You limit your happiness when you look for certain things as opposed to leaving yourself open to experience whatever comes to you or comes to you for your fun and learning.
And you also limit others, specifically who they can be for you, when you put people in boxes expecting only their past behaviors to always be their only behaviors. Don’t worry though. They do the same to you. (Touch of sarcasm there.)
When I was a substitute teacher I did not see the kids the way their regular classroom teacher did. The teacher usually left a list of the behavioral problem kids.
What a nasty habit – leading the substitute teacher to experience the child as a problem without even knowing the child in a neutral light. What do you think the average substitute teacher would see in the behaviors of the names on such a list?
No wonder kids lived up to those labels of being a problem kid!
When I saw those list the first thing I did was indirectly choose those kids to be my helpers for the day. I asked them to hand out papers, erase the blackboard (yes, we had those back then.)
I chose to see the child not the label. And what you expect is always what you will see – always.
Do you think I had problems with those students on those lists? All they needed was the extra attention. My guess is they could not get that attention at home or any place in a positive way so they did what they had to do to get people to acknowledge their existence by acting out. Plain and simple.
In fact, I have long thought that anyone who does anything less than nice lacks love in their world. They certainly have no self love and no one gives them what every human has a right to receive – love.
What if I had, instead, chosen to see those kids as trouble makers? How do you think they would have behaved for me? Duh. And why would that happen?
When you look for certain behaviors you find them – to the omission of all other behaviors. So, for their regular teachers who only saw them in the light of being behavior problems, those kids, no matter how often they acted in nice helpful ways, didn’t stand a chance of being noticed or praised for the new ways of acting.
Here is the thing to watch out for…
Yes, you do that same thing to everyone in your world. I think you caught my drift on that point. And now you know what to do, right? Release your expectations for how others will act around you.
But the point I want to drive home here is that you do the same to yourself!
Huh?
You expect yourself to behave the same way in certain circumstances therefore what do you do when you find yourself in those circumstances? You act as expected by you!
No one does anything to you to make you act that certain way. You do it all by yourself.
Choose a new way to act and you will be happier.
For instance, I used to be painfully shy. When I went to classes or parties I kept to myself and waited for others to talk to me. When I realized how I behaved I decided to talk to tier people first. Every time I did the shyness decreased until I quickly (Yes. Quickly.) was no longer shy at all.