Your Mind Has Powers

It’s Sunday night, the scary’s are setting in and you’re trying to relax your mind before heading back into yet another work week. You open social media and start clicking through stories and scrolling through your feed. It’s full of perfectly clean and decorated homes, happy family photos, make-up tutorials with tons of products, vacation destinations, someone’s new car, a reel about the Amazon finds you must have , and those baby nurseries that are perfectly set up and personalized.  You look around your house and compare it to those online. You see your reflection and start to pick out your flaws. Your spouse is sitting on the other end of the couch, watching sports, trying to also just relax before the craziness of the week begins again and not doting all over you like that girls husband on Instagram. All of a sudden, it hits you like a train. Why don’t I have the perfect home? Why can’t I afford to take a nice vacation? Maybe if I had more money, I could have those things. Maybe if we had a bigger house, it wouldn’t feel so crowded in here with all of the kids things. Maybe if I didn’t have to go to work tomorrow, I would feel less stressed. Maybe if my husband just worked more, we could have more money and then life would be better.

              That next morning you roll out of bed, get yourself ready for the day, grab your coffee and head to the office. While filling up your water bottle you run into your co-worker. She looks surprisingly happy for a Monday morning. You try to ignore her, but she asks how your weekend was. “Fine, it was pretty boring” you tell her, “didn’t do much, spent time with the kids, tried to clean the house, grocery shopped. Nothing great.” You really don’t want to talk, but feel obligated at this point, so you asked her how her weekend was in return. “It was great, spent time with my family, got the house tidied up, cooked a great dinner for everyone Saturday night, can’t complain!” She responds. You do your best to cut the conversation short and return to your desk. Her weekend sounds awfully similar to mine, but she seemed so much more excited about it. How could she be so happy about such a mundane weekend? You wonder.

              Mid-day you get called into your bosses office. He starts providing some constructive criticisms on a project you just submitted to him and asks you to fix some minor errors before it's passed along to upper management. You begrudgingly take it back to your desk and start fixing it, feeling sorry for yourself and annoyed at him. I don’t feel like wasting my time on this, I wish I just had a million dollars and never had to do this work to begin with,  you can’t help but think to yourself.

              You finish up your day and have plans to get drinks with one of your friends after work. On your way there, there’s construction and you have to take a small detour. Whatever excitement you had about happy hour now just turned to feelings of being annoyed. You text your friend to tell her you’ll be a few minutes late. When you finally walk into the restaurant, you plop yourself down at the table and huff. “What’s wrong?” She asks you. “UGH, I just feel like everything’s wrong. I don’t have enough money, I wish I had a nicer house, my job drives me crazy, my boss is breathing down my back and always bringing up my mistakes. I couldn’t even get here to meet you without there being some problem. It’s always something!” You tell her.

She looks at you for a second and even though she doesn’t say anything, you can tell she’s thinking something. “What?” you ask, with somewhat of an attitude.

“Nothing. I’m sorry you are feeling that way,” she responds.

Once you place your drink orders, you continue to tell your friend about your weekend, how your husband seems to always have to be asked twice to do something simple, how he leaves his beard hairs on the sink or the toothpaste top dirty, how your children seem to leave destruction in their path wherever they go. She talks you through her seemingly similar life too, but she doesn’t seem to be nearly as stressed or frustrated as you feel. You feel compelled to ask her what her secret is.

“I don’t have a secret,” she begins, “My husband is not perfect, he leaves his dirty laundry on the floor next to the bed at night when he could easily walk it into the closet and put it in the hamper. But when I feel him crawl into bed in those early morning hours, I know he’s home and my mind and body can finally rest. My kids leave their toys on the floor and their beds aren’t made, but I’m lucky to have been able to have children at all and I am even luckier that they are happy and healthy enough to play and make a mess. My manager also points out errors and has me fix them but it’s because she wants me to look like a rockstar to upper management, not because she just wants to just point out my mistakes. I hit the detour too, but I got to drive past the lake that I used to go to all the time when my kids were small and it brought such a smile to my face. The sunset was also beautiful over it. And who knows, maybe it was some devine fate that prevented me from getting into an accident today. I also got to come meet you out after work, which was something I had been looking forward to since we made the plan a few weeks ago. Sure, I could look at those things in my life and see the bad in them, but I choose to see the positive side. Life’s too short to not be happy, and I have a lot to be happy about. I’m really lucky to have what I have.”

You stare at her in somewhat of awe of her perspective, not knowing how to respond, so you kind of brush off the topic and continue about your dinner.

              That night, you come home and the kitchen is a mess. Your husband had gotten the kids off the bus, made them dinner and was now doing bath and bedtime, so you could go meet your friend after work but he didn’t clean the mess up.   You did not want to leave it in such disarray so you drop your bags by the front door, take off your sweater and start cleaning. The more you clean, the angrier you become. Why am I cleaning up this mess, I didn’t make it. He should have cleaned it as the kids were eating dinner, I shouldn’t have to come home to such a mess. You decide that after the kids are in bed, you will have a talk with him. And that’s exactly what you do.

“Why did you leave such a mess for me to come home to tonight?” You start by asking him.

He blinks, “I would have gotten to it, but the kids and I were having so much fun together, I didn’t want to interrupt our time together to clean dishes. I planned to do it after they had gone to bed.”

His response made sense to you, but whatsmore, it made you think of what your friend had told you earlier. How her positive outlook and gratitude for her life made such an impact on how she functions every day. Instead of arguing with your husband, you just say, “Oh, okay,” and let it go.

              While laying in bed that night, your dinner conversation with your friend loops in your head. Have I really been harping so much on the negative that I don’t see the positive? I obviously know there is a lot to be grateful for…

              To get your mind off of it, you open back up social media and start scrolling again. Except tonight, you see a video of an elderly woman whose home appears to be falling apart. The exterior has hanging gutters and grass grown knee high. A man is offering to clean up the front of her home for free and she is so grateful at the end of the video she cries. The next video is of a mom, holding her baby in the hospital, an oxygen mask is on the baby’s face. You read her caption that someone has donated what her baby needed to survive and she is crying happy tears. Another post was made by a community page with a GoFundMe for a family whose house had burned down due to a car fire starting in their garage. Tonight’s videos are a much different vibe than last nights. However, these videos make you think about  your own life again, but in a whole different way. How could I be so upset over a cozy home, healthy children, a hardworking and loving husband, a good job that pays decent, enough money to grocery shop and have food on the table? These people have hardships I know nothing about and they can be grateful and remain positive, why can’t I? Again, what your friend said to you earlier is replaying in your head, so you send her a text about it, asking how she manages to stay positive in times where she finds it difficult to see things that way. She responds rather quickly about reframing your thoughts, challenging the negative ones and practicing gratitude. You decide then and there to take her advice and start practicing those things.

You quickly come to realize that by doing so, your mood has lightened significantly. The little, mundane things don't seem so tedious. Things that would usually annoy you, you are no longer so bothered by. But why?

You are in charge of your life. Just as you pick out what clothes to wear in the morning, you can choose how to see and live it.. Do you want to only see the negative? Do you want to feel bad and have a short fuse and be bothered by every little thing? Or do you want to enjoy what you have? Feel good about your life and the things life has blessed you with? Sure, we could always have more. But we also could always have less. We also have the power to change what really makes us unhappy. Make decisions, get a new job, learn a new skill. But you know where that all starts? Our mind. Our mind has the power to change many things.

So how do we do that? Well, start questioning yourself. Think about the situation you’re in. Play “devils advocate” but make it positive. If something is making you unhappy and you find it to be important, how can you make it better? If you find yourself complaining, ask yourself why. If you find something to be frustrating, find a silver lining. If you realize you’re making negative comments about yourself, start flipping the narrative to make comments about the great things about yourself.

But it doesn’t stop there. Think highly of yourself, surround yourself with others who have positive mindsets. Have compassion and empathy. The more positivity we put out, the more it will find its way back to us. Have you ever heard of the Law of Attraction? If not, it’s worth a google. (And if you’re really interested, there’s some good books on it!)

Here’s some tips & tricks I teach my clients who are having a hard time with this:

-          anytime and every time you realize you’re making a negative comment about yourself or your life, you have to write down 3 positive comments in your phone or on a piece of paper

-          Each day, write one thing you are grateful for in a notebook or on a small piece of paper (if small piece of paper, stick it in a jar or container) at the end of the year, you’ll have 365 things that you were grateful for that year to reflect on

-          Ask yourself why. (No, seriously, like a toddler learning about life for the first time)   Question yourself when feeling mad, upset, frustrated, anxious. Get to the root of the feeling. Let the train of thought flow until you reach it. Once you do, find a solution.

Also- If you need more help, there’s also more help to be found. Me, or any one of us at Evolution, are here for you!

Xo

Amanda