Your mood is a direct contributor (or barrier) to your success; here are some of the most common stagnating thoughts to eliminate from your life right away.
Unhappiness is a sneaky demon. It’s one of those feelings that can blindside at 3pm on some idle Thursday, and reveal itself quite long after it came knocking.
Quite often, unhappiness is almost a non-feeling. It’s difficult to articulate, and it comes with a sense of melancholy or absence.
Sometimes we don’t know we’ve lost it until we’ve already formed patterns which corrode our happiness day after day. Our moods shape our lives, and many of these patterns originate with these 4 thoughts. We’ve compiled this list to help you identify and eliminate them.
1. I Should Not Feel (Insert Feeling Here)
Denying or suppressing any emotion, no matter how great, or how heartbreaking it may be, is not in anyone’s good personal interest. End of story.
Everything we feel is felt for a reason, even if that reason isn’t in the present moment. Ignoring an emotion could hamper positive change in your life. It is important to remember there is no way you necessarily should or should not feel -and that how you feel can also be a choice.
If you’re dealing with emotions that are causing guilt or anxiety, your coping methods have the potential to compound the problem. Instead of being reactive, be reflective; ask yourself if the catalyst for your feelings is something you can change, or cannot change? If you can create positive change out of the situation, great. If you cannot, then it is important to accept, adapt, and move on.
You wouldn’t put up with an abuser, and that goes double when you’re the one beating yourself up. A little genuine understanding or forgiveness goes a long way.
2. I Deserve Anything, Good or Bad
Our sense of worthiness in any situation usually serves as a part of our emotional compass in terms of entitlement, or whether we allow life to kick us down a flight of stairs or two.
Sure, you may or may not deserve that promotion -or you may feel like you deserve the bare minimum in life. But why? Or better yet, why not forget about it?
Expectations over things that in reality are out of our control create barriers. Life is a pretty complex thing, and anything can happen.
We decide our feelings, and how personally we take one encounter or another. If we got caught up in what’s fair or what we deserve all the time, we’ll overlook changes in reality, and valuable opportunities to adapt may be overlooked.
3. Structure is Control
To really hammer in our last point, this thought will burn out the perfectionist in anyone in a very short time.
The next time you find yourself not listening, micromanaging, inhibiting autonomy -or “raging against the system” and focusing only on the flaws present on the job site– ask yourself if it’s time to let go.
A healthy structure is based on trust, open communication, and autonomy. And conveniently, it also allows us to choose the battles we’re best suited for so we can make time for other things. It does not mean being disrespectful or acting out however one is feeling at any given time.
This goes for people at all levels, whether they’re running a company or working on the ground floor. Healthy structure also removes needless complexities and makes our lives easier.
One example of how structure can remove needless complexity are workwear uniforms. On one hand, your company finds value in them because they encourage team-based thinking to tackle workplace challenges, but they also make our weekly laundry a heck of a lot easier and reduce morning prep time. Some rebel against structure, and others embrace it for its value.
4. I’ll Be Happy When…
This one is huge. Any thinking that delays happiness isn’t bringing it, and should be corrected or eliminated. If delaying happiness is part of your plan, find another plan.
But it’s also important to have a firm grasp on what makes you happy in the first place, because sometimes real success means living how most people won’t live for a little while, to live like most people can’t live for a long time.
In other words, hard work can be factored into things that make happiness. Saying “I’ll be happy when I’m not doing this or that” is unfounded. Accept and love the life you’re living, all the time, warts and all.