1. You believe that creating your best life is a matter of deciding what you want and then going after it, but in reality, you are psychologically incapable of being able to predict what will make you happy.
Your brain can only perceive what it’s known, so when you choose what you want for the future, you’re actually just recreating a solution or an ideal of the past. When things don’t work out the way you want them to, you think you’ve failed only because you didn’t re-create something you perceived as desirable. In reality, you likely created something better, but foreign, and your brain misinterpreted it as “bad” because of that. (Moral of the story: Living in the moment isn’t a lofty ideal reserved for the Zen and enlightened; it’s the only way to live a life that isn’t infiltrated with illusions. It’s the only thing your brain can actually comprehend.)
2. You extrapolate the present moment because you believe that success is somewhere you “arrive,” so you are constantly trying to take a snapshot of your life and see if you can be happy yet. You convince yourself that any given moment is representative of your life as a whole. Because we’re wired to believe that success is somewhere we get to—when goals are accomplished and things are completed—we’re constantly measuring our present moments by how “finished” they are, how good the story sounds, how someone else would judge the elevator speech. We find ourselves thinking: “Is this all there is?” because we forget that everything is transitory, and no one single instance can summarise the whole. There is nowhere to “arrive” to. The only thing you’re rushing toward is death. Accomplishing goals is not success. How much you expand in the process is.
3. Bad feelings should not always be interpreted as deterrents. They are also indicators that you are doing something challenging and worthwhile. You learn the most when you put yourself into uncomfortable situations that let you grow, bring out the best, and nudge you to adapt yourself.
4. To change your beliefs, new line of thinking is not enough. To make real changes, seek experiences that will cause you to make changes to your belief and thus change you! A belief is what you know to be true because experience has made it evident to you.
5. Problems are not roadblocks to achieve something. They are in fact catalysts to make your life better by forcing you to take action to resolve, behave differently, and actualise the life you wanted. They push you from your comfort zone.
6. You think your past defines you, and worse, you think that it is an unchangeable reality, when really, your perception of it changes as you do.
Because experience is always multi-dimensional, there are a variety of memories, experiences, feelings, “gists” you can choose to recall… and what you choose is indicative of your present state of mind. So many people get caught up in allowing the past to define them or haunt them simply because they have not evolved to the place of seeing how the past did not prevent them from achieving the life they want, it facilitated it. This doesn’t mean to disregard or gloss over painful or traumatic events, but simply to be able to recall them with acceptance and to be able to place them in the storyline of your personal evolution.
7. Most negative emotional reactions are you identifying a dissociated aspect of yourself. (As in my case when I react sharply on seeing my daughter regurgitating a "forced' feed, I am reminded of my own childhood... and about similar ways I fed myself and puked).
