journal every day and share these entries with their coaches.

We provide journaling assignments to get started and stay focused. This process allows coaches to uncover patterns of thought, beliefs and expectations of behavior that hinder joy and success. It is an essential part of coaching, and it’s the key element that makes the process deeply transformational.

You can try this on your own and see what you learn about yourself. Following is a journaling prompt to get you started.

1. Pick one area in your life where you are not as satisfied as you'd like to be.

2. Identify all the reasons why you are dissatisfied. Don't hold back. Write a list that is comprehensive and completely exhaustive. If you can’t think of viable reasons, take some guesses.

3. After you have written all the reasons down, review them and identify how many of them are due to circumstances and/or other people.

4. Then create a second list eliminating those reasons. What are you left with? What did you discover?

You might find that while you cannot change the people or the circumstances in your life, you can certainly change the way you view it all and how you deal with it. You might suddenly get struck with how hard you have been working to try to change things that are not in your control and how little time you have been working on changing the one thing that is possible for you to affect — your thinking.

Think carefully about this question: Is your mindset as robust as you'd like it to be? If not, it's time to give it some of your attention.

Kim Ades, MBA, is President of Frame of Mind Coaching and specializes in performance through thought management. By using her unique process of coaching through journaling, she works with clients to unveil and switch their thought patterns to ignite significant change and life transformation. She is now teaching this process to coaches all over the world for use with their clients. Visit www.frameofmindcoaching.com to sign up for a free, secure online journal.