“What and if are two non-threatening words. Put together and they can haunt you for the rest of your life.” – quote from Letters to Juliet
That’s true if you look at it as regret. “What if I did that instead…” or “didn’t do that…” That’s looking to the past wishing you could change what already happened. You can’t, so move on. Let go of the past. It already happened. Focusing on it won’t make it better. Live in the present to make the future better. That will get you the results that you’re looking for.
“What if” also conjures up catastrophizing, gloom and doom and worrying about what might happen next. The key word there being might. It might happen and it might not. If you don’t want it to happen, don’t focus on it. What we focus on, we attract. Focus on the positive to get a positive result. Focus on the negative and you get negative. The negative is just as likely to happen as the positive in most cases, so why not choose positive?
It feels better to focus on the good that might happen instead of the bad. Yet we’re conditioned to look on the negative side. Out of habit people choose to come from the lack perspective. Then they wonder why their life isn’t going so great. Why do they have less than their neighbor or bestie? It’s all in how you look at things.
Choose to Look at the Positive
Instead of catastrophizing and gloom and doom, “what if” can be expansive and creative. It’s looking to the future in a positive way, to dream, to create. Gloom and doom are coming from a place of fear and worry. Not from what positive you could create, or a place of expansion.
Try this out by getting into your feelings, your body for a minute. Get calm and centered. Feel into or think about catastrophizing, worrying about the future. How does that feel? To me it feels condensed, restrictive, tight. You might feel tightness somewhere in your body. Or you may find it hard to breathe or breathing shallowly. Your anxiety level might even go up.
Now feel into looking to the future in a dreamy way, creating, day dreaming, possibilities. How does that feel? Just writing that I feel lighter, brighter, more expansive. I want to take a big, long, deep breath. It feels good. It feels like I want to get up and do something whereas before I felt stuck and glued to my chair.
Quick Shift Tip
Side note: whenever you feel a certain way, feel into it some more. See how it makes you feel. If you’re feeling anxious, feeling into it deepens the anxiety. That doesn’t feel good. Then look for the opposite. What’s the opposite of anxiety? Calm, centered, grounded. Now focus on that. Breathe into it. Shut your eyes. Relax. Even in the office you can take five and do that. Now you just shifted your mood out of anxiety and into calm.
Fear or Expansion
Life is always about choices. This is one more way that you can make a choice. As we talked about before, would you rather be right or happy, now you can ask yourself would you rather be in fear or expansion?
When your boss gives you an assignment and asks you to come up with five new ways to do something or two possible solutions, if you’re not in the right mindset, what happens? You freeze. You struggle to come up with something. Your mind goes blank. All you can come up with is what you already know.
If you allow yourself to get into day dreaming mode, now your mind can expand. Now the possibilities are endless. You can see all kinds of solutions you didn’t see before or knew existed. Your mind is turned on. Life looks different.
Use this in your personal life too. If you want to figure out an ingenious way to manage your finances or an easy way to meet a guy, tune in. Turn off and tune in as Esther Hicks says. Turn off the busy brain by doing a few seconds or minutes of deep breathing. As you turn off the outside world, it allows you to tune into your inside world – your creativity, your intuition. Now you’ve expanded. You see things differently. It’s like brainstorming with no one around to play off of. Having other people’s input as stimulation is great, but we can do it ourselves. All we need is to be centered to allow the expansion.
Now You Can Play the “What if” Game Productively
Once you’re centered and expanded, then you can play the “what if” game for positive gain. What if I did this with my money instead of doing that? What if I got off of dating sites and used this strategy instead? What if I talked to my kids this way instead of that?
How does it feel when you ask yourself these questions: What if I stopped worrying about all this stuff and let it go? It feels like you released a burden, right? It feels lighter.
What if I let this go today and pick it back up tomorrow? If you can let go of your worries or frustrations and put them on hold more than likely you’ll find when tomorrow comes you won’t want to pick them back up again. Why would you? They feel bad.
Instead of reaching for that extra glass of wine so you can go numb and not deal with your life, choose not to think about it for now. Make a pact that tomorrow or an hour from now you’ll expand yourself to find new possibilities. Then you won’t need that glass of wine or third handful of chips.
Instead of filling ourselves up with worries, wine, chocolate and chips, let go and empty our mind of them. Then we center and fill back up. This time we fill up with expansion, creativity, new possibilities. It’s like unhooking the water line in your freezer because it’s all clogged up and your ice tastes bad. Let it all drain out, then hook it back up and let fresh water come in. Out with the old, in with the new.
Next time you’re worried, mad, sad, frustrated etc., don’t play the “what if” game. Wait until you can get grounded and centered, allow yourself to expand. Then ask “what if” from an expanded, creative perspective. You’ll be amazed at how different your answers are!
If you’re not sure about what I wrote and want an honest answer, ask your intuition. Find out how to identify your intuition, how to listen to it, how to talk to it and how to trust it by CLICKING HERE.
Once you start listening to your intuition, you’ll be amazed how how much your life can change. Then you can truly start enjoying yourself. CLICK HERE to find out more!
