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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Try to trust that you are a little bit beyond where you think you are and that almost nothing is as scary as it feels.
We’re highly evolved to pay more attention to potential adverse outcomes than potential positive outcomes. We’re unrealistically pessimistic about our future and ourselves. We unconsciously prioritize consistency over opportunity, routine over joy, and sameness over excitement. When you find yourself afraid to take on a new challenge, hesitant to walk a new path, or feeling like you won’t be able to succeed at something, remind yourself of something like this: “Most of my fear and anxiety is an outdated survival response.”
We’re often told to control our thoughts and feelings, to be the “bigger person” in every situation. We aren’t often told how we’re expected to do this or what being in control of ourselves even means. What
Our minds typically choose the path of least resistance when left to their own devices. You won’t often find yourself mindlessly wandering from the path to explore the uncharted parts of the forest. If you want to go there, you’ll have to do it on purpose.
The more frequently you travel these pathways, the more well-worn they become and the more likely you are to travel them again. The neurons that fire together wire together.
I think control is being able to decide when you want to walk the paths that are already worn down for you and when you want to stray from the path and go a different way.
We learn to be self-critical by internalizing judgments we hear and feel from other people. Nobody begins life with negative feelings toward themselves. We’re taught these habits, learn these patterns.
There can be a degree of truth and wisdom in statements like these, but they tend to become overgeneralized in our minds. Many of us first hear these phrases early in life, long before we have the ability to understand things like nuance and subtlety. We take them literally and apply them globally, whether that’s how they were meant or not.
even be a fictional character. This individual is the new personification of your inner critic. Every thought that holds you back, brings you down, or steals from you no longer belongs to you. It now belongs to them.
