Standards. We all have them and they’re different for everyone. We have standards for every area of our lives on what we’re willing to tolerate and put up with, and what we’re not.
You can see your current standards in every area right now based on what you see around you.
What you see around you is the standard you’ve been willing to tolerate up ’til this point. It’s what you’ve been OK with, and what you haven’t been.
And you even have habits and practices that then reinforce the things you’re willing to put up with, and the things you’re not.
For example, if your standard is that you’re fit and healthy, then you have habits and practices in your life that reinforce you being fit and healthy. You most likely have a fitness practice of some kind, you move your body regularly, you eat foods that are good for you and avoid the ones that aren’t, etc.
Or, for example, if you’re not willing to put up with your house being messy/dirty, you will clean it regularly, or you’ll hire someone to clean it for you (’cause you want your standard, you just don’t want to be the one who keeps it up).
This is true across all areas of your life (and business). You have standards and that’s that.
But what about the standards you know you’ve outgrown and need to shift or change in some way?
Whatever standards you have in your life, only you can know when it’s time to raise the bar or shift in some way. Only you get to decide what’s acceptable and what you’re no longer available for.
And one standard we could ALL use a shift in is how we allow ourselves to feel on a daily basis.
It’s actually pretty freaking ridiculous how bad we’re willing to allow ourselves to feel at times, and how long we’re willing to allow ourselves to sustain that bad feeling. For days. Weeks. Months. Even years.
It’s disgusting, really.
Feeling good is our natural state. It’s who we are at our core. It’s how we were born into this world.
And then, over the course of our lives, the external world and our external physical realities cause our natural state to be compromised.
Allowing yourself to feel bad–especially for an extended period of time–is a learned behavior. Feeling good is your natural state.
I came to a realization this morning as I was doing my daily mindset practice. It’s a realization that’s been a long-time-coming, and it connected so many dots when I looked back over my 2018.
And that realization was: it is no longer acceptable for me to not feel good.
One of the things I committed to for 2018 was figuring out how to feel good and allow myself to be consistent with it. It’s been a hell of a journey over the last 12 months.
That journey culminated today when I was listening to an Abraham-Hicks audio where she pointed out that humans are just so damn willing to allow themselves to feel bad for an extended period of time. And something clicked in me.
That’s what I’ve been doing for most of my life. That’s what I’ve been unlearning this whole year: how to stop allowing myself to feel bad for an extended period of time.
It’s been my life-pattern: knowing that something–a thought, a belief, a project, a person, a job, whatever–was making me feel bad, and choosing not to do anything about it. Choosing instead to bask in the negative emotion; to steep myself in it until my fingers prune.
It’s a pattern that most humans spend their lives in. Over and over again, just allowing themselves to feel bad, to indulge in woe-is-me, self-pity that is only harming them more.
We often choose to stay in the bad-feeling place because it’s comfortable. We’re used to feeling that way. It’s familiar.
But in truth, it’s just a pattern and a choice we’ve been taught to make, and so choosing to find a way to feel good regardless of what’s happening externally (or internally) is hard for us.
This feel-bad pattern was programmed into me growing up by adults around me saying things like, “knock on wood” after something good happened, or “worrying about the other shoe dropping,” or having fear-based conversations about not celebrating too much or getting too used to things being good because the “pendulum always swings back in the opposite direction.”
All of it nonsense, but all of it things I was taught indirectly by my upbringing. Maybe you can relate?
But it’s all a choice. A choice to feel good. A choice to feel bad and let that bad feeling overtake you. A choice to use feeling bad as a gauge for when you need to refocus on feeling good. A choice to not continue to feel bad.
To put it into a simpler perspective, it’s like this: Shit happens, but that doesn’t mean you have to stand in it.
So this year, I was on a mission to break that pattern. To finally fully allow myself to do as Abraham-Hicks says and “be selfish enough to care about how I feel.”
And today, I was, again, reminded that it all comes down to feeling good.
Everything we think we want is really about how we think it will make us feel to have it/be it/do it. And if we just focus exclusively on feeling good and on amplifying the things that make us feel good, all the other non-feel-good areas of our lives would start feeling better automatically as a byproduct of our focus being exclusively on feeling good.
Read that paragraph again. Then read it again. And again.
There is magic in those words.
For most of my life, my standard has been that it’s OK to feel bad more often than I feel good; that feeling bad is “just a part of life,” and feeling good is something that’s few and far between. That I have to “knock on wood” when something good happens, and fear for the bad that’s around the corner.
Well, today, I’m raising that standard, officially. My new standard is that it is NO LONGER ACCEPTABLE for me to not feel good.
Which mean if it doesn’t make me feel good, I’m either changing it or letting it go. Period. End of story.
And that my focus every single day from here until eternity will be on feeling as good as I can possibly feel, as often as I can possibly feel it, for as long as I can possibly feel it. AND no longer allowing myself to indulge in feeling bad. I now commit to only allowing myself to feel bad momentarily as contrast that helps me get clear on what I want, so I grow and expand…and then get right back to feeling good.
Are you ready to set a new standard for yourself? Say it with me now: if it doesn’t make me feel good, it doesn’t get to stay.
Dream life or bust,
jen
P.S. Ready to feel SO GOOD about your story? Join us for The Story Revision Workshop where I’ll be teaching you how to revise the draft you have into the story you actually want. Plus I’ll be doing a full breakdown of how I turned the first draft of my screenplay into the badass one I submitted to the Rom-Com Contest (that, so far, has placed as a Semi-Finalist!).
>> Details and sign up here: www.jenniferblanchard.net/revisionworkshop
