Bumps in the road

Every single day of your life has been filled with success. Most of those successes are so seemingly ordinary and common that you don’t remember them. Yet they are vital and even miraculous successes nonetheless. Just a moment ago, you successfully took a breath of fresh air. Your heart successfully completed another cycle of pumping blood, filled with oxygen and other nutrients, throughout your body. You successfully started your computer and navigated to this page. Already this day has held many successes, and before the day is over there will be many, many more.

In fact, from your perspective, success is the normal mode. In most of what you do, you expect success, without even the slightest tinge of doubt. And by and large, you get it. Success to you is a habit that’s firmly entrenched, an assumption that’s virtually unshakable.

Coming from that perspective, it’s understandable that when you don’t achieve success at some particular thing, it shocks you. You stop and take notice, and not usually in a good way. You feel frustration and dismay. You complain loudly.

In some ways, that’s good, because it’s an indication of how deeply and how confidently you expect to succeed. Yet in one important way, it can be precarious to your future success. Because although your subconscious mind goes smoothly from one success to another, your conscious mind will tend to blow even the little failures way out of proportion, with emotionally charged thoughts of disappointment, disillusion, frustration and anxiety. Eventually, even your subconscious mind takes note of that negativity and begins to accept it without question. That puts your whole, deeply ingrained, success-oriented perspective at risk.

If you look at the world news, you’ll quickly see that most of it is bad news. But that doesn’t mean that everyone’s life all over the world is filled with bad stuff. In fact it means just the opposite. The reason the bad news is news, the reason it gets so much attention, is because it is so relatively rare. That, by very definition, is what makes it news.

It is precisely the same with you. Your life is overwhelmingly positive, so much so that you don’t even notice most of the positive stuff. So when something bad does come along, it gets your attention. In fact it usually dominates your attention.

What’s the way out of that trap? Gratitude. The more sincerely thankful you are for the good stuff, the more aware you are of it. The more aware you are of the good stuff, the less overwhelming the bad stuff will be.

You’re already in the habit of being successful. Take time to see that. Get also in the habit of gratitude. Then you’ll be able to see the disappointments for what they are, mere bumps in the road. And you’ll move quickly on past each one.