Stop believing the lies you tell yourself

+ I never have enough time for the things I want to do.

+ We are terrible with money.

+ He never listens to me… He doesn’t appreciate me…

+ I can’t lose the weight

+ I’m no good at…

Any of these sound familiar?  I know for me the ‘time’ lie is something that I catch myself repeating all the time.  But it occurred to me the other day.  I have exactly the amount of time I’m meant to have.  Yes life is busy.  But so is everyone else’s. We all have the same amount of time in the day and I can continue to stress over my lack of it (which really just causes the feeling of no time because that’s what I’m focusing on), or I can be grateful for the time I do have instead.

And just like that suddenly, time feels abundant. Long days seem to stretch ahead of me. There is less stressing and gripping and holding onto the time I do have and I seem to get more done. Funny that.

So I started thinking… in what other areas do I do the same thing?

Money is another common one we often talk ourselves into problems with.  We stress and whinge over how broke we are and suddenly we’re flooded with bills and things breaking down.  One after the other they never seem to stop. Yet if we just relax a little and start to appreciate the financial security we do have (and no I’m not talking burying our head in the sand and resorting to credit cards), suddenly we start to see ways out of our financial stress.  Opportunities seem to appear as if by magic.  Of course it’s not actually magic, it’s just that we’re not so distracted by stressing that we notice these opportunities.  We created the space to receive them.

We get stuck in this cycle of repeating these stories about ourselves that after a while we start believing them too. Yet the irony is, they’re only true because we keep repeating them.

It’s like when we keep telling ourselves we can’t do something because at one point in time we tried and failed, or maybe someone told us we couldn’t.  Yet if we just drop the expectation that we can’t, maybe we can?

Like…

I can’t get anything done when the kids are awake.  

Well maybe you can, it’s just not going to look like it used to.

I can’t lose the weight because…

Of course you can’t if that’s what you believe to be true. 

I’m not any good at…

Not if you keep telling yourself that, because you’ll never try.

Maybe if we stopped repeating these lies to ourselves, we’d be able to start creating the change that we actually want, rather than just focusing on everything we don’t want?  I know I’m going to start being more aware of the things I tell myself.

What stories have you repeated to yourself for so long that you’ve started to believe them.