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Reframing your mindset
Sometimes people say it’s hard to keep track of bigger goals, or that they have too much negative thinking or a mental block, so they can’t make that leap forward. This might just be because of a feeling of overwhelm due to something that happened in the past; and because of the ‘pastness’ of their experience, they feel they cannot change their lifestyle or their mindset.
When we’re in this state of mind we’re automatically in repeat mode and we reach a ‘tipping point’. Suddenly life gets overwhelming and becomes ODTAA – One Damn Thing After
Another.
Pay attention to self-dialogue
But what if one of the problems we have is to do with the way we talk to ourselves. For instance, what if we reframed the thought of ‘I’m unlucky/unfortunate,’ to instead, ‘I’ve experienced quite a lot of misfortune/lack of luck in my life but as everything changes, that situation can change too’. Suddenly a fixed entity or circumstance becomes something that can change or even reverse itself, given the right circumstances and connections.
Lifestyle and mindset (i.e. action and thought) so often boxed up by mental images that fix us into a certain character, position or way of doing things. But it’s not our past, it’s what we do
from here on that matters.
The Courage to be Disliked
I’ve recently been reading The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. It’s based on a certain kind of future-oriented psychology pioneered by Alfred Adler (1870-1937).
I believe, that while we cannot ignore the past, it’s true that, as Kishimi says, the way we talk to ourselves – the way we deal with our interpersonal relationships — is bound to have the biggest impact on our lifestyle and life course. For Alfred Adler, our view of ourselves is forged from about the age of 10 years old.
My story
I can see that what Adler said might resonate. When I was 10 years old, I was sent to a boarding school I didn’t want to attend, while my parents left for work abroad. I clearly remember the sense of shock of being separated from my parents for the first time in my life, the emotional and physical cold of the shared dormitories, and isolation among strangers.
I went to several schools both before and after that, so throughout my education, I always felt wary and distant even with loved ones, perhaps fearing abandonment.
Interpersonal connections
I didn’t really address this until later in life when I started to see that the way I related to others was as much to do with a set of circumstances in my childhood which were no fault of mine, or indeed of anyone else, rather than something intrinsically wrong with me. Realising this has meant that I have been able to connect much more successfully in interpersonal relationships. Before that, I often felt that I had to ‘do’ someone else’s emotions for them as I was so attached to the outcome; as though their wellbeing was the same as my wellbeing. So someone would say, ‘I’m so unhappy’ or ‘I am so frustrated’ or ‘I am so angry’ and I would attempt to ‘go there’ instead of attending to my own needs first.
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replay?
