What gets your attention?

"When you focus on what's wrong, you will never change." - Mel Robbins

My two-year-old has been waking up 30 minutes early each morning. I pull him into bed with me and keep my eyes closed, hoping he will go back to sleep. He has no intention of doing that though, instead he hugs me, chats, and plays with the toy he has brought along in tow. Well the other day, he got up even earlier, 45 minutes before the alarm. "Oh no" I think to myself, "we are going in the wrong direction!" I think about it off and on for the rest of the day, wondering to myself what I should do. Instead of thinking of ways to get him to change, I ponder about getting up with him and use that extra time to write or to read. I am usually trying to carve time out for those two activities anyway, I might as well just get a head start on it. So I prepare myself mentally for an earlier wake up call. The very next morning, my son is back to his normal wake up time when my alarm goes off.

Is this how life works? Once I stopped thinking about how to encourage my son to sleep in and just decided to go with it, things reverted back to how they were. And it's funny, because I still got up before my alarm and had more time for morning activities.

This little experiment tells me that when we focus on what's wrong, it can remove you from your path. It can move you in a different direction than you need to go. It's simple really when you think about it. Take the scenario where you are trying to communicate with your pup who is sitting on the couch. If you tell this pup "no" then they may be confused as to what needs to happen. If you tell this pup "off" now we are getting more descriptive. Rather than pointing out what's wrong to your pup, you are redirecting her to take the right action.

The same can be true for our own lives. We need to think about where we want to go and how we are going to get there. Sure, sometimes that will involve putting an end to some activities, but if that's the only place we put our attention, we are not going to get to where we need to be.

It's like driving down the road and you ask your passenger, am I taking this left turn. And the response is no not that left turn. Well which one then?

I hope you have found your footing this week and are hitting your stride!