“Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.” – Dalai Lama
Sometimes life just isn’t fair. It’s dark, gloomy, and absent of happiness. What you find is that talking about the unfortunate circumstances then makes you feel better. This complaining helps you feel as though something has been released. You are now relieved.
It’s the complaining that brings on this misery.
We can think that focusing on our problems and wallowing in our complaining will make us feel better, but this is all in our thinking and what you are really doing is only reaffirming the problems that brought you to this place in your mind.
That is just it. What you are complaining about and these problems are only in your mind. Life isn’t bad or good and it rather just is. Nature has no judgement about the things that happen, whether it is the grass growing or dying, it just is.
Just as your life, just is.
People who win never complain. They take life for it gives them and they make what they can out of it. One of the most powerful Tony Robbins’ quotes that I’ve heard is:
“Everything happens for a reason and a purpose, and it serves you.”
What I remember him saying is that he doesn’t know this to be true, but that he believes it to be true because it empowers him. That is the power of the mind.
These thoughts and things that we focus on have power over our life. We can choose to focus on the negativity and the darkness in life or we can choose to look at the things that empower us.
We can choose to focus on the things that will strengthen us and make the world a better place. You have the choice to control this one thing.
Why Daily Complaining is Ruining Your Life
Of all the things in life the one thing that we can control is our mind. We have the ability to focus on what matters and we can let go of what will hold us back.
This act of daily complaining is ruining your life. It is making you less whole. It is inhibiting you from growing and reaching your potential. Complaining is standing in the way of you and the achievement of your dreams.
The following are the four most important reasons why this daily complaining is preventing you from living the life you want to live:
1. When You Complain You Reaffirm Negativity in your Mind
The mind, like nature, will accept what you give it. If you show it complaining, it will respond to the negativity put out into the universe and the messages that you are affirming about life.
When this happens you train yourself to focus on the dark and unwanted times. Your mind becomes accustomed to negative thinking and this thus brings about your negative experiences.
It is your responsibility to give it positivity. The more positivity you give it, the more it will be able to continually come back to the good things in life. Eventually positivity is the only thing it knows and responds to.
2. You Cancel Out All the Positives
When your focus is on what you are complaining about then you forget about all the good in life. It brings you to a place where all the positives in your life are just absent from your mind.
This leads you to being unaware of good times and happiness that just might mean a great deal to you and your success.
It likely would even make the difference for you when looking back on your life and all the wonderful times you could have had an even fuller awareness of. Shift the focus and bring the attention back to the positives so that you are more aware of them.
3. You Drive Others Away from You
No one likes to be around someone that brings them down. Coming up with things that are wrong in the world or life and complaining about them will only seek to drive people to not want to be around you.
In NLP we call this a process of anchoring where we associate an external behavior such as complaining and negativity with an internal emotion such as having negative feelings about that person who complained when you are around them.
When you are the complainer then it becomes just automatic for them to associate you with those negative feelings they had while you were complaining.
You want to have people associate you with good feelings such as happiness and positivity and they will want to be around you much more
4. Your Focus on Negativity Only Brings More Negativity
It has been said that what we think about we bring about.
When we think about negative things and bring them into greater awareness through an act such as complaining then we only bring about more of those negative events and circumstances that we were complaining about in the first place.
The much better route to take is to acknowledge your emotions and understand that this isn’t what you wanted, but now you can focus even more intensely on what you do want. This is where you get the opportunity to move forward instead of backward.
Focus is one of the most important intangibles to your success in life. It is the key that most people are missing when their focus is on things that are not leading to their goals and dreams. This complaining drives your attention away from success.
The greatest successes in life have nothing to complain about.
Some might say that it is because of where they are now, but I say that they are where they are at now because they first made the shift to focus on what is important and what will lead them to their goals rather than complaining.
This change happens in the mind first.
To be successful you have to know that the journey is all on you. In the long run you will achieve your goals not just because of other people and circumstances, but because of you and your determination.
This means that other people are not the cause of your problems. Only you are. This gives you the power to take control over your life.
This ability comes from within.
The key is attuning your focus to what matters and where you want to go. What is it that you want and how can you be grateful for what you have now?
When you find life for what’s good, then that is when life will take your breath away and when you come to realize your greatest successes.
Summary
While you may think that these outside circumstances are causing the failure in life, it is actually your mind, the attention you bring to these events, and the complaining you do about such events that are bringing you to ruin.