What's the worst that's happened to you so far? How did it hurt you? Do you wish that the pain would just go away? Do you wish, maybe, that it never happened at all?
What if wishing your pain away was the wrong answer? What if instead, you co...
Look In & Learn is going to help you get where you want by giving you a framework that will let you weed out your garbage thoughts and mine your golden thoughts.
When I refer to 'garbage' and 'golden' thoughts here's the difference:
- Garbage thoughts: Thinking that does not help you get where you want
- Golden thoughts: Thinking that does help you get where you want
It certainly helps to have a clear direction for where you want to go but, if you don't have that right now, that's okay. When I started developing Look In & Learn, the only thing I wanted was to not feel how I was feeling. You don't have to know exactly where you want to end up, if you know that you don't want to be where you are. That's more than enough to begin. And, if you do have an idea of where you want to go, Look In & Learn will help you get there faster.
Okay, at this point I can hear you thinking 'Enough already'. How does this actually work? Let's get into how this works and why it works.
Squeezing the Juice – Use What You Have to Get Stronger
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I got back from the worst vacation ever. I don't mean the lost-my-luggage-and-it-rained-all-the-time kind of worst. I mean the got-stalked-for-a-week-by-a-cult-looking-to-do-god-knows-what-make-me-disappear-had-to-stay-awake-for-days-without-eating-on-the-run-barely-made-it-back-home kind of worst.
I was shook up. Never before have I known such fear. I got a taste of what victims of crime or those with PTSD must feel. If you've ever had a really traumatic experience, you know the feeling. If you haven't, basically your mind keeps going over and over and over the experience, thinking about it every single day, forcing you to re-live the emotions. It robs you of all joy.
When I got home, my thinking was dark. I was numbing myself with cigarettes, entertainment, booze, other things I shouldn't have. Anything to get away from my feelings and thoughts. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't concentrate at work and I had no enthusiasm for anything.
Eventually, I hit a point where I looked in the mirror one day and thought to myself, 'I cannot live like this'. I made a choice. I decided I was going to use whatever I could from this experience to make myself stronger. Like a scavenger in a post-apocalyptic world, I set to work reviewing the entire experience in as much detail as I could remember, thinking about where I could have made different decisions and noting what I learned to do and not to do. This was the first situation where I performed a Look In & Learn and where I found my first Treasure.
Try this. Write down a few situations in the past that were tough on you. Then ask:
'How can I use this to make myself stronger?'
Start writing down whatever ideas come to mind.
The process of Look In & Learn is a bit like squeezing the juice out of an orange with your bare hands. The juice is the Treasure (i.e., the golden thoughts). All the other 'stuff'? That's the garbage of the experience. That's all the negativity, the fear, the bad feelings, bad thoughts, the hate, the anger, the shame...everything like that. It's all the stuff you don't want to hold onto.
Take an experience, squeeze out all the juice, keep the good stuff and toss away all the bad. Look In & Learn embodies the whole process.
The next time you run into a difficult situation, try asking yourself 'How can I use this to make myself stronger?' Bad things are going to happen. They will. When they do, you will be able to break them down and grow more powerful in the process.
'Prepare the Ground' – Learn How to Catch Your Thoughts
There is a part of your brain called the reticular activating system (check it out online). Since your brain can only handle so much information at once, and there is a lot going on in life, its function is to filter out unnecessary information and bring you the important information. Who tells your brain how to distinguish between 'unnecessary' and 'important'? You do. Through your actions, thoughts, and beliefs, you teach your brain what to look for. Ever buy a new car, new dress, or whatever and then, magically, you start seeing it everywhere? That's your reticular activating system at work.
The same system also works on your thinking. If you show your brain the difference between garbage thoughts and golden thoughts, your brain starts to catch them for you. For those thoughts that aren't helping you, your mind will be on the look out for similar (crappy) thinking in the future. You will notice catching yourself thinking 'Wait a minute, I shouldn't be thinking that way because...'. It's like having a psychological immune system.
So, the next time that person at work you don't get along with makes a comment, you won't react the same way. You can short circuit your own thinking because you've put your mental immune system on alert that you don't want to think that way anymore. You've chosen a different reaction because you've decided, in advance, to think differently about the situation.
By going over your Past Problems with Look In & Learn, you are teaching yourself about you. Figuring out how you think in different situations gives you the ability to change how you think about those situations so that you can get the outcomes you want. The more you do this, the more automatic the process becomes and the less work you will have to do on these particular problems in the future.
Know Thyself – Are You More Hand Grenade or Nuclear Bomb?
Making yourself stronger and being prepared for future situations is great, but sometimes you just need to avoid a situation completely. Growing up with my Dad, having a quick temper did not pay off very well. One of the side benefits of my childhood is that, if someone is yelling at me, I actually relax.
Everyone has different ranges for different situations. Some people can take a lot of crap from their boss but lose it easily at their spouse or parents. You need to know what your capacity is for absorbing various situations. Look In & Learn will show you your thinking today and make you more resistant to reacting in certain ways in the future. It will also show you those situations that you simply need to avoid. Sometimes, no matter how much work you put in, abstinence is the only method that gets you the results you want.
Look In & Learn will help you to know yourself well enough to understand the situations you just need to avoid.
