There’s a story about a person who walks to work each day, and each day they get to a point where there’s an open manhole, and they fall down it. Eventually, they take a different route and make it to work unscathed. Not much of a story, maybe, but it does serve to show us how we keep hurting ourselves in the same way over and over and over again.
Have you noticed?
It’s often easier to notice in someone else. You know the person—maybe someone close to you—who keeps putting themselves in situations that can’t end well. The pattern seems fairly obvious, doesn’t it? But there’s no telling them, is there?
Here’s the thing: we all do it. Each and every one of us writes our own self-fulfilling prophecies. Some write mostly negative ones, some write mostly positive ones, and most of us balance it out pretty evenly with a bit of both.
The question most of us want answered is, how do we minimize the negative and maximize the positive patterns? And once again, the answer comes down to mindfulness; to awareness. We can’t do anything to help ourselves if we aren’t first aware there’s a pattern. To give you a clue, see if any of these seem familiar: you keep losing things; you’re always late; you never get the job / promotion / position you want; bad luck follows you everywhere; you can’t hold down a relationship; things always break around you; success eludes you at every turn.
What many of us do when these things happen is we put it down to externalities; born under a bad sign, Mercury in retrograde, people out to get you, the world’s dangerous place, the government, etc, etc, etc. Who knows? Maybe you’re right. But here’s something about every single one of these factors: they are beyond your control. Do you want to be ruled entirely by factors you cannot influence, or do you want to have some say over how things pan out?
I, for one, like the idea of controlling the factors I can manage. And what I notice is, the more I do this, the more I see things turning out for the best.
So, in the end, what can we control? The internal. Only the internal. Everything else is, by some measure, is beyond our control: I can’t control how you feel about something; I can’t control what happens to the economy; I can’t control office politics, let alone politics on a national or global scale; I can’t control the weather; I can’t even control my family or friends. So let these things be; they’ve managed without you before you came on the scene, and they’ll manage without you once you leave—maybe not in the way you think you’d like them to manage, but hey, it’s probably not your business anyway.
But inside, that’s a different story. I may not be able to change the way you act, but I can change the way I think about how you act. In fact, I have the power to change my thinking about anything! And if I want to be happy, I need to look at changing my thinking about things every time I’m not happy. It’s really that simple. The times I choose not to change my thinking are the times I am telling myself that I don’t want to be happy. Which is fine. Nobody said I had to be happy.
But just notice how quick we are to blame externalities for our unhappiness: “I’m mad because you did this or said that or thought something else.” No you’re not. You’re mad because you chose not to be happy. One of the key elements of awareness is getting the story straight. And getting the story straight requires us to get as close as we can to the source of that story; and that source is always, always, within us.
So we are all self-fulfilling prophets: the way we think defines how we see the world, and how we see the world determines how we respond to it. That thing that keeps happening to you, it’s a message from the aware part of you to the unaware part of you, that it’s time to take a break and have a look inside. There’s a treasure trove of wisdom waiting in there for you to come and loot. When you do, you’ll find those things don’t happen so much anymore, and when they do happen, you’ll find that you see them in a very different way.
