Seeing things differently

A few days ago a friend and I was at a zebra crossing. Although cars are supposed to stop and wait for the pedestrians to pass, one of them just honked at us. We were both shocked but interestingly, we had different takes on what had happened. My friend was ranting; What the hell! Why did he honk at us purposely? What an a**hole! But on the other hand, i was thinking something must have happened to that guy.

See, in this simple scenario that many of us would come across once in a while it tell us that although we might be experiencing the same situation, but what’s in our mind will be different.

Let’s see why we think that way.

For my friend, he is thinking that the driver purposely honked at us. In reality, how true is that? 50%! Its either true or false.

For me, i was thinking that he is encountering a mishap. Again, how true is that? 50%! Its the same no matter how you judge the situation.

There could be 10 or 20 reasons we could give ourselves for that kind of happening. It could be:

1. He’s doing it on purpose
2. He’s an A**hole
3. Something must have happened to his family
4. He’s rushing to the hospital
5. His wife is pregnant and she needs him
6. He needs to rush home to save his marriage
7. His child is sick and alone at home
8. His parents met with some accident
9. His dog/fish/ant died
10. He is crazy

From the above reasons which has only 50/50 truth we give to ourselves, any of it is bound to give us a feeling, either positive or negative.

Reasons 1&2 would make us Pissed off, angry, frustrated, etc and i label it Negative.
Reasons 3 to 8 would make us feel that its kinda reasonable for his actions and if i was having that predicament, maybe I’d do the same. Hence it make us feel more Positive.
Reasons 9&10 is the 2^ND most common thinking that people adopt which isn’t that helpful. Although humoring off the thought could be useful but sometimes you can’t convince yourself that it is a reasonable excuse for their actions. However, it differs from person to person, so i would label it neutral.

Now we can see that there are 2/10 thoughts are negative and neutral respectively, 6/10 are positive! But we commonly, unknowingly talk to ourselves negatively that in turn affects our mood and hence our outcome! And guess what? We undertake Negative thoughts which are the minority out of the many other Positive probabilities!!!

We all talk to ourselves every single day and it is important to know what we are feeding our mind, there are many things that could happen that upset us and it seems to be beyond our control. But we can control what we perceive, what we tell ourselves and most importantly, how we feel.