Beth's Ponderings
Do you
catastrophize?
That’s a “fancy” term
that means you see something negative happening in any situation - current,
future, or just imagined - and then take that negativity to the far extreme.
I recently heard a
woman say that when we look at something big that we want to accomplish, or a
significant change we want to make, we are most creative at coming up with
worst-case scenarios than we are at visualizing it going successfully.
How true!
When we plan for a
trip, to start a business, take a course, or whatever our dream may be, instead
of visualizing ways we can accomplish it easier and better, we say we need to
be “realistic.” That word, “realistic” tends
to keep us small in the way we think, and firmly entrenched in our comfort zone
(aka rut), which is not what we want at all if we are trying to create
something new in our lives.
Yet, on the other
hand, for any given project, we can usually rattle off the top of our heads,
almost without any effort, an extensive list of excuses and reasons why what we
want to do won’t happen, will go horribly and terribly wrong, or how we’ll be
hopeless failures for the rest of our lives.
And, usually, those reasons and worst-care scenarios are so outlandishly
not even possible - certainly nothing realistic about them!
But, what if we
switched that around? What if we were
more outlandishly creative with the reasons why what we want to do WILL work
and how it will make our lives better?
Not only would that make whatever we are doing more enjoyable to do, and
much less stressful, but the added bonus is that we may even discover other
aspects that we want to explore deeper, or methods that will work even better
for us.
There is no one
absolutely perfectly guaranteed way to accomplish anything. There are only multiple creative ways that
each reflect our own individual
personalities.
So instead of
catastrophizing about your next project, why not be outlandishly creative in
planning it. I dare you!
Beth
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