One of the most propagated and yet most misguided pieces of advice in the personal development/Law of Attraction world is that you should “be positive all the time” and only think positive thoughts.

(I heard a very popular, bald spiritual teacher repeating this idea to Oprah the other day and I started yelling at the TV. It’s the opposite of helpful because I see it fuck people up all the time, trying to align themselves with something or someone they just don’t like in the name of “positivity.”)

 

You’re not going to like some things. You’re really not going to like some people.

And that’s perfectly A-OK. That’s exactly as it should be.

The real problem comes when you try to stifle some feeling that society has taught you to believe isn’t “nice.”

Because then you’re resisting those thoughts and feelings.

And guess what?

That makes them stick around. And grow bigger. And fester.

Not allowing your feeling is  a version of an auto-immune disease. You don’t want any part of that.

 

Allow yourself to feel whatever it is that you feel. Even when it’s not very nice.

That way you give your thoughts the opportunity to evolve.

They will, quickly.

And you’ll feel the wonderful freedom that’s waiting for you on the other side.

I am a distinction junkie.

I think it goes back to the late Thomas J. Leonard, the father of the coaching profession and the man who expanded how I think in lots of ways…

Through his love of distinctions, he reminded me how much words matter.

Not in that there are “right” words and “wrong” words (that’s New Age bullshit, folks)…

But rather that subtle word choices have the power to guide us to radically different destinations.

Distinctions, parsing the meaning of different words that most people use as synonyms, have great power.

(In fact, you will find a page on a distinction in every issue of my Very Cool Life magazine, The Vibe. The next issue will be the distinction between “alignment” and “integrity.”)

 

A friend wrote me a nice note today, saying I taught him to choose what feels right.

When I read his words, another distinction popped up.

I teach people to choose what feels better, not “right.”

To me, that’s a big distinction.

 

In my experience, when most people talk about what feels right, they are not paying attention to how they FEEL at all.

They are paying attention to what they think is right. And very often, what you’ve been taught to believe was “right” has no correlation to what your intuition is trying to tell you.

 

Noticing what feels better (often something much closer to relief than elation) will guide you much more efficiently than noticing what feels right.