Making up a story

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Often in life, we make up stories in our head of wrongdoing done by others towards us based on what we think we know.

It is like reading a book with pages missing or text blocked out and then telling someone the story or worse the ending.

We allow preconceived ideas of others, marred by our judgements, to write stories that are based on simply that.

It’s a little like when we have a bad experience with a doctor or the phone company etc, we then assume we will always have a bad experience with doctors or the phone company.

Maybe a particular person made a bad choice of behaviour and then we seem to label them.

So we react to other people’s behaviour towards us, or most often overreact, based on nothing other than a partially complete picture or judgements.

Making up a story and often allowing ourselves to be a victim.

The simple fact is no one is out to get us anyway, they are busy with their own priorities, so being a victim is never worth the energy.

Instead of reacting we could simply ask questions to the other person and complete the story knowing the complete picture of another person’s behaviour. We may come to the same conclusion, but more often we would not, as we would react without blinkers.

Asking some questions first avoids overreaction and the need to make up stories that include us the victim.

A comfort in holding on

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Liberating ourselves from past behaviours is sometimes sabotaged.

We may think that we have decided to change and form new habits.

Sometimes we explain to ourselves that lapses in behaviour are to do with it taking a long time to change a habit. This is certainly true of habits that we have had for a lifetime that we are trying to alter.

However, sometimes there is a subconscious comfort in remaining as we were, particularly if the habit is related to a person or perhaps our childhood.

Once you realise what triggers a particularly habitual behaviour that you are trying to change, get really curious to see if this behaviour has a comfort zone from the past.

Comfort zones are nearly always uncomfortable and safety is riskier than change. Staying stuck with a habit is in the long-term more painful than the change.

As I blogged only recently, hard things end up being easy longer-term and easy is always painful, like holding on for ‘comfort’.