Change Your Mental Patterns
If you really want to become the driver of your life then you need to increase the awareness of your mental patterns. If you want to develop new thinking you need to first become aware of your old mental patterns. So start catching yourself first, whenever you say, he hurt my feelings, catch yourself.
We have developed mental patterns, where we try to identify the cause of our feelings outside of ourselves. And these mental patterns have been developed after thousands of hours of such thinking. So now to change this kind of thinking to the new thinking, where we start taking responsibility of our own feelings, is going to be tough and will require lots of endeavor.
Developing new mental pattern is just like learning to drive a car. In beginning it appears to be so difficult, three pedals and only two feet, changing gear and also taking care of steering. It’s not easy to manage all of it together. But when we practice again and again, after thousands of trials, mistakes and new efforts, new mental pattern is developed and we are able to drive the car without jerking or thinking. Driving becomes our second nature.
We have learned to be unhappy, angry, hurt and frustrated automatically because we have learned to think that way a long time ago. We have accepted this kind of behavior and never challenged it. But the good news is, we can learn to not be unhappy, angry hurt or frustrated.
How?
By training our mind to think in a different way.
A thought becomes a belief when we have worked on it repeatedly. Many of us just try once or twice and then give up. We need to work on the thought repeatedly and then it will become our new belief system or mental pattern.
We need to be determined to learn to be happy, to challenge and destroy each and every thought that brings unhappiness in us.