Creating a New State of Mind (#2)

Have you ever found yourself negotiating with your present state of mind with grand concern?!  Almost like a come to Jesus meeting with yourself, but hopefully not in the presence of Psych professionals. Others aren’t really relevant during this episode, just an FYI.

Sabotaging state.

Since I can remember I had always had a state of mind that made me sabotage myself.  It’s a fascinating story really.  Bad things would keep happening to me and I couldn’t understand why. None of my peers seemed to have a series of repeated bad luck as I did.  Repetitive failures, blunders and life circumstances seemed to define my brain to project a “negative” state of mind.  Don’t get me wrong, I have always been a very happy person with a cartoon character like vibrancy, but when something would go wrong I quickly resorted to saying that I had bad luck.

 It was also mainly founded upon by the reactions of others directly or indirectly involved with whichever catastrophe that surfaced.  Comments like, “Wow, I have never seen this in my 20+ years in this business!”, “You have the worst luck” and so on.  I adopted a “Why me?” mentality with just about everything negative.  I discovered that by soaking in the negative situation and constantly revisiting it would make me feel even worse than the initial experience.

It’s not about perfect. It’s about effort.

 – Jillian Michaels

Feeling like I had bad luck.

Many years went on and I continued to feel as the “black cat.  Coming to a point in my life where I recognized that I had always had the belief that whatever could go wrong would go wrong and it sparked something inside to truly want to change my views.  It was a very gradual process for me because as you can imagine I had to break the cycle and retrain my brain.  My next move was pretty powerful.  I renamed my “bad luck” to “odd luck.”

Now you must be thinking what the heck would changing the name do for my cause.  Ask yourself this, do you believe that your brain instinctively understands the meaning of signs that read “Open” and “Closed?”  The brain has to learn what each are and what the consequences can be when you pull on that door handle.  It will either open or it won’t.  I viewed my title change as an open ended opportunity.  Kind of like Purgatory.  Don’t worry this isn’t a religious show, so all good.  

Changing my terminology.

I wasn’t saying I had bad luck or good luck. It gave my brain the opportunity to explore the situation at hand with no actual finality thus tricking me into thinking that it was “odd luck.”  The term odd to me doesn’t convey bad or good just irregular and I was ok with that.  The stress level started to drop which afforded me the opportunity to put some positivity into situations that I was never aware to do before. Believe it or not the labeling process did wonders for me.  Less perceived negative situations would arise and I felt that my new found positive direction was completely responsible. 

A couple of years went by with this mind set and I took every opportunity to put positive spins on things.  Just thinking positive thoughts made me feel a lot better.  I was able to rationalize situations with a controllable or uncontrollable conclusion.  If it was controllable I handled it.  If it was truly an uncontrollable, I let it go.  I no longer hold onto things I can’t control. Additionally, I have recently recreated my “odd luck” title to “good luck.”   It’s so much better with this belief! 

determination:

the process of establishing something exactly by calculation or research.

It is said that optimism comes before success. 

Do you believe that this is true?  How can optimism be any value for creating success? 

(Please respond to the questions here with us so we can learn and grow.  The good and the bad will help others recognize successes and failures in our own lives.  Thank you so very much!)