How To Focus On What You Want Instead of What You Don’t Want
When my clients are super-stressed and things are not going their way, they often say that life must be trying to tell them something. But what exactly is that something? My clients usually conclude that it means that they are either on the wrong track, they are not doing enough, or they should have done things differently. The following tips might help the next time you are feeling like you are being punished by the universe.
- Observe the pattern without personalizing it. So you have had three fender-benders in the last week, or you notice that every woman you date turns out to also be dating someone else. While you may indeed be repeating a pattern at work or in life, personalizing it by making yourself out to be bad or defective is definitely not helpful. It’s more helpful to ask yourself questions about what you would prefer to see happen in the future and how you might “behave your way” into better outcomes. If you continually focus your brain on the perceived pattern, guess what will likely continue to happen? Yep, accidents, and girlfriends being dishonest.
- Notice signs of stress that you might be passing off as logic. Stress thoughts have a funny way of convincing us that they are legitimate. My two favorites are counting and generalizing.
Counting is where we use our thought process to look back and start counting our own failures or grievances against others—but the counting is completely one-sided or does not take the full picture into consideration. For example, “I picked up the check the last 34 times!” Or, “I have hosted the last ten holiday events, and no one has thanked me even once.” Even though you often offer to pay the check too quickly or are the first to offer your hosting services.
The habit of generalizing is when we use terms like all, everyone, every time, etc., and then convince ourselves that what we are saying is actually true. For example, “Everyone in that department is a narcissist.” Or, “All of these drivers are idiots.”
If you notice that you are counting or generalizing, try to interrupt that thought process and find some ways to de-stress. You need a shift in perspective before you take any actions.
When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful. ~ Malala Yousafzai
