How to Be Unsinkable: Re-Create Your Reality

The Illusion of Outside Circumstances

Reprinted, with permission of the publisher, from Unsinkable: How to Bounce Back Quickly When Live Knocks You Down © 2011 Sonia Ricotti. Published by New Page Books a division of Career Press, Pompton Plains, NJ. 800-227-3371. All rights reserved.

Often we get so caught up in what is happening outside of us that we believe the way we are feeling is the result of these external circumstances. This isn’t true. That belief is all an illusion. For instance, let’s say your boss just yelled at you, and your reaction is anger and frustration. You may believe you are feeling those negative feelings because your boss just yelled at you. However, there is a missing component here. There is something that occurs between your boss’s behavior toward you and your feelings after it happens. What is it that occurs? You have a thought.

That thought you had the moment after your boss yelled at you is what caused you to feel angry and frustrated. It isn’t his actual yelling at you that caused those negative feelings, but rather what you chose to make it mean and what you said to yourself at that moment. It all happens in a split second.

The Example of the Boss

Let’s go back to the original example of your boss yelling at you. Perhaps you were feeling angry and frustrated because you feel that he was disrespectful toward you, that he is unappreciative of your hard work, and that he thinks he is better than you. That was your interpretation and those were the thoughts you came up with after he yelled at you, which made you feel the way you do. That is what you chose to make it mean.

Of course, we don’t know if that is really true. For all we know, your boss had a really bad day. Perhaps his boss yelled at him and even threatened to fire him. Perhaps he is experiencing some trouble at home and his wife told him that morning that she was leaving him. We can make up so many scenarios around why he yelled at you, and none of them have anything to do with you—except you happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, when he felt the need to vent his anger.