Telling yourself the truth

We are all big fat freaking liars! Whoa, what a way to start out a post, right?! Just bear with me for a minute.

We all tell ourselves our life story as it happens. As you go through life we tell ourselves what we are perceiving. It sounds kind of ridiculous only because it happens so naturally that we don't notice it. Think about it. When something noteworthy happens in your life and you go and tell a friend, you're telling your friend a story of a part of your life. And before telling this story you had to process your experience.

Tell me if you've ever had this experience: you tell a story to a friend and your friend interprets what happened differently than you did and all of the sudden you see the situation in a whole new light. You generally experience an emotional reaction which then affects how you deal with the given situation.

What I'm trying to get at is that we all have the ability to affect ourselves the way the friend affected you in my previous example. It all lies in the story we tell ourselves. We can wake up every morning thinking, "Wow life sucks," and you'll never want to get out of bed or we can think, "Wow, isn't it amazing that God has blessed me with another day on this earth," and I'm sure the results will be different.

The trouble with this is that we've been raised in an ungrateful and cynical society that scoffs at positive thinking. We also feel a little crazy when we actively tell ourselves something that we know we don't quite believe. There's also nothing the people of the US love more than instant gratification. Unfortunately, telling yourself the truth falls into all these things that we don't like. We need to first catch ourselves when we have the urge to be negative and then we need to take that thought and replace it with something realistic and positive.

Now the worst part about this is it takes a lot of time and effort to really have it affect your life. It's a proven fact that the subconscious needs repetition to believe something. There's certain aspects of my life that I'm still trying to get control of, but I know my life would be miserable had I not chosen to take control of what I tell myself.

YAY!

There's finally a Blogger iPhone app. I think I'll be able to update much more frequently now!