Therapy is no doubt a helpful tool when you have problems to overcome, and one of the primary strategies therapists use to uncover and solve your issues involves identifying common behavioral patterns. But you don’t always need a therapist to recognize and correct an unhealthy pattern in your life. Here’s a primer for how you can solve the problems that don’t require professional help.
The world is good at creating patterns and we have an innate ability for picking them up. As we grow, our experience becomes a giant database of information and we make associations between similar events and occurrences as a way of understanding the world. While recognizing these patterns can be an incredibly helpful tool for solving our own issues, we’re much better at recognizing them in others than we are in ourselves. We also have a tendency to see patterns where we want to see them, even when they aren’t really there. We enlist the help of therapists because they’re trained to connect the behavioral dots, but with a little work we can hone our pattern recognition skills and solve many of our own problems. In this post we’ll give you a basic introduction to how pattern recognition works, how you can use it to investigate your issues, and what you need to watch our for so you don’t identify any patterns incorrectly.
…that our boney old dairy cattle go to meet their maker! We have no expectations of getting any decent meat off these two so we’ll chalk it all up to another failed experiment in hobby farming. So long Jordan and Pippen — our Chicago Bulls… :-)
…for nearly 15 years now but never took the time to explore the Kettle Moraine until last Saturday. It’s a pretty amazing place, although the fall foliage is pretty tapped out for now. Here’s a view from the top of Parnell Tower. Make a note now to check it out next year…
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. – Leonardo da Vinci
The problem with many books and guides on simplifying your clutter, your work life, your desk, your life, is that they are usually too darn complicated.
We need a simple method of simplifying.
It’s been nearly a decade since I first started trying to simplify my life, and in those years I’ve struggled with clutter, I’ve had surges and ebbs of complications and simplicity, I’ve tried dozens of methods of simplifying from as many sources. It’s been an interesting journey, although not one that I can recommend to everyone. If you’re looking to simplify a certain aspect of your life, you don’t want to go through that kind of confusion.
So I’ve boiled it down to a simple method of Four Laws of Simplicity (apologies to John Maeda) that you can use on any area of your life, and in fact on your life as a whole:
1. Collect everything in one place.
2. Choose the essential.
3. Eliminate the rest.
4. Organize the remaining stuff neatly and nicely.
“My life changed when I stopped waiting for someone to rescue me and began taking responsibility for myself.” I haven’t heard this statement from just one person. I’ve heard it from thousands, including myself
Gratitude Focus: We usually don’t have the power to control what’s going on around us, but we can be grateful that we always have the power to hunker down and take care of ourselves.
One of my favorite things about life is that we all get a chance, once a day, to start over.
The morning comes bearing gifts of renewal, redemption and a chance to start all over again. The fresh dew on the Spring leaves glimmer as the sun is just starting to poke her head out from the horizon and imbue each morning with the promise of revival. Moments like these remind me that life goes on.
And not only does life go on, but this very morning you have a chance to make a new decision about HOW it goes. I know I don’t get it perfect; I mess up every day. I try to kick sugar and I fail 20 times a week. But I try and try again. And each day I am closer to my result.
The same thing goes for goals, achieving dreams and the quality of your life. You may not have gotten it perfect in the past, but perfection is never what we can really achieve – only progress. When you stop trying to be perfect and embrace progress OVER perfection – you free yourself to live a life on your terms. We, my friend, are human beings, and by our very nature are not perfect.
But what we can do is welcome the promise of the morning, of each new day that reminds us that we can try again and today get it 1% more right. We can be 1% more on our own side, we can love ourselves 1% more and we can come 1% closer to our dreams.
You and I don’t need to get it all done today, because we can’t; but we can achieve 1% more than we did yesterday. We can forgive ourselves 1% more than we did yesterday. We can show up for our loved ones more than we did yesterday.
The promise of the morning inspires me every day. Today, I am to do 1% better than I did yesterday. Day-by-day, slowly but surely these small incremental changes will bring about MASSIVE change in our lives.
Embrace the promise of renewal each morning, and for today, don’t try to be perfect, just be 1% better than you were yesterday.
One sweltering summer day, I sought escape from the heat at a nearby beach. Lying there with my lemonade, I looked at all the people soaking up the sun. No matter how many people were on that beach, there would be enough sun for everyone. I realized that the same was true of God’s love and guidance. No matter how many people seek a Higher Power’s help, there is always enough to go around. To someone who believed that there was never enough time, money, love, or anything else, this was amazing news!
This awareness was tested at an Al-Anon meeting when someone spoke about his Higher Power with a personal love and intensity that matched my own. I felt as if his intimacy with God would leave less love for me. But I think that the opposite is true. I often feel closest to my “Higher Power” when I hear others share about how well a Higher Power has taken care of them. Today I try to remember that there is enough love for us all…
Bright, shiny objects! 
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