We accept impossibility too often. And when things work out that seemed at first impossible, we’ll quickly remind ourselves of the times things didn’t work out, just as we knew they wouldn’t. Maybe that’s just me. My friend said a great line the other day. She said, “I’m afraid I’ll never not be crazy.” I love that. We’re all pretty much insane.
Our natural mind is not one that accepts “good” very easily. Even when good things are abounding, we’re just sitting by waiting for it to end. What a cynical view of life. Never accepting good things happening to us because we’re never expecting good things to happen to us. We have to put our minds through training to become better at seeing the good in life and not constantly anticipating daily armageddons.
A lot of it comes down to what we’re feeding our minds in regard to what we read and listen to. No, you don’t CONSTANTLY have to be reading books by Tony Robbins or listening to speakers like Les Brown. It should be integrated through your week more consistently than it probably is now, but you need to mix things up. Variety is in fact the spice of life. I love reading and can read all day but I’m not just reading John Maxwell books. Two books that I’ve really loved reading lately are, “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee” and “The Secret History of the World by Mark Booth”. Two books that really have nothing to do with personal growth.
People get so caught up in wanting to change the whole universe in a single week or a single day. They submerge themselves so much in reading certain success literature and listening to success-oriented audios, that they stress themselves out almost completely if they’re not doing it 24-7. First, you have to sleep. Second, there are other important aspects of your life that you still need to incorporate. It’s good that you want to develop more, but don’t expect this process to be any different than any other process that has ever existed.
People are also quickly let down because their whole universe didn’t change within a week or a day. They listened and read to the point of creating a new stress and ultimately gave up on this new thing entirely. Rather than consistently incorporating new things into their lives steadily and without rushing, they throw everything on themselves all at once. Because they’re not where Tony Robbins is or someone that has studied that type of material for a stretch of time, they give up.
So, to start taking those steps to train our minds to think better and expect better, we just do things consistently. We slowly build new habits, like reading and listening. We also watch the things we say to ourselves. We start working on catching ourselves when a self-defeating thought comes to mind. When we think something like, “I can’t believe this is happening to me,” we replace it with, “I’m really glad this is happening.”
Be patient with yourself. Let the process be just that, a process. Things of value take time. Recognizing that your life is good and there are good things happening is extremely valuable.
My friend Aurora inspired the title of this post. Her amazing writing is found here
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