The Situation is Neutral

This is quite possible one of the things my clients hate the most and resist the most and defend the most. “Jaime trust me, it’s because of my job that I’m miserable.” “Jaime, seriously, the only reason I’m depressed is because of the pandemic.” “Jaime, I’m scared, not because of my thoughts, but because I got laid off and I am not going to find a job in this market.”

Oh how we love to blame our circumstances for our feelings.

But think about it. Your situation could make someone else feel something different. Read that again. If your situation created feelings, everyone would feel the same way about it, but they don’t. So there’s something happening between the situation you find yourself in and your feelings. Guess what it is?

If you read my article, Thoughts are Stories, then you know, it’s your thought about the situation that creates your feelings about it.

I was laid off in October, 2020 due to Covid. And while other people in my same situation might have felt scared or lost, I felt overjoyed. I had known I wanted to leave my job but I didn’t have the courage. I had known the company was probably going to close down so I had started planning. So when the doors finally closed, I had already gotten certified as a coach and had one client, was collecting unemployment and was able to negotiate a severance. I was literally overjoyed.

The pandemic itself has made some people feel depressed and lonely. For others, it helped them re-prioritize and reshape their work/life balance.

In your job, the one that’s currently making you “miserable”, there was a time when you were energized and inspired by it, otherwise you wouldn’t have taken the job in the first place. You had ideas about what you would do there and who you would be. Those ideas fueled your feelings of inspiration and motivation. Other ideas and thoughts are fueling your misery.

We don’t want to get in the habit of trying to change our thoughts, but we do want to be aware of how they are making us feel. Because the beauty of life and circumstance is that we get to choose. We choose every moment. We choose what we do and how we feel. We can’t choose outside circumstances, but we 100% get to choose how we show up inside of those circumstances.

I live abroad and sometimes it’s lonely. I could choose to hate it, to miss home, to resent my situation; but instead I choose to love it, to learn from it, to enjoy every moment. It’s not always easy, but it’s always a choice.