What do you tell yourself?
Some days you get what you want, and some days you don’t. Do you get what you want more often than not? If you do, you’re already choosing to focus positively at least part of the time. But what about people who DON’T have things going their way most of the time?
On the days when you don’t, what kind of things do you tell yourself in your own mind? Do you say things like “well, these things happen and everyone has good days and bad days”? Or do you talk to yourself more like, “well, you really screwed up this time”? Or, call yourself names and tell yourself why you deserved for this to happen, or “this is how my luck ALWAYS goes”?
Here’s how your mind works: You listen to, and you believe every single thing you tell yourself! Your mind doesn’t get sarcasm, or put-down jokes. It doesn’t get that you “don’t really mean it”. Your mind takes your words to be literal. So, given a choice between believing:
1. You’re an awful person, you have the worst luck, you deserve all terrible things, it’s too hard, you can NEVER do anything right, and you’re a terrible screwup; or
2. You’re a decent person, and valuable, you’re as good as anyone else, and sometimes these things happen, nobody is perfect, and it’s ok for YOU to be imperfect, tomorrow’s a new day, problems are there to be solved, it’s a challenge and You’re UP FOR IT! …
Which style of self-talk do you think will give you a more positive outcome?
Sometimes when I suggest to people that they get to CHOOSE what they tell themselves, and what they believe, they respond by saying, “yeah, but all that positive thinking, it’s not the truth, and when I try to tell myself the “positive” lies, I know the stories are lies. I feel dishonest. So you’re saying you WANT me to LIE to myself?”
Well, my response is this: No, I don’t want you to lie to yourself. I DO want you to notice that you do many more things right than wrong. Your mind listens to what you say and what you think. Your mind is a GOAL-SEEKING automated device. YOU get to tell it what to go after. It is deep-programmed that what you think about is what you want, and to go after it. If you think “I’m a piece of dog-stuff” your mind thinks that’s what you want to believe, that this is your GOAL, and it sets about proving this mind-set to you. Your mind is programmed to turn that into a goal, and to achieve it. So you can set about changing what you think about, or you can keep getting the negative results you’ve been getting.
If you want to seriously have a joyful life, and that’s not what your life looks like, you’re going to need to do some serious work on the way you think, the things you tell yourself about the way the world works, and *what you CHOOSE to focus your attention on all the time*. Think of your mind as if it’s a search engine. If you focus a search engine on poverty, if you type in “poverty”, the search engine isn’t going to find any effective methods to improve your income. It’s going to show you poverty and more poverty. If you tell your inner search engine to search for everything you’ve ever done wrong, that’s what it looks for. Try this today. Try looking for everything you do right. Now this means everything, from getting your clothes on correctly, brushing your teeth, making your bed, even eating meals. Example: A dieter sticks to his or her diet and faithfully eats 1200 calories a day for 28 days. On the 29th, our dieter has a meltdown, and eats a piece of cake. Many of us decide at this point to give up… not noticing that the one slip-up doesn’t undo all the good work. NOTICE this. Notice that you only messed up 1 out of 84 times. (3 meals a day for 28 days) We have programmed ourselves to take for granted the hundreds of little things we do right every day. We may do 100 or 500 things in a day, and only make 3 mistakes. What do we remember? The 3 mistakes. Because we focus on what we did wrong. In answer to the “you want me to lie to myself?” …. no, I want you to stop lying. I want you to tell the truth. The truth is that even on a bad day, we usually have done more things right than wrong. And when we are aware of doing lots of things right, we can stop sabotaging ourselves and start creating a more positive existence.
I have to admit that I didn’t start getting positive results of any sort in my life, my life was a series of crises, was one disaster after another, until I started telling myself that I deserved better. Until I started working on my beliefs (and yes, I did some on my own, and some with hypnosis working with a hypnotherapist, and some with psychological therapy.)
And I didn’t seriously start having JOY in my life until I was willing to let go of the self-sabotaging habits and beliefs I had about how Unjoyful life is, and how undeserving I was of Joy…. Not to mention the belief I had that if you got too happy, “the Gods” would pull the rug out from under you. That’s a REAL joy killer, there! But you know what? Even THAT one can be overcome.
