Negative was a hard concept to understand when I was young. Subtraction. Multiplying a positive number with a negative one and still getting a negative number.
Negative became harder to understand as I got older.
We easily hide our negative thoughts. Our negative beliefs about ourselves. We don’t easily see how our negative thinking takes away from being more productive or happy yet we easily share our negative opinions of others and their ideas.
Read the above paragraph slowly. (We are all guilty of this.)
The problem is that most times we can convince ourselves of anything. If we are afraid or if we don’t feel worthy or able, we tell ourselves convincingly that we are right. This faulty logic leads us to stop and only endure.
When trapped by our negative thoughts we live within our emotions. Negative thoughts lead to anger, resentment, envy and jealousy. They fill our souls with helplessness and our hearts with fatigue.
We work hard at justifying why we believe our negative thoughts. Our stories to others are simply for us to hear why we are right further convincing us that our negative thoughts are true, unavoidable, and not easily changed.
This is insanity! Why don’t we spend more time finding a “way out”? Why don’t we stop easily sharing negative thoughts about others and their actions or ideas and focus our work to find a different way to get to our goal? To think through what is really important to us and then spend our time working to realize what we value and want to achieve?
Could it be that the person or persons we interact with either don’t understand me well enough or can’t offer me the skills or experience to help me choose differently? Could their negativity be bringing me down?
Could it be that I don’t have the skills YET to get to my goal? What am I missing? Where can I learn these new skills?
Could it be that I don’t realize how much I have accomplished? That I am not as bad off as I think but can’t see this?
Could it be that the person I am with will never give or share with me what I really want in them?
Could it be that what I value and what I like to do can never be accomplished fully in the job I have now?
When you have negative thoughts, when you feel great disappointment and fatigue, when you experience a setback you should always step back and think about “fit”. Don’t dwell on your negative thoughts. Move past them.
I strongly believe that we have the power to design or re-design our lives by consciously meeting new people, reading different things, spending our days differently so that we have a better chance at trying to achieve what we value most in our lives. This is what I mean by a “fit”.
Much like our own clothes when they fit well. When there is “fit”, our lives feel like they are flowing. Our lives begin to make us feel so good.
Design yourself into a better situation. Ask yourself why something doesn’t fit your negative situation? Sometimes we can approach things differently the next time.
Most times I have found that my biggest frustrations and disappointments that led to my negative thoughts occurred when the “fit” was not right. Some happened because of my poor choices. Others by chance. The person, the advisor, the friend, the goal, my skills, their advice, my experience, their experience, or my level of self-awareness didn’t “fit” the situation.
What can you do? Design your interactions differently. Choose differently. Think differently. Act differently. Spend your time differently. Listen differently. Focus differently. Change people or things around you (patiently with thoughtfulness) until you begin to get a better “fit” in your life with everything around you.
Work over a lifetime to create a better life design for yourself. Remember, we can never accomplish anything alone. Some of our life’s design occurs by chance. This is what we resolve ourselves to think is always true. But it’s not.
We have more power over our life’s design by not thinking as much about the past and more about what we need to do differently today and before tomorrow.
Difficult to try but simple to do. Think first of your life design before making your to do list. Over time, you will be happy that you did.
And watch your negative thoughts melt away. You will naturally become less critical of those people you come in contact with that simply no longer “fit” your life and what you value, leaving your heart filled with the energy and your soul the capacity to enjoy more fully each new day.