I don’t care what you think…
I care about what you do about the way you think. I was never taught how to use my brain. I spent many years in school. I spent a lot of time there filling my brain, very little time was spent there actually learning how to use my brain. I have diplomas to prove this. I have spent years filling my brain. I had to learn how to use my brain on my own…
What I am getting at here is that as an adult, you may have spent all your life using a tool that you were never taught was even a tool, let alone taught to sharpen it. It is entirely possible to go through your entire existence wearing glasses that have been completely fogged up and dirty. Without ever having had the knowledge that you are wearing glasses and that you can clean them. This is the state of our education. It is the state of the world we live in.
You were given a body and like most people, you were not given the instruction manual for this tool. It was left up to you to figure out how to take care of it. You were given vague guidelines as to what food is good for you and what food isn’t but for the most past, everything else was left up to you. School certainly didn’t help with that and your parents can’t quite be trusted with this either because they were also raised wearing the dirty glasses I just talked about.
You might have heard the phrase: “Your mind is a great servant but an awful master”. What does that even mean? It means that your brain is unreliable. It has all kinds of features built into it that can be taken advantage of: consciously or unconsciously. It filters every experience you ever had and no one explains how to take care of it…
I started to tell people about how I use my brain and the reaction I got most of the time was: ”It doesn’t work that way”. It took me a long time to realize most people have never examined the process of their brain. Never got curious about what their brain does and how it does the things it does. I think we can all accept that the brain is an amazing tool for creativity. It also means that this creativity can come up with all kinds of hallucinations that turn against us.
The good news is you are the curator of your thoughts. You have the ability, somewhere in you, to act or not to act on the thoughts that are generated by your brain. I know this because when you read “There is someone behind you that wants to murder you”, you didn’t suddenly turn around to check.
You might have been working with a mind that unknowingly prevents you from accomplishing what you want in life. I know I certainly was. It took me a long time to figure out how to use my brain so that it would help me and not hinder me (it still does sometimes). There is a lifetime of wiring that needs to be looked at…
Here is one example that usually triggers people quite a lot. It takes the form of a conversation and I call it the what if game:
Person: What if things don’t turn out the way you planned? X - Y - Z could happen and it would be horrible.
Me: What if they turn out exactly the way I planned and wanted? That would be amazing!
Person: That isn’t reasonable to think that.
Me: I currently have as much evidence as you for the story I just made up, you just don’t like the fact that I make up better stories than yours…
Person: It’s not how things work!
I am simplifying but people learn very quickly that playing the what if game with me is not a successful strategy. I will even say out loud ”Oh we are playing the what if game, great!”. I trust myself to deal with what arises when the time comes, it is irrelevant until then.
Our brains are wired to look for things that are out of place. This is very useful when snakes might be sliding on a branch that you want to grab onto to swing yourself from tree to tree in the jungle or forest. It is, however, very ill suited to our modern world problems. It will try to convince you there are threats in the future that you haven’t seen. Our brain does this all the time for relationships, for work, when traveling…
Here are two facts that you cannot forget about the universe:
You don’t know everything
You don’t know what you don’t know
This leads us to only one conclusion that makes sense. You can never plan for all outcomes. There will always be something outside the plan that you will only learn as you put the plan in motion. The time to worry about those things is not right now. It only feeds your paralysis. Tomorrow’s problems have to be solved tomorrow. Until then, trust that whatever is happening right now will keep happening and that you can adjust what you need to adjust when the time comes, worrying just wastes energy.