Reframing the Negatives
Posted in motivation on January 8th, 2010 by MiriusLife can throw you curves, but how do you respond to them?
Training is hard, eating when you don’t want to eat is hard, going to bed when you’d rather be chatting with your friends is not easy.
But if you want to be exceptional, to achieve what others haven’t got the grit to achieve then you can’t just hope that its going to happen. When the going gets tough and all that is all very well but closing your eyes and hoping its going to work out isn’t always best even if you use your pent up aggression as fuel. Save that for the weights instead.
A useful trick is to change your mental outlook. Harder to do than to say but its a question of practice. Just like you wouldn’t expect to walk into a gym for the first time and deadlift 500 pounds, neither should you expect to be able to be able to overcome a serious obstacle without practice. So start small, start with easy things and work upwards. What you need to do is to retrain how your brain interprets situations.
Last night I lay awake worrying about something at work. There was a chance that I’d made a mistake and I it hard to get back to sleep. What was going to happen was that the next day I’d avoid trying to think about the problem and eventually might get round to it and would pick at it hoping that I wouldn’t find a mistake. Instead I decided that I had made a mistake and I would find it in the morning, and I’d attack the problem aggressively.
Worry is a self destructive thing because you are making yourself stressed about something that has not happened and may never happen. By reframing it in my mind into past event, I removed the fear of having made a mistake an turned it into a problem to be solved. Now that works for me, it may not work for you, you will need to find something that works for you.
All of us encounter negative situations, but most of the time the situations themselves are neutral. We assign the situation as negative in our minds. It is us then who have the power to assign a different meaning to the situation. All it takes is the ability to take a mental step back from the brink. To not allow our emotions to make decisions for us.
Change your life today.
