One of the challenges a given person faces is how they differentiate between the outside experiences they are having and what they tell themselves about the world around them and those experiences. The inner reality is not the same as the outer reality, but it can be easy to confuse the two and as a result not fully recognize where negative messaging is coming from. Another aspect to consider is that you don’t have control over the world around you, but you do have control over yourself and how you respond to a given situation.
Think about a bad day. What made that day bad? Chances are you can point to a number of situations that occurred during that day to seemingly make it bad, and there’s likely some reality to what you observed and experienced. However at the core of that day being bad are triggers, with associated internal messages and perspectives that took your outside experiences and painted them with a particular perspective that reinforced the internal messaging.
Now a bad day is a bad day and the experiences we have in the world can and do legitimately create bad days. However its important to understand that our internal messaging plays a role in the experience of a bad day and contributes to the overall experiences that we have. When you recognize this connection, you can also differentiate between what you have control over and what you don’t have control over.
For example, if someone cuts you off in traffic, you don’t have control over that. However if you have a thought or a feeling around being cutoff, you have an opportunity to re-orient those feelings or redirect those thoughts. You can choose to stew in your thoughts and emotions or you can recognize that you couldn’t control that person cutting you off but you can re-orient on how it’s a lesson about being a safe driver and feel grateful to yourself for being a better driver.
That’s a simple example, but you can apply this same rationale and process to more complicated situations. For instance, you might have a tense meeting with your manager. S/he is coming down hard on you about your work performance. You can get caught up in reactive thoughts and emotions, feeling like a victim, or you can look at the situation and consider that your manager might be also having a bad day and also ask yourself how you could change your work performance to address their concerns.
One of the most important skills we can cultivate is the skill of perspective. Your ability to be flexible and look at a situation from different points of view can help you see the difference between internal message and the actual situation. If you have a negative belief about yourself, and you are in a situation that seems to confirm it, take a few deep breaths and examine the situation. What is your internal messaging telling you? What are the beliefs contained within that internal messaging?
Consider those answers for a few moments. Sit with them and then ask yourself where that internal messaging comes from. Who is really telling you that message? Chances are the message is rooted in your past, when someone else told you something about you and also punished you in some manner. Sit with that for a bit.
Finally look at the external situation. How does this external situation trigger your inner messaging? What are the similarities between the external situation and the original situation that caused the messaging? What are the differences between the external situation and the original situation? Give yourself some space to consider those answers for a bit.
When we take a bit of time (and some breath!) to consider a situation, instead of reacting to it, what we give ourselves is the space to respond to the situation. We can choose our responses and we can also choose to re-orient our internal beliefs and in the process give ourselves a way to resolve the external situation without sabotaging ourselves because of something that happened a long time ago. We are more than our triggers and reactions and we can change them because they represent outmoded survival responses for situations we’re no longer in.
