22 Sep What’s your default mindset?
Whether we realise it or not, we all have a fallback position in terms of our thinking, attitudes and beliefs.
For many years, my depression created a baseline of thinking along the lines of … I’m hopeless and so I’ll stuff things up; even if I do achieve something, it won’t really be of any value.
More recently, as my anxiety has increased, my thinking has been more about what could go wrong, or in fact what WILL go wrong!
Accordingly, for many years, my default thinking has been about how bad things have been and about how bad or terrifying they will be.
But lately I’ve been making a serious effort to shift this, to adjust my starting position to something that will give me a greater chance of happiness. Because those previous ways of thinking just focused my attention, almost exclusively, to all that was and will be bad.
Now, it’s important to be realistic; but the reality is that there’s much that’s good in my life; very much. But I rarely, if ever, gave that much attention.
So now, I’m starting off with something like … my life is really good, even if or when things go wrong. Because things will go wrong, and I want to be prepared for that, but almost all that goes wrong in life is temporary, and almost all that goes wrong need not undermine, at least not completely, my happiness and wellbeing.
My new default position, then, is beginning to take hold. I’m making sure it’s grounded in reality, and I still need to work on it but over time, I’m striving towards this being the point from which I automatically start. To get there, I need to say this to myself and repeat this over and over, reminding myself of it’s truth and it’s value. There have been and will continue to be times I forget, or doubt it, but over time I expect it to become more and more habitual and hold more and more power.
And with that, I expect more happiness and wellbeing, better relationships and really, a better life.
What’s your default position? Are you even aware of it? What would you ideally like it to be?