Change is a good thing....sometimes. What I have been looking for is a change in health but that importantly includes mental health. But change is not always as positive or lasting as we might hope.
My focus has been on improvement, not just random change. How can I improve? What is it that I can do better? I find myself asking these questions of myself on a daily basis...more than on a daily basis. My goal is improvement. Not by someone else's standards but my own.
I used to be pretty darn grouchy, often. Although there are probably multiple reasons for this, all of this grouchiness stemmed from a poor self-image.
Poor self-image is probably to most dangerous and destructive part of my life. I don't think that I ever had a solid understanding of who I really was as a person. The big reason was that I was trying to constantly seek approval from others, feeling that If I am receiving their approval, I would have evidence that I was actually a good person. Looking for approval from the outside rather than from within. By the way, that doesn't work. Believe me. It really doesn't work. I had to change this.
So with a measured process in place, I began the changes that when focused in the right direction, leads to improvement. My negative thinking about myself and consequently everybody else had to change. My fear of rejection had to change. My fear of "getting in trouble" had to change. My fear of making mistakes had to change. The self-loathing had to change. My constant feelings of misery and impending doom had to change. All of this has one thing in common. Negative thinking.
So although I didn't want to see change unfocused, lacking direction, I knew that if I kept thinking as I was thinking, I would keep getting what I had been getting. We all need to consider this. But for me, I needed to make changes, and almost any change at all was acceptable. Random and radical change would change from those ingrained patterns of disapproval. So changes I made.
I have very intentionally changed my thinking in a lot of areas of my life. Brain research tells us that we develop ruts in the way we mentally process things. So to avoid thinking the same way, I needed to stop thinking the same way. To change that, I would be very careful to not go down the same mental paths that lead to a broken Mike. I had to change it up. I changed the way I did lots of things. I drink room temperature water as opposed to having ice. I switched from darker beers to lighter beers. I switched from KFC to kale. I take as different a path as I can to get from point A to point B. I would intentionally rearrange my apps on my iphone, forcing my brain to go and look for the app and not just go to it without thinking.
This is change but the goal is improvement. At least now the vehicle, so to speak, is moving in a different direction which makes it a whole lot easier to steer as I go down the road to life.
Special thanks to Melissa in China for following this blog. Thank you for your kind comments.
IMPROVE!!
