Tidying Up Everything That Doesn’t Bring You Joy.
Is it bringing you personal growth, progress at work, creativity, or laughter?
When something isn’t working in our external reality, we question it. A negative person who always brings you down or a type of food that always makes you nauseous. We’re quick to zero down on those things and get rid of them. But when it comes to questioning our thoughts, emotions, and mental energy, we tend to drop the ball.
We need to routinely check in on ourselves and challenge the thoughts that not only don’t bring us joy but actually cause us pain. We only have so much mental energy to get us through the day, and we need to use it wisely.
There are so many amazing things rattling around up there, and you should keep all that. Just get rid of everything else that’s bringing you down.
Here are 4 things we need to cut out ASAP.
Judgment
People are going to judge you, it’s inevitable.
In the end, you are the one living your life and you are the only one who needs to fully understand you’re reasoning.
A lot of people are just judgmental by nature, they probably don’t even mean to be so discouraging. In 20 minutes, they’ll be off judging someone else for something else entirely. So, don’t take it so personally, more often than not it has nothing to do with you.
Take it easy on judging yourself as well, we are often too hard on ourselves. Give yourself a break, we forget that we are also allowed to be lazy, selfish, or angry sometimes. Not every day is going to be super productive and not every reaction you have is going to be mature and enlightened. When we look at others we see the whole picture but when looking at ourselves we don’t. Everybody has bad days, and everybody makes mistakes, it’s all part of being human.
Being a perfectionist
Being a perfectionist has become one of those cliché answers for when an interviewer asks you what your greatest weakness is. Saying you’re a perfectionist is a way of masquerading a strength as a weakness, so you come across better in hopes of landing the job. In reality, it truly is a weakness and a bad one at that.
I never thought I was a perfectionist, I thought I was the polar opposite actually. Turns out I’m both, I definitely have the ‘good enough’ mindset with most things. But I am a raging perfectionist when it comes to something I care about. The reason I thought I wasn’t a perfectionist is because I am a wee bit of a procrastinator, little did I know they were very related. The obsession of not being able to do anything unless it’s done perfectly stopped me from even starting so many things.
Trust me I get it, if you’re a perfectionist stopping is not as easy as just deciding to stop. It needs to be a choice you make every day, that becomes easier with practice. Publish that article even if you could possibly make it 10% better if you spent more time on it. In the end, you might be able to perfect it with those finishing touches but you could also be using your time doing something else. Something that’s better and more productive.
Fear of failing
Failing is a part of life.
I view it as a gift that I have been such a colossal failure in life because I don’t really fear it anymore. Relationships, jobs, I have even failed at becoming financially stable several times. It doesn’t even hurt my ego anymore because I just try something else, and what’s the worst that can happen, I fail? Been there done that.
Removing the negative connotation, I had connected with failure, made me realize that it doesn’t have to be a full stop it’s just a pivot. A pivot in another direction, hopefully, a better direction.
Failure doesn’t have to mean losing if you don’t want it to. It can be just another learning opportunity served with a small slice of humble pie. It also builds your resiliency and your confidence, you picked yourself up off the floor once before and you’ll do it again.
Focusing on your weaknesses
We all want to be well-rounded people, and there are definitely some life-skills everyone should have. But we should play to our strengths instead of dwelling on our weaknesses.
Do you think Mark Zuckerberg sits around thinking about how everyone thinks he’s some kind of AI robot? Or do you think he spends his time excelling at what he’s good at. Based on all his success I think it's the latter.
I am a pretty good public speaker, but I hate it. The adrenaline that pumps through me to get me on stage, always makes me blackout. I come off stage with little awareness of what happened, I’ll just remember a laugh here or there. I don’t focus on the lost opportunity of not being able to do public speaking. I try to instead focus on how I do better in small groups or one on one.
There are some things we are just naturally better at and we just need to piece those together with things we actually enjoy doing. That’s where we find our strengths.
Does it bring you joy?
Our mind is our forever home, and we are stuck with it so we might as well make it an enjoyable place to be. Channel your Marie Condo and mentally get rid of everything that isn’t serving you.
Does reminiscing about your break up bring you joy? Probably not unless your some kind of masochist.
Ditch everything that isn’t making you into the person you want to be. It’s really easy to harp on the negatives, trust me I’m guilty of it too. But more good will always come from looking on the bright side.
It’s simple in theory but harder in execution. Challenging your mental habits isn’t going to be a walk in the park since most of them are probably subconscious. A lot of them we already know the answer to, we just need a little push in the right direction.
