What Happened To You?
Author
Damon Cart
Date
Sep 29, 2017
Tags
General tips
Content
Author
Did something happen to you or for you? Or did it just happen?
We often think of events, especially the ones we don’t like, as happening to us when really they’re just happening and we personalize it and often that makes it worse.
You can make a solid argument that if someone calls you an asshole that this action was done to you. I won’t deny that. However, how useful is it to think of it that way?
Perhaps you did act like an asshole and someone is calling you out for it and you might perceive this as useful feedback about something you did.
Most assholes don’t self-reflect this way though.
Most sensitive people will get angry and reactive before they consider whether or not they did something assholish.
If you’re certain you did nothing to rationally deserve being called an asshole, it’s probably best to just think of it as something that happened rather than something that happened to you.
In this video I’m describing a situation where just the day before we had shot a day of training for one of the modules of my practitioner training and none of the footage was usable. The image looked great but their was no sound. What a waste!
Unfortunately it was also (I think) some of the best teaching I’ve ever done. Ouch! Still hurts.
Upon discovering this I thought “How can this happen to me?” and I admit that I engaged in personalizing an event that was not personal at all.
The situation happened. It didn’t happen to me I realized as I stopped myself before engaging in an old pattern of believing “bad” stuff always happens to me.
In doing that I was free from the pattern and that allowed me to assess the situation without emotions distorting it.
I looked over the microphone and played around with it until I realized indeed the battery was dead. No one else was responsible for checking the battery but me because I had not delegated this task.
I decided that I would accept this lesson and teach even better for the rest of the weekend to make up for my mistake.
There are some people who believe the world happens “for” them. This is also a form of egocentric thinking.
Have you ever met a psychotic optimist? Someone who always believes things will work out great for him or her and the world is here to give them what they want and even when given a sour grape they will tell you it’s better than yours even though yours is sweeter?
These people can be pretty annoying and this type of thinking can be found in antisocial people (the clinical definition of antisocial) as well as people who are psychotic like serial killer Ted Bundy who was eternally optimistic and charismatic.
The interesting thing about these people is that this type of extreme optimism usually works well for them and it can work well for you too as long as you stay grounded and as long as you don’t distort reality. Believing objective reality operates for you is an example of distorting it.
This is also why The Secret and The Law of Attraction works and also why it doesn’t work (and also why extremist followers of these concepts are so annoying).
When something happens that you don’t like give yourself the choice of which way of thinking about it will work best for the situation instead of engaging in emotional distortions or engaging in being so overly optimistic that you don’t logically assess the problem. Be careful also of becoming to detached by thinking everything that happens has no connection to you.
The solution to most anything is choice. Life is not static. A solution for one situation could cause a problem in another situation. You are not a hammer and everything is not a nail. You always have choices.
Damon Cart
Author
Damon Cart is considered to be a natural talent by some of the best NLP trainers in the world. His approach to guiding and teaching students brings to their awareness that they've been doing NLP all of their lives without realizing it and he empowers them with skills and resources to thrive and reach their full potential. With the understanding of how Neuro Linguistic Programs create oneβs experience a person can then take charge of those programs and create the experience and the life they want. By taking this approach into his own rigorous, daily NLP practice Damon has been able to rapidly accelerate his progress in learning, coaching clients and teaching workshops.
