This morning we talked about your energy flows where your attention goes. If your attention is focused on the negative, it is the negative that you will find. So it stands to reason that if you focus on the positive, then you will find the positive – right?
If you believe firmly that no one will ever love you – you will likely not find love. But if you believe with equal force that you are very lovable, then you will be loved. You will see the evidence of it in the behavior of those around you. You will experience it.
How Does That Work?
A few months ago, my husband was coping with some depression. It was related to what many of us feel when we’re depressed. He wasn’t where he wanted to be in his life. He felt like he’d lacked goals. He believed firmly that he’d let me down and by extension, everyone else. He felt like a failure.
He saw that failure reflected in everything around him.
It took a while for me to understand what was happening, because what he saw as failure – I did not. What he perceived as letting me down – I did not. When we finally talked about these issues, I offered him the following thought:
We make choices in life. Some are good. Some are bad. Some do well. Some do not. If you spend all your time looking back at the past at what you did wrong and regretting the things you didn’t change when you could have – then you are simply making new regrets right now.
Accentuate the positives in your life, I told him. Look at what is going right. Look at what is great. You might find that when you believe in what’s going right, the rest of it falls into line.
Eliminate Negative Self-Talk
Eliminating negative self-talk helps you in many areas. In your marriage, it can help you to believe that you are lovable – so you don’t constantly make your spouse jump through hoops to ‘prove’ it.
It can help you believe that everything is going to work out; you don’t just give up because things have gotten hard.
It can help you to understand that sometimes you can talk out a problem and sometimes you need to let it rest for a bit. You can take timeouts from difficult conversations in a marriage and not give up. You can take a break from a fight so that you can both cool off and that’s not throwing in the towel – it’s creating a more positive atmosphere to sort out issues.
Where does your attention go?
To be continued