As I go about my day, my brain starts telling me stories. Let’s see if any of these ring a bell for you:
Things are going to be a lot harder than what you’re planning for.
This challenge you’re up against is really hard.
You’re not special.
I have many years that I spent as a kid trying to figure out what “normal” was and trying to compare my family life to those of my friends’.
The struggle has been hard for me over the years and it’s taken a lot of work for me to fight against the negative voice in my head.
Here is a simple trick that James Clear and Neil Pasricha apply in their books. James Clear is the best-selling author of Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. If you’ve not picked up his book to read it, I highly recommend it. One of the sections within his book is flipping the thought within your head.
Let’s try it:
Recently, my employer laid me off and I’m out of a job. I can look at this as: “I’m out of work during a pandemic and it’s going to be really hard to find a job.” Or, I can flip the switch and say: “I get more time in my day to develop my writing while searching for a new full-time job.”
I can choose to look at things from a negative perspective, or I can flip how I look at the situation and change it from a problem to a challenge. Positivity is infectious while negativity drags you down.
In Neil Pasricha’s book You Are Awesome: How to Navigate Change, Wrestle with Failure, and Live an Intentional Life, he has a similar tenet. Instead of saying: “I haven’t found a job,” Neil says to add one simple word to the sentence. Instead, say: “I haven’t found a job yet.”
Both Clear and Pasricha are onto something. By refraining a problem into an opportunity, our perspective changes. We can choose to focus on gratitude and embrace possibilities, or we can try to be a martyr and suffer.
Which would you rather be? Happy and moving forward positively, or angry, frustrated, and depressed?
Take a piece of paper, write down a problem you have and then use either “get” or “yet” to refrain the problem into an opportunity.
Then take that paper and hang it up where you can see it every day. That’s your goal. You can do it.
Like what you’ve read? Be sure to check out my other posts in my Let Go and Be Free blog.
