Make the Change You Crave
by Jane Powell
“What are you telling yourself?”
Positive self-talk is not about telling yourself that bad things in your life don’t exist or have not happened. It’s not about telling yourself life will be easy if you think the right thoughts. Self-talk is about self-awareness and recognizing how your thoughts affect how you feel and ultimately what you accomplish.
Your thoughts are your self-talk. And, they directly affect the way you feel. Since your feelings dictate your actions, it’s important to take notice of the chain of thoughts and events in your life.
This new found awareness holds the key to making the changes you crave come to pass.
Fear is worrying about all the different tomorrows.
Fear is worrying about the bad days that may or may not come,
and even worrying about the good ones because you know that they can’t last.
You can dream of the future, plan for it – those are good things to do –
but you can’t control all the tomorrows…
To be afraid is to live among all the frightening tomorrows
as if they were certain to happen.
To be courageous is to close off all those tomorrows
and devote your attention and energy to the one today
that is the only thing you ever experience with certainty.
Actions take over
Doubt is a gateway to fear. A small, trivial doubt, repeated again and again, and considered from many different angles, can soon grow into a nearly insurmountable fear.
Doubt can be very reasonable, yet it’s not a good idea to reason with it. For whether you argue against your doubt or whether you argue for it, in both cases you make that doubt stronger.
Instead, simply notice your doubts, and then quickly move on. If you have the thought that you can’t do something, allow that thought for a moment and then get busy proving it wrong with your actions.
Doubts are born in your thoughts, and as you dwell on them they grow more influential in your mind. So stop thinking of why you can’t and start taking action to show how you can.
One small positive action is much more powerful than the most elaborately constructed doubt. Because once you do something, you absolutely know you can, and doubt has no way to stand up to certainty.
Whatever it is you doubt you can do, begin to do it. And watch the doubt quickly dissolve into meaninglessness as your actions take over.
Ralph Marston
