We are all attached to what we don’t want, because it’s a negative. What you romance, you keep. It’s like a flower. All of you have had houseplants. If you water them, they survive; if you don’t water them, they die. Mary doesn't romance houseplants, she romances me.
But what do we find ourselves doing? We romance the negative side of our lives and create more of it. I've watched hundreds of marriages where people romance the negativity in their relationship, and they make it bigger and bigger and bigger. And if you ask them what they don’t want, they can’t tell you. They can tell you what they want, but they don’t know how to get it until they understand what they don’t want.
This is why I said to write it down and become very clear on what you don’t want. You need to write it down and put it up on your mirror in your bathroom and on your refrigerator, wherever you can see it throughout your day. If you've got a job and you work in an office, then put a note about the thing that you don’t want on the wall of the office. Do this until it starts to bug you to the point that you can’t stand looking at it. And after you’re fed up looking at it, then you can start looking at what you do want. Then write it down and put it beside the negative.
You see, in order to create a paradigm shift, you've got to get angry. You've got to be angry at what you don’t want, because it takes this emotion to move you out of the rut.
By Gary Young
