A Field Guide to Feelings
Ignite Confidence
And cook the negativity.
You learn a lot quicker from negative experiences than you do from positive ones. The stick is more damaging than the carrot is enticing. There’s a good reason for that. If you get whacked hard enough by the stick, it won’t matter how many carrots you have. But the result is that you will continuously look for bad news, zero in on the negativity, and lose sight of the big picture. You take for granted all the blessings you have, are ignorant of your resources, and blind to grace.
When people come in for counseling, they can often see all their problems very clearly. They can talk for hours about the terrible things that happened to them, the effect the problems have on them, and why they can’t change. They make the same mistakes over and over again and believe that, if only they could feel badly enough about themselves, they would do differently. They don’t. Heaping guilt upon themselves and reproaching others does nothing other than burden them with guilt and anger, it does nothing to free them.
I’m always on the lookout for the exception to the problems presented to me. If you have problems with your anger, I want to know as much about the times you did not have an outburst as the times you did. If you are addicted, I want to know about the times you…
