What You Think is What You Get

The single most effective way to ensure frustration in your future is to be constantly frustrated and worried about elements of your current life. It’s as simple as that: your thoughts become your reality. Harboring negative belief systems and allowing negative thought patterns to persist allows an unfulfilled and stagnant life to become a self-fulfilling […]

The single most effective way to ensure frustration in your future is to be constantly frustrated and worried about elements of your current life. It’s as simple as that: your thoughts become your reality. Harboring negative belief systems and allowing negative thought patterns to persist allows an unfulfilled and stagnant life to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When you have negative expectations, you’re creating a space where the only possible outcome — or even understanding — is negative. When you define something as wrong, that thing can only be experienced as wrong. That will never change so long as you continue within the same mindset without cleaning out your filters and deliberately changing your mindset.

You’re the one creating your own frustration. You’re creating your own definition of what’s dissatisfying about your life, and you’re the one defining what’s out of alignment with your highest excitement. For an elite athlete, there is nothing as devastating in the game or out of it as frustration — especially when you know that you haven’t been playing at your highest level.

To stop this frustration from mounting, you’ve got to create something else: a way of looking at the world that doesn’t create needless negativity. The idea is to understand that wherever you are in any given moment — even if it’s not where you prefer to be, it’s where you need to be to learn what you need to learn, even if you don’t prefer it.

Everything is neutral until you give it meaning. 

Realize the difference between neutrally recognizing that you don’t prefer something, and tainting your life with negativity by negatively defining the experience. Once you validate an experience, it’ll stick to you like glue because you’re giving it undue attention and power. What keeps you in this self-perpetuating cycle of frustration is defining what’s going on around you as an invalid experience that shouldn’t be happening. You created that experience. You defined it. You gave it a negative vibration and discarded what you could have learned. Ultimately, you are invalidating yourself — and you’ll find yourself manifesting the same challenges and frustrations again and again as you feel invalidated and constricted.

Everything is just a mirror. Are you seeing frowning faces and concerns being reflected back at you? Then you know you’re not validating yourself because that frown is coming from your own face. I encourage you to put your face on the faces of those surrounding you so that you can appreciate the real lesson in what you’re experiencing, instead of seeing the other person as the problem. You’ll receive the real lesson, and you can recognize through the frown that you don’t prefer what is happening. Don’t validate it, just thank the frown and turn it upside down.

Now you’re smiling because that’s what you prefer. You’ve taken the gift of those frowns and discovered the element inside of you that wasn’t in alignment with where you wanted to be. Decide to smile at everything that happens. You know it’s going to serve you in a positive way because it’s up to you!

By Richard Maloney, Author of "Injury Free: Mental Training for Elite Athletes" Quality Mind Global

Thrive Global — Published on February 7, 2020. https://thriveglobal.com/stories/what-you-think-is-what-you-get/