Counting Yourself In

Counting Yourself In

How do you know you are important? No, really. Some of you are shaking your heads. Hmm.

It’s not what you do, you know, it’s your own, magnificent self. You work so hard at being indispensable. You work so hard at being important to others that it’s hard for you to remember that it’s your own opinion of yourself that matters the most.

The heck with ‘em.

That’s seems kind of harsh, but here’s what I mean. Pay attention because it’s tricksy.

Look around you right now for all the yellow things you can see in 10 seconds. (Go ahead, I’ll wait. tick tick tick) You found a bunch of yellow things, or not, but how many striped things did you see? Most of us don’t recall, or can recall a few, but because we are filtering for yellow, we miss a lot of other stuff.

The same thing happens with us and others. We filter for the stuff we expect from them, and then miss the other stuff. If we decide SoAndSo is a jerk, we may never notice how tender he is with his wife. If we decide Whosy is an idiot, we may never notice that she is a math whiz.

We all do it. We kind of have to; otherwise, we’d be overwhelmed with all the information coming at us all the time. But, this is really good news for us, because it means we have the power to change our filters.

This is what Creative Questions do. They change our filters. When we ask a question like, “Why don’t I matter?” which is a bad creative question, our subconscious cranks out answers like, I’m not good enough or smart enough or I don’t do enough. Maybe we get answers like, I’m not good looking enough, or too tall, or short, or thin, or fat, or my eyes are blue, or I’m icky, or I’m old, or young. Well, you see what I mean.

When we identify the bad question and flip it into a good Creative Question, “Why do I matter?” we get answers like, because I’m enough, because I make a difference, because I’m a good person, because I’m interesting, because I’m special.

If I don’t feel like I matter, I’m running bad questions.

If I feel insignificant, I’m running bad questions.

If I feel like a bad person, I’m running bad questions.

Are you seeing the pattern?

When I don’t feel good, that’s my clue I’m running bad questions. If I take a couple minutes to formulate good questions, or pick a card from my deck, I can change that, often in an instant. If I feel heavy, or blue, or grim, or stupid, or ugly, or anything like that, I can flip it around quickly and easily.

All I’m asking is that you try it, try changing your bad question into a good one. If you need help, contact me, I’m glad to give you a hand with this.

How have I changed from feeling stuck in my gunk to feeling significant?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 04092013