What is my mind telling me?
@4:30 AM, I wake myself up to start my routine… while my mind start chatting:
“Gosh, nobody’s doing it but me.”
“Little more sleep, please…”
“If only I have better working hours job. Happy for them, to work from 9 to 5. ”
“Still got pain in my neck. Can I get a little break?”
“Drag me to the shower, anybody?!”
Another mind chatters under different circumstances (high probability to happen);
“He must be cheating on his business. How can he drove brand new BMW 7 series in a crisis like this?”
“These rich kids doesn’t understand life at all. All they know is getting money from their parents and waste it like there’s no tomorrow.”
“Look at that beggar! He should work his butt off instead of begging pennies on the street. He still got a healthy body though.”
“This traffic jam is killing me. The government is never pay attention to all of this crap. What are they actually doing?”
“My boss, he doesn’t like me. I’m not involved in his new high-profile project. He must think that I am so dumb and useless engineer.”
“I have to find my dream job. I did not suit this environment”
…and so on. Those are what happened automatically in my mind under any circumstances. I tend to make frank opinion even without adequate supporting facts. As you can guess, those opinions contain poor judgment and followed by either self pity or self pride.
Put the blame on my mental chatters; the voice inside my head that, without I realize, speaks continuously to me. Unconsciously these mind chatters act as an automatic response to everything that I see, I feel, and happen to me. I was living unconsciously with it until it become a part of my life. It keeps talking, talking, and talking and finally frame my worldview and directs my life. Lack of self awareness, I go for autopilots. I don’t know where I’m going until it landed me to the place I don’t want to be. At that moment, I start to scream; where is it? What had happened?
Before my life drifted too far away, I should do something about this mental chatter. First, I have to recognize it. By increasing my level of awareness, I need to understand what is it telling me about. I have to give more thought about it. Once I realized and became more aware of their existence I need to go to the next step; I have to stop telling my self a bad story about anything happened in front of me. This means: stop being judgmental. I have no rights of telling people what to do nor complaining about how do they look or behave since I don’t know what their story are, even if it is only happened in my mind. I have to set my mind to embrace my circumstances more. Making useless comments and complains will only result to self pity or self pride, which are toxic to my mind. I have to start having a different frame to see my outside world. Thus I will create a new story, a good story to tell my self as my new mental chatters. Continuously doing it will feed my mind with good foods. As a natural byproduct it will directs my life to a better place, destination I always wanted to be.
This posting is inspired by brilliant speech of Dr. Srikumar Rao posted in YouTube - Leading@Google.
