Building Hope Counseling Services

Your mindset changes the way you experience every moment of every day.

Sounds dramatic? Maybe, but it’s still true!

The stories that we tell ourselves every day are arguably more important than anything that we go through in daily life. The story is the understanding, the way we make sense of our world.

Our brains work hard to find evidence to support our own beliefs. Think of this like looking through a pair of sunglasses.

If the sunglasses are dark, the whole world will look bleak and difficult to manage. Our every decision will be from a place of fear, scarcity, and survival.

How wonderful for us that the opposite is true as well.

Firmly believing that today is a good day, or looking through brightly colored glasses, will guide you towards choices, relationships, and events that will be good. You’ll see minor inconveniences as just that – minor – and something like traffic or the potatoes going bad will no longer derail your entire day.

And it will be a good day.

What color are your sunglasses today?

Do they make the world around you dark and difficult to navigate or are they bright, giving ordinary events a soft glow of joy?

You get to decide every morning – What story am I going to tell myself?

The more you practice choosing a positive interpretation of reality, the easier it will become for you to see and recognize the small, ordinary, everyday goodness that surrounds you.

It can be scary to choose to improve your mindset.

Even if the life you’re living now isn’t entirely pleasurable, it’s one you understand. You know what this difficult situation requires of you because you’ve seen it and done it before.

If we don’t try new things, we won’t have to risk heartbreak, embarrassment, or disappointment if it doesn’t work out. We understand our small, chaotic lives very well and often aren’t interested in learning how to manage a different kind of difficulty that comes with trying something new.

After all, the brain’s job is to keep us safe, not make us happy. How can it keep us safe if we keep changing the situation?!

Fear can keep your life very small. I think it might be time for us all to try something new.

Get out of your own way.

What do you want? Think about it for a moment and get as specific as you can.

What do you really want out of this life? Not what your parents want, or your boss, or your friends, or society, or anyone else.

Just you.

What do you want for your life?

There might be something holding you back that’s outside of your control. But maybe, just maybe, if you zoom out a little bit, the only thing holding you back is yourself.