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“We don’t see things the way they are. We see them the way WE are”
In our lives, we have grown so accustomed to making every action, word, & event that occurs have meaning. Someone gets mad at you: “They hate me”. You get rejected from a person, place, or job: “I’m not good enough.” We immediately come to a conclusion about what a moment means based on how it occurs to us—we are meaning-making machines.
Yet it’s interesting how if two people hear the same comment from one person, one might look at it as “mean” while the other might look at it with no meaning at all. It’s because with the events that have happened throughout our lives, we’ve become triggered to correlate people, places, & things to having these meanings we’ve created based off of our past experiences.
But what if we started to turn moments, especially the failures, to not having any meaning at all? What if what occurred in our lives didn’t occur as anything other than just another moment or event? That’s the thing, incidents that happen, in reality, have the ability to have no importance, yet we’re the ones that give every moment power & hold onto the stories we make them mean.
I heard a conversation last week where someone was talking about starting a new project & followed with the question, “But what if I fail?” The person they asked responded back, “There are no such things as failures: you either win or you learn— it’s just the way you look at it.” This comment made me really stop to think about just how POWERFUL we all can be if we simply looked at things in different ways. WE are the only ones that have the ability to make someone’s words hurt or offend us, make our losses feel like failures, or rejections like we’re not good enough.
So for this #MondayMotivation, I encourage you to start looking at the way events occur in your lives differently. If you start changing your views on the moments that seem like losses and let go of the stories you make those moments mean, you’ll soon start to see that you’ll be able to free yourself up from holding yourself back in being & doing greater things. Anyone else with me?! 👊🏻💖
