By HOW TO CHANGE YOUR THOUGHTS (WHEN YOU CAN’T CHANGE WHAT HAPPENED)
Angel Chernoff
Let me re-share another quick story and a timeless reminder with you…
“There’s a vivid, beautiful, priceless piece of art hanging right in front of you. It’s sophisticated and detailed – a painstaking labor of deep devotion and love. The colors and textures are like no other – they soar and dip, they shine bright and leap right out at you! And yet you choose to fixate your eyes on the tiny, dark housefly that has landed on the edge of this masterpiece. Why would you choose to do such a thing?”
She cracked a half smile in my direction and then shifted her gaze down to the ground.
“Look,” I said, “the point here is that there’s no possible way to be 100% certain about anything in this world. Life, like good art, is sophisticated, complex and unpredictable. So you’re left with a choice: either appreciate it and look for the beauty in it or focus on the worst and dwell on it.”
But if you expect the worst, you’re never disappointed,” she said under her breath.
“Yeah, but who really lives like that?” I replied. “No one, that’s who! People die slowly every day like that, without ever truly living.”
That’s the gist of a conversation I had recently with an attendee of our “Think Better, Live Better” seminar (I’m sharing this with her full permission). She literally started the conversation by telling me that expecting negative things to happen is her way of coping with life’s challenges. If you can relate in any way at all, it’s time to shift your mindset.
And let there be no mistake about it, when you are feeling down in the dumps on a regular basis, the battle you are going through isn’t fueled by the words or actions of others, and it isn’t fueled by what did or didn’t happen in the recent or distant past either. It’s fueled by your mind that gives negativity a voice.
Believing in negative thoughts and acting on them is the single greatest barrier to living a good life.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the mind is your biggest battleground. It’s the place where the fiercest and most ruthless conflict resides. It’s where you fall victim to your own train of thought time and time again!
And if you allow these self-defeating thoughts to dwell in your mind, they will succeed in robbing you of peace, joy, productivity, meaning, and ultimately your life. You will think yourself into endless disappointment, heartache, and even depression.
Bottom line: You are what you think! And to a great extent, we make our own life stories by our thoughts. The reality we ultimately create is a process of our daily thinking.
