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  • Home
  • About
    • The Happy Fan Club
  • Offerings
    • Redesign Your Life 2.0
    • Get Creative
    • Personal Coaching
  • Creativity Conversations
  • LET'S CONNECT!
  • Blog
    • Live Free Your Way
    • Seeing Things Differently
    • Mistaking Assumptions for Truth
    • How Humor Keeps Us Sane
    • Know Thyself
    • Peach Pie for Breakfast
    • Explore Experience Express
    • Should You Be Downshifting?
    • Stop the Hustle!
    • Do Your Habits Serve or Sabotage
    • Settle Down? Down Where?
    • What Lights You Up?
    • Saying Yes When Your Mind Says No
    • Independence From What?
    • Letting Ourselves Off the Hook
    • Letting Go of Assumptions
    • Is Kindness Allowed?
    • How to Throw a Wrench in the Works
    • Happiness
    • Daring to be Lighthearted
    • What Happens When You See Things Differently
    • Find Delight in Everyday Life
    • Are You Saying What Needs to Be Said
    • Is Your Life in Alignment
    • Are You Trapped by Your Past
    • Can You Love Your Life
    • The Hallmark of Creativity
    • Out Of Ideas?
    • Waking Up to a New World
    • Are You a Possibilitarian?
    • Want to Love Your Life?
    • Is Creativity Necessary
    • What's Stopping You?
    • An Unexpected Discovery
    • Free Your Mind
    • Is Your Creative Genius Hiding
    • Empty Headed or Clear Minded?
    • Is Stress Really Necessary?
    • Will Creativity Improve Your Life?
    • Is Creativity In Your Future?
    • Replace Fear With Love
    • How to Get Out of Your Own Way
    • Just Take A Moment
    • You Don't Have To - You Get To
    • The Good News About Being Stuck
    • Interested in Inner Freedom?
    • Are You a Hoarder?
    • What Remains
    • Co-vid 19 Free Pass to the Roller Coaster
    • Grace Under Pressure
    • Now is the Time To Notice
    • Hanging With the Wrong Crowd
    • Make Your Life Simpler
    • What Could Be Different For You
    • Everything is a Miracle
    • Do You Have A Negativity Bias
    • Are You Really Seeing Or Just Assuming?
    • Happiness and Resilience
    • Wherever You Go, There You Are
    • Is Stress Making You Sick?
    • What I Wish My Humans Knew
    • Looking Backwards
    • Daring to Change Course
    • Lost in Thought or Taking Action?
    • Still Can't Focus?
    • Do Your Thoughts Get Dark and Gloomy?
    • Can't Focus?
    • An Instant Formula for New Ideas
    • Talk Yourself Out of Another Great Idea?
    • Is Your Busyness Keeping You From Getting Things Done?
    • What's that Feeling In the Pit of My Stomach?
    • How Cool is This?
    • How to Make Your New Year Happier
    • Why Be Open To Life?
    • Simple Ways to Transform Your Life
    • Get Clarity and Confidence
    • Are You Driven by Fear or Love?
    • The Number One Way to Keep Your Vision Alive and Well
    • Why Stop Trying to Figure it Out?
    • What Are You Trying to Prove?
    • Do Your Goals Reflect Your Hearts Desire
    • Why My Cat is My Spiritual Teacher
    • Surviving the Holidays
    • 3 Convincing Reasons
    • 3 Secrets to Enjoying the Holidays
    • 5 Quick Steps to Get Your Mojo Back
    • 3 Ways to Keep Your Energy High
    • 5 Reasons to Do Good
    • Pain Relief for the Soul
    • Tired of Living by the Rules? Go Rogue!
    • What? You've Made a Mess? Excellent!
    • Why You Need to Be Inspired Now
    • Change Your Life in Just 48 Hours?
    • The Cure For Mental Overload
    • 5 Infallible Ways to Stay Inspired
  • Newsletter

Looking Backwards?

9/5/2019

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Labor Day has come and gone and even though the weather is still balmy and warm, summer is clearly over. It happens every year: everything in me resists this inevitability. In my mind, there’s nothing like summer: the warmth of the sun melting my body's tension and slowing down my often jazzed up energy; the beauty and lushness of the natural landscape bringing a quiet peace.

Each time I take seriously the thoughts that claim “it’s over,”  my body tenses up and my feelings switching from calm and happy to disappointed and unhappy. That one thought - summer is over - brings a full deck of associations of loss with it and momentarily obscures the pleasure I felt just seconds before the thoughts of doom and gloom.

Even though most of us been conditioned to associate summer months with freedom and adventure and the fall season with routine and restriction, there’s a valuable understanding you can take advantage of to minimize or even eliminate the effects of this kind of limited thinking. And it works for any habitual thoughts that disrupt your focus and ability to get things done.
The single most important thing to know is how thoughts - like the ones I was having - can either enhance or ruin our capacity to be productive and engaged. Most of us know this theoretically but when there’s drama in the story, it’s easy to get hooked and forget that we have a choice as to whether we react to them or not.

Thoughts wedge themselves between us and our experience of the world.  They’re accompanied by physical sensations and are quickly labelled by the mind: good/bad, right/wrong, I deserve this/don’t deserve this, why can’t it be different, and so on. Once these judgments start blaring in our heads about what should or shouldn't be happening, we interpret them as if they were the truth and start trying to do something about our external reality, even though nothing's wrong out there. It's in the internal reality where we can really see what needs or doesn’t need to be done.
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We can take a step back and notice that thoughts come and go on their own steam and despite appearances, we don’t need to do anything to, with or about them.  As long as we don’t spend our energy on reacting to negative or critical thoughts, they’ll lose their audience (us) and leave. And even if they do linger at the back of our brains, we don’t have to give them our attention. That means we can still get on with what’s right in front of us.  When we know that thoughts by themselves are powerless unless we give them power, we can unhook from listening to “fake news” in our heads and shift our focus to what we want to create or experience or simply enjoy in that moment. 

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Once you try this you’ll see how much more energy, focus and enjoyment are available to you.
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