Quit Magnifying What’s Going Wrong
Quit Magnifying What’s Going Wrong
Have you ever noticed that whatever you focus on grows bigger? Take a moment to think about this past week. How much of your focus was on what is going right in your life? How much of your focus was on what’s going wrong in your life. As you have learned in previous blogs, our brain is wired to back up whatever our choice of focus happens to be.
For example, let’s say you had 9 great things that happened in your week and one negative experience. If you focus on the one negative experience you will hijack the stage time in your mind of those 9 great things that happened. Cool thing is, you are the landlord of your mind. It is possible flip the script from the one negative thing to the 9 positive things.
The first step is awareness. Often times it happens so fast that you are simply left mucking around in a negative emotion that results from focusing on what’s going wrong in your day. The coaching question to ask yourself is: what was I focusing on right before the negative emotion kicked in?
The second step is inquiry.What’s great about this situation? This question challenges the impoverished view of reality that blocks you from focusing on the positive aspects of your life in the moment of reflection. I did this when I had my bike accident a few months ago and broke both arms. When I posed the question: what’s GREAT about this situation? nothing came up and first. Yet, when I kept the inquiry going, I could feel the shift between my two ears:I have the opportunity to slow down, learn patience with my body, celebrate small steps towards healing, pray, lean into God and appreciate my husband flossing my teeth, washing my face and taking care of everything I used to do, truly taking my marriage connection to an entirely different level.
The third step is mental course correction. After becoming aware and inquiry, you are then in a position to mental shift your focus. One NLP technique you can use involves closing your eyes and mentally pulling up the scene that you are magnifying on a movie screen. Play it through from the perspective of watching it in the audience. Then make all of the components smaller than you are in your “movie”. For example, you had a situation that in your mind went the wrong way…imagine all of the components of that situation being very small and you are very big looking down on all of it. This activity helps the mind access perspective. Similar to the questions: what would you imagine you will think of this situation in 10 years? What would you tell a friend going through a similar situation? Another technique mentioned in my book:99 Things You Want to Know before Stressing Out, involves thinking about the undesirable situation from your death bed: how much mental space would you have wanted to give to what’s not working out in your life verses what it?
Take Action:
During the next week take 5 minutes at the end of your day to write down what went well in your day. Your mind might push back if you had 1 thing that went wrong. Invite the Holy Spirit to help you renew your mind in Christ. To think of the situation from the perspectives offered above. When you magnify undesirable events bigger than God’s Sovereignty and ability to guide you through life, you render yourself vulnerable to fear, self-doubt and worry.“Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”– Romans 12:1-2
Listen to Edge God In Podcast:Launch into God: 5thThing to Quit with CS Lewis Quit Overdoing It.
