A friend said to me yesterday: “I never hear you get angry.”

I do get angry, and frustrated, and anxious, and, and, and…….., but she never sees or hears it, and I’ll tell you why.

When you are reinventing, everything gets bigger.

Have you noticed? Emotions, empowerment, gremlins, being in the flow, being out of the flow. Desire is bigger. Not being able to see ‘How’ is bigger. Everything gets bigger.

By virtue of your focus on change and transition, you have your inner energy moving faster, and everything has the potential for being amplified. You are playing a bigger game, living larger, more vital and alive. Everything shows up in an amplified way.

Thought is creative. So I make it mandatory, not optional, to tend to my thought patterns judiciously. I like to tend to anger, anxiety, irritation, before it gets bigger! It’s a choice of mine because I’ve noticed that things just go better when I do it. (And, you regular readers know that I don’t always practice this as consistently as I would like.)

When I feel angry, or anxious, or even irritated or frustrated, I know that it is a signal. It’s guidance. It’s an indicator that I am out of alignment with who I truly am and who I want to be.

I don’t talk about it to anybody, because that keeps my focus on it and amplifies it. And keeps me stuck in feeling bad.

Here’s what I do instead. I ask myself two questions, and I work on it until I can feel a visceral shift that feels like relief.

1. What is it that I am thinking about you (person or situation) that is keeping me from being who I know I really am?
2. How can I see you (person or situation) differently so that I feel better? (It can take me a while to fish around for perspectives until I get one that really shifts how I feel in my gut. This isn’t just a mental process or magical thinking. It’s finding a perspective that feels true to me and makes me feel better.)

Relief is my signal or indicator that I have shifted my thinking in the direction of what I want and who I want to be. When I feel relief, I know that I’ve done my work, for now. I’ve come back into being my most resourceful self, for now.

There’s one more piece. Every time anything ‘pushes my button’ on this issue again, I remind myself of the perspective that I have chosen. I focus on that perspective until I feel the negative emotion lift again. Sometimes it takes a while.

Once you have found your preferred perspective, it is a practice, a discipline, to hold it and to come back to it whenever you feel the indicator of negative emotion again.

So at first, it is just a new perspective that you really need to keep reminding yourself of, because you already had a good head of steam going in the old thought or you wouldn’t have felt the negative emotion. Thoughts tend to carve a sort of groove in your mind, and unless you consciously intervene and intentionally redirect the thought to a new ‘groove’, it’s easy to just keep thinking what you have been thinking.

In other words, it is a process or journey of continually shifting your thought, not a ‘getting there’. Eventually, when you have practiced your new perspective enough, it becomes a new belief, and then it has more ’staying power’. A belief is something you keep thinking. It takes repetition to develop and sustain itself.

Eventually, you will develop a new ‘thought groove’, and it will stick. Then your new (chosen and preferred) thought will become a new belief, one that feels good to you.

This may seem like a lot of work, but it has tremendous power.

Big credit to Abraham-Hicks for this process.

Filed under: Being a Reinventer, Tools, Survival Tactics on October 5th, 2007