What If Everything Goes Wrong?

There's a change coming, you can feel it, but your mind is plagued: What if everything goes wrong!?!? Well, what if everything goes right?

It's pretty easy to sit in absolute, petrifying dread, imagining the very worst scenarios for every instance of a projected change; but isn't it just as easy to imagine the very best scenarios? This is a choice that we have - it's up to us to choose what we are going to think about at any given moment in time. And who's in charge here, anyway?

It is said that we are given hard and difficult times in life, so that we are pushed into doing what we don't want to do; meaning that we have lots of ideas about how things are supposed to be, and in effect, these thoughts can be very limiting. "It has to be like this, not like that, or that, or that, or that, like THIS!" But what if all of those different options were actually better? "No, I have to get a job, doing this," you say. But you don't get it. you're stuck. Life is awful. You're fretting and fuming, but finally you give up and you take a different job. And voila, all of a sudden you find that you're really good at this other job, in fact, that you've become a real expert in it, and there is a demand for you that pushes your wages way up and over what you had ever conceived as possible.

We limit ourselves with our mind games - worrying and dreading change and imagining the worst possible outcomes; refusing to see anything outside of what we think is right. Those limitations never serve us, they are useless.

How do you drop your limitations? Call yourself on them. Practice by taking simpler situations. Start with the worst possible scenario, and then change it. Scenario 1 "OK, this morning I am going to get coffee and this is what's going to happen: the barrista is going to be totally stressed, bitchy, unfriendly and make the wrong coffee to boot. It'll take an additional 5 minutes to get the right one, and then, when I am putting sugar in it, some jerk is going to clumsily crash into the little sugar bar and the coffee will end up spilling all over my suit." Scenario 2: "Ok, this morning I am going to get coffee and this is what's going to happen: The barrista is going to smile at me, and my order will be prepared perfectly and quickly to my complete satisfaction, and I will have it back in my car within 3 minutes."

Once you've practiced sufficiently with little things, move to bigger things; but the real secret is to keep practicing. No matter what you are thinking about, call yourself on your thoughts - and make sure you are checking out everything that could go right!

Blessings.
- Darshan

© 2008 Darshan F Jessop