Toxic thinking

I can be critical. I can even express my opinions on other people’s work, if cornered, or among friends. Even more so I can be extremely critical of my own work. And let’s face it, people talk. We talk about other people, we talk about their work, art, relationships, or what ever you have. If we take this behaviour to even further, we could say we all gossip.

The thing is, gossip is not exactly very beneficial past time. But I am not here to tell you not to do it, just be aware of it. I’m guilty of it from time to time, but I am ok with it. What I am getting at here is the toxic thinking, which often manifests as us giving out about other people. And the major difference here is that often we attack other people’s flaws only to hide our own.

Denial is a powerful thing, and most of us do it pretty well. The little bit of research I have done in the subject, the denial is actually part of our self-preservation system. You see we have natural instinct to avoid things that might damage us, heights, needles, toxic or dangerous animals, fire… The list goes on. With this our self-preservation system finds it hard to separate mental threats from physical ones. So we fear things that might expose us, make us face our own failures.

But until we are willing to face the things we fear, we cannot grow, we cannot reach our potential. It is so easy to give out about someone else’s new album, when we don’t have one… Surely if their album is crap, that validates or justifies us taking forever to get started on our own. Surely if the band we went to see last night in our mind played a lousy show, even though most people seemed to enjoy them, justifies the fact that it was not us on that stage instead of them.

This applies to our personal lives as well. Surely talking about someone else’s relationship going down in the dumps distracts from what’s going on in our own relationship.

So lets focus on the positive stuff instead. Let what others are doing inspire you instead. Put a stop to the toxic thinking. Drop the excuses. Praise what others are doing. You are still allowed to have your opinion, but don’t let it be excuse.

J.P.

The author J.P. Kallio is a singer songwriter
To get EIGHT of his songs for free go HERE