The following is a rewrite of an old post last year. It’s about 50% recycled and 50% new.
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Framing is everything. Framing is the difference between fulfillment and discomfort. It’s the difference between excitement and dread. All it takes is a tiny change in the framing and you can experience utter despair or heaven on earth.
The most important positive change you could possibly make to your life is to choose framing that serves you.
I am not a naturally positive person, in fact, my first reaction to most things is quite negative. I used to find it very easy to get stuck in existential dread or frustration about how unfair things were or how unjust life felt.
Naturally, this caused me to take all my blessing for granted and I mean that literally. My glass could be 70% full but I would focus on the 30% that wasn’t. The scarcity mindset.
Sometimes the glass is less than half full, but with practice, we can learn to feel a deep sense of appreciation, even for a cup that’s mostly empty, with other a few drops of water to keep us going.
This isn’t delusion. It’s not coping. This is how we start to turn things around. That first step, to change our focus and change the framing, that is the seed which gives birth to an abundance mindset.
We can influence our reality with our thoughts and emotions, but in my experience, no amount of positive affirmations can hide what’s going on behind those thoughts. So much is decided by the subconscious mind and the subconscious mind can only be worked on through a change in the frame.
You cannot force yourself to feel good about something you feel bad about. But you can change the implications of such an event. You can change the adjectives you use to describe something, or leave out certain embellishments. You can brainstorm potential positive outcomes and focus on those.
Changing the framing doesn’t mean pretending things are good when they are not. It means feeling everything you feel fully, not denying any thoughts or emotion, but paying careful attention to which thoughts you engage with and allowing the thoughts that feel bad to just play out their course without throwing any fuel on the fire.
There may be chemical reactions at play, but you can become a guiding voice for all the chemical reactions occurring within you.
You can’t instantly decide to start liking something that repels you. But you can find the good aspects of it or look for positive things yo counter it.
You can’t cover up fear or anger with forced positivity, but you can find the deeper root of these emotions and compensate for them through self love and support.
For years I trained myself to stop thinking reactively. It required me to constantly seek more positive framing. I didn’t reject my dislike of certain unpleasant realities or frustrations, I just asked the questions…
“What can I do with this?”
“How can I calm down?”
“What can this teach me?”
“How can I avoid feeling this way in the future without unnecessary sacrifice?”
I became very pragmatic about my emotions.
I also learned that “negative emotions” aren’t always negative. Sadness is not incompatible with happiness. Sometimes it’s a natural reaction to change or loss, so why should we judge it negatively?
Crying can be therapeutic if we let it be. Crying is a chance to let go of some of our unpleasant emotion, as long as we learn how to let those emotions go as they come up. It’s essentially pooping.
Anger can serve as a stimulus to push us to do something we needed to do, a way to break up stagnation, as long as we don’t let it drive us to behave destructively.
Nowadays I sometimes don’t even realize certain things happening to me are considered “bad”. They aren’t things that I want or would ever choose, but now I assume they are just a learning experience and will get better over time.
And they usually do if I let them.
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Thinking about turning this into my next full length video. Thanks to everyone who has been supporting “Untangled Knots”, my YouTube channel. If you didn’t see my new shorts, here are a few:
How to Make Society Work Again
I Beat Depression
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