Once-Upon-a-Not-too-Distant-Time, a negative thought would enter my brain like a formidable opponent and I’d get sweaty, miserable and downright beat-up wrestling it for days on end.
Once-Upon-a-Today, negative thoughts still come and go from my head, but I do my darndest to give them imperfect best love instead of war.
What peace pipe are you smoking, Jason?! That’s some new age, unicorn laughter, mumbo jumbo, if I’ve ever heard it!
Please hear me out. Consider, for a moment, that negative thoughts will likely always figure into our life experience. As such, they are wonderful in the sense that they prove we are still alive and capable of complex thinking. They may even contain some useful information when you peel back their facade of bleak negativity. At the same time, they can be profoundly distracting, disruptive and mentally and emotionally draining.
So now, I try to listen to my negative thoughts and do my best to mine them for nuggets of wisdom, assuming there are any to mine. Then I let them be and move on with my day.
The moving-on-part can be the down-right-tricky-part because…
Negative thoughts are like excitable children vying for our mind’s attention incessantly.
It’s all an imperfect process to say the least, but I find great freedom in the practice. And I’ll take freedom any day over brawling with my thoughts knockdown, dragout, professional wrestling style. That’s HIGHLY overrated!
I dare you to show a little love to your next negative thought when it tries to do a diving 450 elbow drop on you.
JASON FREEMAN is a Professional Speaker and the proud owner of a Speech Impediment. He is also the author of “Awkwardly Awesome: Embracing My Imperfect Best” and a Perseverance Coach.
He excites and encourages his audience to break through the barriers of their own limitations using a method he created, called “Doing your Imperfect Best ™”.
His Imperfect TEDx Talk can be viewed here.
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