You create your own reality

Posted: November 1st, 2009 | Filed under: insights | Tags: personal mastery | No Comments »

You have created the reality that you find yourself in; what you tolerate in life, the beliefs you have that limit you, your attitudes, these and other of your influences have all created your reality.  The sooner you accept this, the sooner you take responsibility for your current situation, the sooner you can take responsibility for changing it for the better.  We may not always have direct control of the world around us but we are always free to choose how we think and feel.  It’s not what happens that makes the biggest difference but how you deal with what happens.  No one can take this inner freedom, this inner power, unless we choose to give it away.

Sound too simple?  Well let’s look at how attitudes are formed.

Attitude is an emotion that all people get when they have other emotions.  As Wikipedia says “Attitudes are positive, negative or neutral views of an “attitude object”: i.e. a person, behaviour or event.  People can also be “ambivalent” towards a target, meaning that they simultaneously possess a positive and a negative bias towards the attitude in question.  Attitudes come from judgments.  Attitudes develop on the ABC model (affect, behavioral change and cognition).  The affective response is a physiological response that expresses an individual’s preference for an entity.  The behavioural intention is a verbal indication of the intention of an individual.  The cognitive response is a cognitive evaluation of the entity to form an attitude.  Most attitudes in individuals are a result of observational learning from their environment.”

There is a simple conclusion to this: a positive reality comes from positive emotions about a person, behaviour, or event.  Re-frame your emotional response to a positive one and your attitude will be a positive one.  Sound too simple?  Well ask yourself if you are really seeing the true picture.  When a Japanese person nods we assume that he means “yes” but he is actually saying “I hear you and I acknowledge that you said that”.  Do not confuse data with assumptions.  The problem is that most people treat interpretations, attributions and generalisations as data or facts, rather than assumptions.

As Peter Senge says in his book “The Fifth Discipline”: “We do not describe the world that we see; we see the world we can describe.”

The greatest thing that any of us will ever choose in life is our attitude towards it.  And that is how you have created the reality you find yourself in now.  If you believe that you will live the fullest life you can, you will.