Stop Blaming: Cut Your Losses And Move On
A couple of posts ago Brian commented that he had spent a year analysing and working out where his beliefs came from only to find it made little difference when he’d worked it out.
I think this is such an important point that I wanted to make a post out of it.
It doesn’t matter where you got the belief from or how you got into whatever situation you are in, as far as it affects how you feel now. It only matters what you do and think now. (In the next post I will add in a caveat about the effect where you’ve been has on making a change).
The natural human reaction to any negative situation is to look where to place the blame. It’s the classic Ego trick, to distract you from actually making a change. Blame is the biggest waste of time. All that matters is where you want to be. How you want to feel and what is blocking that from happening. Where you’ve been and how you’ve felt is irrelevant. Stop blaming and just move on.
The major barrier between most people and the change they want is the fact that to make a change they first have to recognise that what they’ve been doing up to now isn’t useful. For so many people this is too big a step, they have to justify what they’ve been doing. Blame is such a deeply ingrained reaction that there always seems to be this sense of fear of judgement.
I know I’m often not as subtle or tactful as other people might be and I’ll say this is what you’ve been doing and it’s not working. Sometimes people can take offence at that. I am not doing this with the intention of blaming or judging. That has never made sense to me, but people often take a direct observation as blame.
The fear of blaming also makes others around you less honest with you. Because they are afraid of upsetting you. Yet in skirting around the issue, they leave people to act misguidedly and so end up hurt more from their own destructive actions.
You just have to separate yourself from the past you. The past has gone, you have no control over it so let it go. People want to hold on to the past because they have invested so much of themselves in it. There’s an analogy here we can learn from.
People who make lots of money in investing hold no emotional attachment to their investments. They don’t worry what price they bought at, they just sell when the time is right. If they have to take a loss they cut their losses quick.
People who lose lots of money hold on because they can’t stand the thought of not recouping their losses and hold on, until no-one will buy from them.
Happy people live in the here and now. Miserable people try to make the present fit in with the path they’ve taken up to now. And as the old saying goes;
‘If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got.’
