So many of us hope for and work for positive change in our lives. We dream of the day when money isn’t a struggle, when we aren’t surrounded by people who treat us badly, when we are free to be who we truly are, when we can live the life we are meant to… and yet when it happens we don’t believe it. Over time we become habituated to the bad and so we don’t trust the good when it arrives. The good stuff piles on and we ignore it and look for the bad. We spend days and weeks and months getting good feedback, receiving what we’ve asked for, starting to live the life we’ve dreamed of and yet waiting for the moment when things go wrong and life returns to what we know.
We don’t realize how much of our identity get’s wrapped up in being the victim, of being the hard luck kid, of being at the bottom of the priority list. We don’t notice that we’ve begun to see the world from that perspective and so can’t see the good when it arrives. We look so hard for the good guy to date but when he arrives we ignore him because he’s not what we expect, he’s not what we know, he’s not even dating material, right? We get into social situations and become bored because there’s no drama going on, nothing interesting even though that type of interesting is exactly what we say we want to get away from. We keep ourselves in the cycle of never achieving because it’s become who we are. In order to actually achieve our dreams we need to let go of our old identities and open up to new ones.
It’s not that we should forget what we’ve learned, stop looking for issues or become unaware when they exist. We’ve earned our drama radar and should use it. But we shouldn’t make radar blips show up when their aren’t any or get alarmed when there haven’t been any for a while and start looking for the moment when things are going to go bad. Because they probably aren’t. Things change all the time. We should too, starting with our perceptions of who we are. If we think we’re a new person who achieves their dreams, then perhaps we are and we will.