YES! Feeling more optimistic is important. However, at the same time, I feel that it is necessary to acknowledge your fears and the negative chatter. If we don’t my concern is that by trying to bypass the fear and head straight to optimism that it will feel inauthentic, it may even feel like we are fooling ourselves.
I suggest that we allow ourselves to let out our fears, our negative chatter, our doubts in order to release them and move forward. I often think of this as taking out the trash- dump it out and move onward!
There are a few different ways that we can do this:
- We can write down all our negative thoughts then rip up the paper and throw it away as a way to release it.
- We can say our fearful thoughts aloud to ourselves.
- We can even make a little game of it by taking turns saying all your negative thoughts to a trusted friend or family member, and they can in turn share theirs with you.
Think of it as garbage day for your negative thoughts- dump them out
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These options can give us the opportunity to acknowledge our fears as well as our negative feelings and not suppress or deny them by trying to bypass them while heading straight toward optimism. We can have a way to acknowledge and release the negativity before moving forward and choosing better feeling thoughts. This allows us to acknowledge our negative chatter without allowing it to take hold, while simultaneously making space to honestly acknowledge that some of the things that we experience can be extremely scary and if we deny that, then we are only fooling ourselves.
Authentically acknowledging your more scary and negative thoughts, then letting them go, creates a more direct route to reframing to better feeling thoughts. Let’s start dumping out our negative feelings into a metaphorical trash bin to let it out and let it go so we can optimistically move onward!
What is going in your metaphorical trash bin today?
