Change your thinking... Change your life

Do you live in a world where the things people do or say make you feel a certain way?

Do you live in a world where the things that happen to you make you feel a certain way?

Many of us can feel that we are at the mercy of other people’s treatment of us and if they treat us well, then we’ll be happy.

If they treat us badly of course we’ll be angry or upset. It’s their fault. They “made us feel” that way.

But what this approach to the world does is to disempower us completely. It can leave us feeling that we are at the mercy of the whims of other people or the events of the world.

It can leave us feeling rudderless and out of control a lot of the time, like a ping pong ball bobbing around in the ocean.

We may use the principle “what goes around comes around” to make peace with certain events however we also know that bad things happen to good people. Things that happen don’t always make sense and many things that happen seem blatantly unfair.

But if we really slow things down to see them in a different way, we can see something different and totally empowering.

Let’s take a practical example about something minor, but potentially irritating, to make it more real. Recently I was driving around the busy carpark at my local supermarket and had spotted a free space directly in front of me. I was delighted so I made my way towards it.

However, just before I got to it, a car appeared from the opposite (and wrong) direction and nipped into it. I was instantly irritated and felt like saying something to the other driver about her rockstar parking.

In the past I would have been seething inwardly. And the thoughts would have circled in my head for at least a short while making me grumpy and short tempered. I may have even confronted the other driver who almost certainly would not have moved the car. That would have annoyed me even more!

Since I have come to understand this, I now stop the unhelpful thoughts in their tracks and replace them with a more helpful thought, in this case : “maybe she was in a real rush because she has an emergency purchase to make”. Whether it’s true or not is irrelevant to me, because it’s all about stopping me being irritated. Once I had this fresh, helpful thought, my mood immediately changed.

Now you may think “well that’s all very well and that may work for something like this” but try it in any area of your life and see what happens – you may be surprised.

When we have negative thoughts, which make us annoyed or frustrated, these thoughts become our reality. We now feel threatened by this reality and our minds get foggy. When we feel threatened, we react rather than respond. We don’t think we have any other choice. We often say or do things we regret.

When we are thinking clearly, we are in control and can respond in a myriad of ways. We can respond in a creative, constructive way to a situation. We have choices. Thinking clearly gives us options.

The first step in taking any of this onboard is to start taking notice of the thoughts you are thinking. What effect are they having on you? Getting suspicious about your thinking and the effect it is having on you can in itself be a very powerful starting point.