Be thankful for the little things in life
Deficit thinking and comparison to others can be a dark place to visit. Focus on what you have achieved, no matter how small.
One of the benefits of being a professional conference speaker is that you get to listen to other speakers on all sorts of topics if you can spare the time to stay.
Last week, I was fortunate to hear Dr Paul Wood, a psychologist and author of the book How To Escape From Prison ata conference in Wellington.
I first met Paul more than a decade ago, when he was a participant in one of my workshops on Healthy Thinking. I knew he had studied psychology, so I asked him to get up and speak to the audience. Little did I know he had not stood on stage since playing the part of a tree in a school play at the age of 10. After the workshop, I caught up with him and asked where he had studied psychology. I was stunned when he said, ‘‘in prison’’.
He then told me his story about when he was 18 years old, he got into a situation which resulted in him taking someone’s life and spending 10 years behind bars – some in maximum security and solitary confinement.
Through changing his mindset and self-limiting beliefs, he gained a PhD in psychology and became an organisational psychologist. At the time, Paul wanted to keep his story quiet as he was recently out of prison and had mixed feelings about telling his story. I remember saying, ‘‘the world needs to hear your story, you need to do a TED talk and write a book and become a professional speaker’’.
Now I am sure I wasn’t the only one to tell Paul that and, to his credit, he did. To see him on stage and masterfully telling his story with many powerful messages to the audience, was spellbinding and I learnt a lot as well. He described well, the comfort zone where many of us sit for all sorts of reasons. Then there is the stretch zone, which helps us grow, before we can hit the terror zone, when we are way out of our comfort zone. He also encouraged us to be the best we can be each day in small steps.
To see someone like Paul, who made a very bad choice and accepted responsibility for that, be incarcerated and then turn his life around through the power of his mind and beliefs is an incredible story. So many of us live in our own metaphorical prisons of self-limiting thoughts, beliefs and attitudes. Most of us have dark places within our mind, where we tell ourselves we are not good enough, where we benchmark ourselves against others and are self-critical. Sometimes those thoughts spill over to the people around us.
Like any form of training, it takes discipline to train our minds and avoid those dark places and self-limiting beliefs. So, where do your thoughts go when we start to struggle under the weight of life and its pressure to perform?
I find a good technique is to focus on what we do have, rather than on what we don’t. Deficit thinking and comparison to others can be a dark place to visit. Focus on what you have achieved, no matter how small. Sometimes, it may be just getting through a tough day.
Focus on your freedom and be thankful for the simple things in life we take for granted, like breathing. Having seen many patients with emphysema, they would be most grateful just to be able to breathe without supplementary oxygen.
Have a look at Dr Paul Wood’s TED talk, he will give you some steps to find your freedom and escape some of those selflimiting beliefs.
Dr Tom Mulholland is a GP with 30 years’ experience. He’s currently on a mission, tackling health issues around New Zealand.