On a recent business trip, our CEO connected with a friend and shared some of the challenges that he has recently gone through. The friend shared that when he was going through a very difficult time in his life, he read an article that “changed his life”. As he recounted the content of the article, I recalled the exact same concept covered in the book “Rapt” recently discussed. It is indeed good advice.
When we have bad things happen to us in life, a loss, an offense, a mistake, we replay it in our minds over and over again. Each time hoping for insight that we didn’t have on the last go around, the result is that it negatively effects our emotions, and as a result, we spend even more time thinking about it – a vicious cycle. The suggestion of the article was to stop dwelling on those things – to genuinely let them go. Focusing on them only creates bad patterns of thought and leads to more negative emotions. Not only that but it affects the things we focus on in the rest of our life. Our scope is more narrowed rather than seeing the bigger picture.
We can’t always control how we feel, but we can control what we dwell on.
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