Thank God it's not raining

​“Thank God it’s not raining – we are going to have a wonderful day”, that’s what the neighbour across the street from me was saying to her little girl when I took Stella out for a walk a few days ago. We shouted pleasantries to each other and went on our way. For the rest of our wonderful morning walk, I thought about that beautiful little girl and what she was learning from her mother. Then I thought, that’s exactly what I learnt from mine, and then I thought that’s pretty much what everyone’s teaching out there – no wonder the world is such a mess!

Let me explain. You see, just like my neighbour, you too probably think that you are an extremely positive minded person. And you’re right – no one wants good things to happen more than my beautiful neighbour, and I know you do too. I was like that too not so many years ago. Then I discovered something about myself that changed the way I looked at things completely. You see, wanting good things to happen is not the same as being positive thinking. Everyone wants good things to happen, but they don’t and that is because everyone is not positive thinking.
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See, what my neighbour did was that she connected rain with a bad day, and no rain with a wonderful day. In the mind of that little girl, a belief was planted, silently, unknowingly, seemingly no harm done. Twenty, maybe thirty years from now when the three year old is a young woman her mood might depend on whether the sun is shining, and how I ask you does that serve her? The difference comes from whether she accepted what her mother told her at age three to be true or did she per chance reject it with her self-talk that said “mommy doesn’t like rainy days, but I do”. That little girl’s self-talk is the key to whether she see the world as a glass half full or a glass half empty.

​We all learn things that control our moods and our emotions because we connect things that do not need to be connected. If we didn’t make the connection between them then they wouldn’t control us. The concept applies everywhere. It shows up a lot in the connection between tea or coffee and feeling energized, it shows up when people smoke or need a drink to relax. Think about it – if you didn’t think you needed a drink to relax, then you could relax without it – right? People connect success and money with hard work, but then there are those who achieve both without hard work. 

When I started my MBA program, it surprised me that people where consuming coffee to stay awake - I was oblivious of the fact that coffee had this effect on people, because in my family we had coffee to go to bed! I had never made the connection between coffee and wakefulness, in fact the connection I had made was the opposite and I still abide by it!

We cannot escape the connections we make, and those connections control the parameters within which we live our lives. It reminds me of Henry Fords famous word “if you think you can, you can, if you think you can’t you can’t”. Our self-talk is what makes the difference. We can limit ourselves or be Unlimited.
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​What are some of the bogus things you believe in? Are you aware of the limiting connections you have made between things? There is a really quick 2 minute exercise I teach that helps to figure out how limiting or unlimiting your thoughts are. I call it thought mapping. It was first published in the book Thrive, and refined in the book Manifesting Mistakes. More recently, I have added it to the collection of exercises in the workbook “Reaching for Joy”.