GO Month: Mental Clutter - D

Let's celebrate Get Organized (GO) Month by ridding ourselves of mental clutter from A to Z!

To celebrate Get Organized (GO) Month I'm doing a series of posts on the mental clutter that can be just as pervasive as physical clutter. For each letter, I'll talk about a mental stumbling block that often impacts our well-being.

Let's focus on D ... Discounting the Positive

When a person falls into the thinking trap of discounting the positive they downplay their personal achievements and ignore their positive qualities. Ie; I decluttered my whole apartment except my desk so it's really not truly clean and it shouldn't count as I missed this spot.

Many of us are conditioned to respond to compliments and positive feedback by telling ourselves that others are just being nice or that it was no big deal. But people who struggle with this type of faulty thinking, truly have the distorted thought that they aren't worthy of praise or recognition; they feel if people knew the real them that no one would like or care about them.

Ways to combat this thinking include:

• identify what you're discounting - you have to name it to tame it

• really look at the evidence for and against discounting the positive (does not cleaning your desk really disqualify the rest of your apartment as being clean?)

• ask yourself if everyone would see it this way

• explore whether you discount your loved ones positives and if not ask why you do it to yourself

• track your positives for a week in a glow journal and see what that tells you

"A negative mind will never give you a positive life."

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Here's to freeing ourselves from the mental clutter of discounting the positive!

Please share with someone who needs a clearer mindset.

featured image by Free-Photos from Pixabay