From my study and practice of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) one of the most interesting thinking patterns that reveals how we might be engaged with a situation is a ‘cause and effect’ belief. This is something we do all the time so they can be tricky to become aware of.
Here’s one I just caught myself entertaining…it’s a sort of logical fallacy…an unreasonable expectation.
If I do everything right it will cause everything to turn out right
There are other ways of linguistically expressing the same sort of ‘cause-effect’ belief.
These actions (thoughts/behaviours) will cause this desired result
Of course the problem is that it’s just often not true in experience and when it becomes obvious that my ‘doing right’ is not causing the ‘right thing’ to happen then a great amount of frustration and foul language and feeling victimized by…something or someone…typically ensues for me…and I can feel dejected and not wanting to continue what I was doing. It feels like a very young part of me that reacts this way. In this case I’m working on a guitar and wanting (and expecting…demanding?) a very particular result from my actions. I’m operating out of a very high expectation that I’m investing a lot of emotion in…gee, how could that have any possible negative consequences…
So, I’m pausing… and making a decision on how I will respond emotionally if the desired result isn’t achieved despite all my best actions and thinking…which if I’m being honest probably represents the majority of my experience with being invested in a very particular result…it just doesn’t happen as much as I want it to. Such is life…but what I’m trying to have some more skill with is my emotional response when things don’t turn out as I desired. I feel compelled to get better at that.