Allowing Yourself To Just BE

Whilst travelling to work the other morning, our train was delayed for a short time at a signal.  As we were stopped not far from Sydney’s Central Station, many of the other passengers had already begun to get ready to hop off.  The longer we waiting the more anxious and frustrated people started to become.  Some started to complain about being late for work and so on.

All except for me!  I was just sitting there, chilled out and calm, admiring the view.  And to me, the view that I was admiring was pretty beautiful.  You see whilst everyone else was complaining and getting frustrated, I was admiring some tall grass capturing the morning Sun, making it glow a golden colour.

You see for me it’s important to notice the little things that can brighten your day.  Too many people just trudge through life only concerned about what is in front of them right at that moment.  

This becomes a problem when you consider that most people prioritise overcoming problems, and therefore their focus is mainly on the problems that they encounter because they want to SOLVE that problem.  Without realising it, they begin to develop a negative mindset.  Because people give priority to solving problems, they’re always on the lookout for problems to solve.  And it’s a case of seek and you will find!  Because people are LOOKING for problems, they find them!

If you were to sit back at the end of your day and do a ‘Day in Review’ of just going through, in chronological order, all of the things that have happened throughout the day, you may be surprised to notice that a lot of the things that you recall were problems or negative thoughts in one form or another.

For example, a typical analysis of the everyday events that the average person might remember at the end of their day may go something like this:

• Traffic jam on the way to work made me late.
  
• Some idiot cut me off in traffic.
  
• The barista forgot to sir my coffee.
  
• Tried to turn on the computer at work, had to reset my password AGAIN which took AGES!
  
• STILL haven’t heard back about the Zigadlo Account, they were supposed to get back to me LAST TUESDAY!
  
• Had our Monthly meeting and Michael from Finance tried to hijack the agenda again.  Seriously, I don’t even know why we need him in these meetings anyway.
  
• Boss complaining about the way I handled the Robinson Account.  I mean I’m doing the best I can with such limited resources.
  
• Tried to stop off at the supermarket to grab a couple of things for Dinner on the way home and they had like hardly NO checkouts open, so everyone was going through the Express Checkout and it took me forever to get served !

In your typical day there are also a lot of GOOD things that happen too but we don’t tend to focus on the good, so we only remember the bad.

If that’s the effect that 1 day can have on you, imagine the combined effect that a whole year, years and decades of that way of thinking can have on you.  It creates a negative mindset where we just start to see everything as being bad which creates the expectation that everything in life WILL be bad.  Our life just becomes a negative self-fulfilling prophecy.   

There is a book I really love called “The Hidden Messages In Water” by Masaru Emoto which deals with the effects that negative thinking can have on our bodies.

For me personally, I prefer to do the opposite.  I make a point of stopping and REALLY taking in and appreciating all the little things that can bring joy to our day.  It can be something as simple as the grass that I mentioned.  The real secret is that you have to savour the experience for just a LITTLE longer than normal for that to really take hold.

Scientists have now discovered that it takes around 20-30 seconds for a thought to really take hold in our minds.  When something bad happens, let’s say for example someone cutting in front of you in traffic, the event is really quick but you keep thinking about it for perhaps a matter of minutes and that is enough to embed it into your brain and so at the end of your day you’ll remember it as being a bad experience.

Likewise we experience a lot of good things each day that are equally as brief.  The problem is that we don’t take the time to just be conscious in that moment and so the FEELING doesn’t get embedded into our brains.  I make it a practice of consciously being on the lookout for every experience that could put me in a good vibrational frequency, such as the grass, and when I do notice those things I just allow myself to linger a little longer in that moment for at least 20 seconds to allow that FEELING to sink in.  And guess what, those are the type of experiences that I recall at the end of my day!

The combined effect of all of these ‘little’ positive experiences means that my natural mood is also positive.  I see the world in a good way and I’m more grateful for the life that I have.

My challenge for you today is when you get home at the end of your day, stop for a while and make a list of all the things that you can remember happening in your day from the very begging.  Just write them all down as they come to you without any prejudice or judgement.  When you’re finished, now go back through your list and for each one, ask yourself if this is a negative of positive experience?  Then just look down your list and see how many POSITIVE experiences you’re having on a daily basis as opposed to how many NEGATIVE experiences you have.

This will allow you to see if your thoughts over the course of a day are predominantly positive or negative.  Then you may want to extend this over the course of a week!   If you find that you’re predominant thoughts are negative, what effect do you think this may be having on your psychology and ultimately on your life?

Leave me a message in the comments below to let me know, firstly what you found.  And then secondly, if you found that your thoughts are predominantly positive, let us all know what thoughts you have that put you in this positive frame of mind.  If your thoughts are predominantly negative, what are you going to do to change this?