Digging Ditches

DAY 7: (DAY 8: coming later today)

Following on from yesterdays post and delving deeper into the busyness of thoughts that can generate during the course of our day, I wanted to consider the question of unaware thinking. These are often thoughts that don’t raise any major cause for concern at the time but still have negative connotations for our self esteem and personal development. It could be something like; not making a decision about our plans for the day, allowing ourselves to get stuck in between thought and action only to become mildly frustrated or disappointed. When repeated daily over a number of years this repetitive drip feeding of mild, negative self reflection grows into something much more toxic and self deprecating.

Imagine having lots of thoughts like this through the day and each of these being repeated everyday for years, carving ditches that we sink deeper into. This is how easy it is to invisibly create a version of ourselves that lacks belief and doesn’t actual represent who we are or who we want to be.

All of this because we have developed a process of rationalising the everyday so that we don’t have to think too much about it. We just get on with our day, thinking that we got away with not dealing with questioning why it was that we did that or didn’t do something else. As an example; I have a tendency to not finish things. I have lots of thoughts and I can very happily run through the process of what I need to do and its purpose in my head - like an arm chair athlete. By doing this I convince myself that I’ve already done the job, achieved the outcome. I know in reality I haven’t but somehow in my head I’ve tricked myself so that I no longer need to act on my first thought.

This is a case of not following the principles of THINK, FEEL, DO…

Simple isn’t it, I have the thought: I want to call my friend today and see how he is doing. I feel that this will be really nice to catch up, after all its been a while. I do call him.

Often my process is a skewed combination of the above; I think, I feel but I don’t do...so I don't call my friend and I don't get to connect with him. Or; I think, I do but I don’t feel. This one often leads to a lack of empathy. I know I’ve said it’s simple but it isn’t, especially if you’ve had half a life time of not applying this connective way of living to your everyday.

Breathing, taking a moment is a great way of checking in with ourselves and how to connect with this process.