第5章 Clear the Pond of Ugly Frogs
Your goal in life is to be happy. Happiness and peace of mind are the ultimate aim of almost all individuals. Your ability to achieve your own happiness is the real measure of how successful you are as a human being.
The good news is that it has never been more possible for you to achieve happiness and fulfillment in every part of your life than it is today. We know more today about the reasons for happiness and unhappiness than we have ever known before. We have learned more about the functioning of the human brain relative to happiness, and to all other functions, in the last few years than we ever knew before.
The truth is that all of us attain the greatest success and happiness possible in this life whenever we use our native capacities to their greatest extent.
SMILEY BLANTON
When Brian was in his twenties, ambitious and eager to live a happy, fulfilling life, he began to study the subject of happiness. After thousands of hours of reading and research in the areas of psychology, philosophy, religion, and success, he got an extraordinary insight into the entire subject.
The Main Obstacle
He discovered that negative emotions, ugly frogs that squat in the back of your mental pond, are the primary obstacles to enjoying the happiness you truly desire. Negative emotions, from whatever source, are the root causes of almost all the unhappiness, misery, and frustration in life and work. If you can eliminate negative emotions, you can transform your whole life!
He also learned that the mind is like a vacuum. It will not remain empty for very long. When you eliminate negative emotions, your mind will refill naturally with positive emotions of happiness, joy, excitement, love, and peace. When you get rid of the weeds, flowers will grow.
Sometimes, a single new idea or insight that leads to your interpreting a past event differently can liberate you so completely that you will never be the same in that area. Forever after, you will be a different person.
Negatives Sometimes Turn into Positives
For example, you could get fired from a job and be angry at your employer for the injustice of it all. Then you find a new and better job that is much more suited to your special talents and abilities, you work with people you really enjoy, and the job pays far more than you could have ever earned at the previous job. In retrospect, you realize that your previous employer did you a huge favor by firing you, and instead of being angry, you think back with gratitude.
One of the most helpful habits you can develop is choosing to seek the valuable lesson in everything that happens to you, especially negative experiences. When you have an unexpected setback or temporary failure (a cold, slimy frog), decide that, since you have complete control of your thoughts, you will seek the lesson or benefit that you can gain from the situation. Very often, you can gain insights, ideas, confidence, and new opportunities. What is the most valuable lesson contained in your biggest difficulty or problem right now?
Take Control of Your mind
To become the best person you can possibly be, you need to start at the beginning. The Law of Control says that you feel happy about yourself to the degree to which you feel you are in control of your own life, and you feel unhappy to the degree to which you feel you are not in control or are controlled by external circumstances or people.
You have either an internal locus of control, where you feel in charge of your own life, or you have an external locus of control, where you feel that you are controlled by circumstances and people—your boss, your bills, your health—that you can do nothing about. Psychologists today agree that the presence or absence of a sense of control is the critical factor in stress or lack of stress, happiness or unhappiness, and almost every human malady, mental and emotional.
The fact is that you have complete control over only one thing—your mind. You can control the thoughts you think. As Victor Frankl, survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, said, “The last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”
Your single focus must then be the elimination of negative emotions of all kinds. Fortunately, negative emotions can be eliminated and removed by using a series of proven methods and techniques, many of which can act in seconds, which you will learn in the pages ahead.
NOW DO THIS
Starting today, begin paying attention to your thoughts when situations upset you, frustrate you, or invoke negative feelings. Take a deep breath and make the decision not to feed them. In Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman talks about a process that some people refer to as “emotional snowballing.” The negative emotion starts off small, but the more energy and attention you give it, the greater it becomes. Choose to dwell on positive thoughts and feelings and starve the negative ones. Remember, you are in control of your thoughts!
Program Yourself to Be Optimistic
Where do your emotions come from? Which comes first, the thought or the feeling? The fact is that thought precedes feeling, and feeling precedes decision and action. First you think a thought or take in new information. You then interpret that thought as being either positive or negative. Your interpretation then generates the appropriate emotion. The emotion then triggers an action or a reaction on your part.
Put another way, you determine your emotional life and much of what happens to you by the way you choose to think about an event or experience. You are the one who gives meaning to each part of your life—no one else.
The way that most people think is based on the stimulus-response model of behavioral psychology. A particular stimulus or event can trigger a particular response or reaction almost instantly. Much of your thinking and feeling is automatic and instinctive, where you simply react as you have done over and over in the past.
However, the best thinkers, the happiest and most successful people, think and respond differently from average people. Instead of immediately responding to a stimulus, the most effective people take the time to think about what is happening and the best way to respond. In those moments of thought between the stimulus and the response, the quality of individual life is determined.
The Power of Thoughtfulness
When you develop the habit of thinking in a positive and constructive way about the events in your life before you respond, you will make better choices and decisions and take more constructive actions than those who simply react with little thought about the consequences.
When you look back over your life, you will see that many of your mistakes that caused unhappiness and grief were the result of not having given the subject enough thought before you acted.
The Law of Substitution
The Law of Substitution says that you can hold only one thought in your mind at a time, positive or negative. It also says that you can deliberately substitute a positive thought for a negative thought. You can choose to think a thought that makes you positive or happy in place of any thought that makes you unhappy.
Dr. Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania conducted twenty-two years of research into the subject of optimism. One of his most important conclusions was that people are optimistic or pessimistic depending upon their “explanatory style.”
Your explanatory style is how you interpret events to yourself. Each person can have her own perception or interpretation of an event or situation, and whatever her perception, her feelings happen automatically as a result of her interpretation. Perception is reality. That's why it is said that there are always three sides to a story, the first person's version, the second person's, and what actually occurred.
You Can Reinterpret a Situation
In a similar vein, the field of neurolinguistic programming refers to “framing” and “reframing.” The situation itself is not what causes you to feel happy or unhappy. It is your interpretation of the situation as being either positive or negative that triggers the corresponding emotion. By reframing a past experience, you will find that your emotional response will totally shift and relieve you of old negative feelings.
For example, when you first look at a cold, slimy frog (or any difficult person or situation) and imagine touching it or being near it, you may feel repulsed. However, if you reinterpret it and think about the fact that frogs eat mosquitoes and mosquito bites are awfully uncomfortable, you may see the frog with new appreciation.
Reframing is a major tool in psychotherapy. Often if people can develop another perspective on their situation, their feelings toward it change completely. If you are unhappy because you had a difficult childhood and you begin to think how your childhood experiences combined to make you a better person as an adult, you can change your perspective. You can actually be grateful for the difficulties you had growing up because they made you the excellent person you are today.
Language is very important in this area. The words that you choose to use to interpret an event can trigger thoughts, feelings, emotions, and reactions, positive or negative. Choose your words with care.
Brian's Story
Brian came from a poor home with no money and few opportunities. He didn't graduate from high school. He worked at laboring jobs for several years, washing dishes, and digging ditches and wells. In his midtwenties, he got into sales, where he eventually succeeded, and then into sales management, where he succeeded even more. By the time he reached the age of thirty, his life was turning around and he was on the way up in his career.
As his fortunes improved, he one day took a deep breath and bought his dream car, a two-year-old Mercedes-Benz 450 SEL, silver-gray with blue leather upholstery. He was able to trade in his older car as the down payment and had to stretch the monthly payments over five years, but at last he had the car he had always wanted.
When he took it out on the highway, he would step on the accelerator, and it would start moving like a big boat, faster and faster until he had to slow down to avoid getting speeding tickets. After he had driven this big, powerful car for a year, he took it in for servicing by a mechanic who specialized in Mercedes-Benz repairs.
One Small Part
When he picked up the car, the mechanic, Mario, said that he had found a problem in the carburetor. A previous mechanic had inserted a key part backward, thereby cutting down the amount of fuel going into the engine. Mario had replaced this part with a new part and installed it properly. He said, “Step on the gas carefully; you will notice the difference.”
Brian was already quite content with his car. It seemed to drive fine and went as fast as he dared on the open highway. But this time, when he barely touched the gas pedal, the car exploded forward as though propelled by a rocket. He had to slam on the brakes to keep from crashing into the traffic on the street.
From then on, whenever he drove his Mercedes, Brian had to step on the accelerator very gently. A slight touch would cause that car to blast forward at such a speed, zero to 60 miles per hour in five seconds, that he would have to brake quickly to hold it back. And all because of changing one small part deep in the carburetor.
You Have Extraordinary Abilities
Your mind and potential are like a beautifully engineered Mercedes. Even if your life is moving along in a satisfactory or even fairly successful way, you may have, deep within your mind, a negative memory or block, an ugly frog, holding you back from accomplishing extraordinary things with your life. When you identify this block and remove it, you will suddenly begin to make more progress in a few weeks or months than you might have made in several years.
In the next chapter, you will learn how to identify those hidden blocks that hold you back. You will learn how to release vast reserves of energy, enthusiasm, and desire in a direction of your own choosing. You will learn proven ideas and insights that can change your life.
NOW DO THIS
Identify one area where you might still be harboring anger at a person from your past or still be thinking about a negative experience that could be holding you back from putting your whole heart into your work or personal life.
Resolve today that you are going to reinterpret the negative experience in a positive way, learn from it, let it go, and then focus your entire attention on your goals and the future rather than continuing to think about the past.