Your mind can look at things many different ways.
But, it generally doesn’t.
Years and years of repeated patterns of thinking have hard wired your thinking. This means that what you believe, you tend to continue to believe, Which transfers to what you see, what you consider is happening, and what it will all result in.
So, does this mean it can never be changed?
That your mind is stuck in one set mindset?
The short answer is no. The longer answer is also no.
For any situation all you need to do is to train it to reframe it.
Create a new picture.
Modern technology allows us to almost do anything with an image.
We can resize it, recolour it, cut it to remove parts, and add anything to it. In effect create a completely different image from what we first have.
The good news is we have an ancient technological counterpart as part of us that achieves the very same thing with events in our life. Our mind. The ultimate editing and enhancement tool. It’s a kind of genetic software that gives us power to alter any current image of life we have in our heads.
One that can flip a scenario to paint a very different picture.
Also known as reframing. It’s a mental miracle worker.
Imagine something that happened to you in the past. Find one that was upsetting or confusing or similar emotion at the time. To help you (and keep it less distressing or too much of a bad reminder) I will use the example of you being overlooked for promotion. For the third time (but please keep your own to follow as we reframe).
That hurt. It felt like rejection. Personal even. And that you were not valued at all. You couldn’t let it go. Your heart wasn’t in your work and you lost any enthusiasm for the role. In fact, your interest in the career field suffered and you became rather lost. One decision by a few others, became a life time of bitter decisions by you.
If you could change how you viewed it at the time, you could have changed everything that resulted in the following years. And this applies to your past situation that floored you.
How could your mind be changed then?
We see with our beliefs.
You think that you see with your eyes.
But, you don’t. You see with your beliefs. I have covered this mindset trait before in the post about Mindsight.
Whatever you go through, nothing is there bar the meaning your mind attaches to it. Or as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, ‘Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’.
The mind does not know what is real or not. It relies on definition of reality from us. No matter what occurs, we give it a label, add an emotion, and inform the mind accordingly. Which is why 10 people can see the same situation and all process it their own way.
But, this is good news. It gives YOU the power to relabel or reframe anything that is happening, has happened, or will happen.
So, where do you start with this?
Go back to the past!
Win the game.
It’s not easy to reframe what you haven’t yet met.
Better still to go over past occurrences and practice your reframing.
It goes something like this – your school sweetheart dumped you after 5 years, but it enabled you to grow up, become responsible, and find a partner who will match that more mature you.
The career you so wanted to succeed in fell apart, but you ended up discovering new skills you didn’t know you had that have served you well.
In short revisit old troubles and reframe the upsides that came out of them.
They may not have been there at the time, but most definitely resulted from those upsetting moments.
You will be reframing your mind to kick the habit of negative remembering in favour of beneficial recognising. Good outcomes always arise out of most scenarios if we reframe our mind to look for them. They are there, maybe not instantly, but most certainly eventually.
Continue to return to old haunts that bothered you and reframe them. Don’t let up. After a short while your mind is going to love it and feel its natural. Then simply take on today in what’s proving a hang up now. You have no future proof this time but view it all like your past victories after pain.
Good things came and they are going to again right now. Reframe today as the opportunity presenting itself for unseen, but guaranteed to appear wins ahead.
Let’s finish with this that shows how well it works – instead of being 40 and wishing you were 15 again, think if you were 75 wishing you were 40….which you are!!
That’s the reframe game.
Play it to paint masterful new pictures in your mind and life!
Picture attribution – Free to use under Pixabay Content License by songjayjay and sciencefreak and patriciavielmag1
