We often miss the point when we talk about our experiences. How you feel is not real.
One of the things we most often find ourselves saying is a sentence which begins with the word “I”. This may sound like a commonplace, but think about it for a moment. Every few minutes—or even every few seconds—we find ourselves saying something beginning with that “I”, the personal pronoun. If you doubt this, then try this little experiment. The next time you find yourself in conversation, try to count how many times you say “I”.
Or if concentrating on two things at once—something that can be difficult at the best of times, especially when you have children about the place :-) —is beyond you, just listen to someone else’s conversation and try counting as those “I” words roll off the tongue. You might be pretty amazed at how often you hear it. It’s almost as though the word “I” is a kind of glue to hold the string of words together. In fact, it seems as though it almost is the string itself, and the other words are beads strung on it. Take away the string and the whole conversation falls apart.
What you will rarely hear when that “I” word pops up every few seconds is another word that really should be there, but isn’t because of a misconception held by many people about our reality. That word is “feel”. When people talk and use the word “I”, they are often talking about feelings, but talk as though they are talking about objective reality. When we say “I”, we could be talking about something that is real, such as “I am late…” or “I am waiting for the train…” But more often than not we are not talking about something real, something that can be verified, but something that is nothing more than our own thoughts and feelings. In short, we put forward something as reality—something out of our control—when in fact it is something that we ourselves have created.
The missing link
The problem arises when we say things about our feelings but instead of using the word “feel” we use the word “am”. It’s often not “I feel useless” but usually “I am useless”. Not “I feel that I can’t do it” and usually just the straight: “I can’t do it”—and usually before we have even tried to do the “it” and so have no way of knowing.
This may sound odd, to go on about a simple distinction between the words “I am” and “I feel”, but in order to work optimally, in order to get the best out of ourselves and motivate ourselves to make an effort, we have to begin to separate feelings from reality. We often accept something as reality, when it isn’t reality at all, but just our feelings
To use just the word “I” might be OK if we were habitually in a positive frame of mind. Going about saying “I am good at this” or “I am making progress” would be all for the good, unless we were really deluded as to our abilities and had an overconfidence in how good we really are. But this isn’t usual. What is usual is that we often find ourselves not in a positive frame of mind. The reasons are easy to find. We get tired. Or we get sick. Or we get depressed without knowing the reasons why.
Then what happens is that the negative feelings we have color our reality, and then we really do begin to “be” what we “think”. We think we are useless, and so we lose motivation—and before we know it we really are useless, sitting about all day and whining that nothing ever seems to go right for us instead of getting up and doing something positive. We’ve all had those days and so we know how dangerous it can be to get stuck in this kind of thinking.
A shift in thinking
When we realize that feelings are not the same as reality, we can make a huge shift in our thinking and bring back some of that motivation. This is good thinking as opposed to bad thinking. When we say “I am…” we give up control. When we say “I feel…” we take back control. To say we are useless implies that it is something that has been given to us, something we cannot change. To say I feel useless means we can ask ourselves the question “why?”
“Why do I feel…” Once we ask that question we can look for facts that prove that the feelings aren’t a true reflection of reality. They are exactly that—feelings and not reality. The answer may then be something simple such as: I am tired. A good sleep will rid us of the feelings and then we can see reality as it is—which is usually not half as bad as the feelings made it out to be. SMILE
We always have to beware of confusing our feelings with reality. If we fall victim to this way of thinking we can end up giving up our power, and that’s a strange thing to do for something that is not real, and which we created ourselves.
Anyone who knows anything about the works of Schopenhauer will know that he was essentially a pessimist. He believed existence to be futile. Well, if you base your existence on the constantly fluctuating feelings you experience, life can seem pretty bad sometimes. But if you look at things objectively, life is often not bad at all. Most of us have many things to be grateful for, and concentrating on those rather than our constantly shifting feelings is a way to be positive.
There is a quote I once heard that was attributed to Schopenhauer. I couldn’t verify it, so it might be from someone else, but I think it makes the point nicely. “My life has been full of misfortunes, most of which never happened.”
Next time you catch yourself saying the word “I”, make sure you are talking about something objective—something really objective—and not just how you’re feeling at that moment. If you are talking about feelings, then make sure you put that word “feel” in there. Then if the feeling is bad, at least you’ll know it’s only a feeling, which means it can soon be replaced by a better one.
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