How A 180-Degree Shift in Your Thinking Can Alleviate Dread
We all dread certain “chores” in life — here’s how to make them less dreadful.
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I hate squats! But I know I should be doing them, right??? Every day? Ok, I’ll do them every day, but know in my mind I’m despising every nano-second of it!! 😡
Ok, I may have slightly embellished — my friend didn’t say those exact words, I think maybe it was lunges she hated the most. Tomato, toMAto. 🍅
Listen, I have a whole list of things I don’t enjoy doing either, and it got me thinking… What do we genuinely accomplish by hating the thing we’re doing?
What if there were 359 other ways we could go about looking at something, a different way to behave/react/respond/perform? There’s more than one way to skin a cat. (I mean, why? Who came up with THAT saying because it’s gnarly man, gnarly.)
With so many different ways to do and look at something, I began to think… why do I always choose the SAME FREAKING WAY? Why does my brain always want to have the same conversation?
When I sit down to do my 30 minutes of writing a day (ok, most days), I do it with the same thoughts swirling around in my head… and the thoughts don’t stray too far from, here we go again, you thinking you’re a writer. Who do you think you are??
Like, wtf brain? Aren’t you some incredible network of synapses and nerve endings and potential, yet you choose to play the same Donna Summer song ad nauseam?
Sounds kinda like, Ugh, let me get my squats done so I can get on with my day.
Why do we choose to immerse our experiences in such a fire swamp of thoughts and conversations? It turns the entire experience into a means to an end that we feel we’re never going to get to.
And yes, we end up doing the work — begrudgingly. We strap on our backpack of dread.
What if we took the same situation and — going rad — looked at it from a 180-degree turnabout?
Now, imagine this. I sit down at my desk and think to myself, Ok, here we go, I’m gonna write because YES, I’M A WRITER DAMNIT and I’m good at it…
