🌼22 Controversial Ideas That Changed My Life(They Might Change Yours)
From an average Jo
There’s a lot to be said for spending intentional time exploring your own mind. I’ve found many answers lie in just asking better questions of mine.
I’ve learned the hard way that if you go running, believing your own mind, you’ll find yourself in a pickle pretty quickly.
The world needs more people that:
Learn MoreThink slow
Question ideas
Build a habit of curiosity
If you can learn to expand the space between thinking and deciding. To allow time to question your thoughts, to go back and forth a little, to play devil’s advocate in your own mind, magic happens.
Read also: Think less. Act more
I’ve been learning to do this for the last three years and here are 22 ideas that I now believe to be true. Who knows, in three more years, I might disagree with them entirely.
After a while, you learn to silence your own mind when it doesn’t serve you. It’s not that you don’t have negative thoughts, rather you learn to smile and tell them that they don’t serve you. It’s something that takes time and something we were never taught in school.
The reality is, we’re all scared, vulnerable and uncertain but acting in spite of that is a differentiator. It’s not the absence of feeling it’s the strength of the mind.
Discipline is a habit. You don’t snap your fingers and decide you’re going to wake up at 5 am for the next, forever. You decide to be better. You make it three days out of seven. Then four. Then five. You never master it, but is the ambition to be better that matters.
Envy is evidence of aspiration. Learn to reframe it as clarity in who you want to be and where you want to go in life. If you can channel those feelings into helping you steer your life, you’ll reach new heights.
My life changed when I stopped letting myself get in my own way. When I let the evidence dictate my path and learned to silence my negative internal narrative.
I think some of the best writing advice out there is to get honest. To be as close to the human experience as you can. Channel rawness, unpolished, frantic thoughts. Empathy is everything.
The default path is so often taken because it’s the one that is most tangible. Get a job, and climb the ladder, it’s understandable. If we want more people to walk a path more aligned with them, we have to be transparent about how.
I’m half convinced people don’t want $1 million. They want autonomy. Which is way cheaper.
If you can master one habit, choose self-belief. Get disciplined about doing the things you said you would and reflect often. Most people don’t even try because they don’t have enough self-belief that they can.
Read also: 6 ways to become a learning machine
Unexplored feelings are missed opportunities. Emotions are signals of how you want to live life.
Design around the day you want to live. The stuff you have is just noise.
“Don’t worry” is bad advice because we do. Better is to worry but worry well. Allocate time for worrying but explore it deeply. Write it down. Why, what, when, how. “Understand your worry” is better.
Underrated advice: get to know your feelings. Spend time understanding where they come from and what triggered them.
One of the greatest gifts is self-compassion. To be a friend to yourself. To coach yourself when you need it. To have empathy with yourself.
Nobody knows what they’re doing. With that in mind, be clueless with confidence. Test, build, learn, fail. You won’t care in 10 years, so don’t care now. You have permission to be oblivious. Own it.
Tune into the stories you tell yourself. Get good at seeking evidence. Play devil’s advocate. Make sure the stories you tell yourself are not fiction.
A liberating thought: It’s not quite right but I have faith I’ll work it out.
What I wished someone had said to me 3 years ago: “You’re not doing it not so why do you care if you fail trying? Worst case, you’ll be in exactly the same spot with more experience.”
Do you know the best thing I did to build a business online? I got a job I liked. So I wasn’t desperate to quit the rat race, instead, I built a sustainable habit for 3 years.
There is real beauty in accepting that this is what life is and you have ownership of who you are and what you want to be.
The space between who you are and who you want to be, framed right, is an opportunity.
One of the best questions you can ask at work is: “What problem are we trying to solve.” When you understand what, you can decide how, too often it’s missed and you end up solving problems you didn’t have.
As I go on in life, I’m not sure anybody has the answers, not really. Maybe those that profess that they do are furthest away from the answers. Who knows? Nobody really.
🟢Contributed by Eve Arnold
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