Whittling Away
Author: Rick Cronen
With the economy being what it is today, there is a lot of “choosing” going on. People are making decisions about where to economize – what to release and what to keep.
A lot of companies are doing the same thing – trying to control costs by deciding who to keep and who to let go. Some companies, despite the front page news, are also hiring – choosing this person over that one.
The process for each is much the same. A set of criteria are established (hopefully) and then applied. Either way, the process inherently creates a sense of powerlessness. You get a pink slip, a letter of hire or a letter of rejection but you don’t really ever know why.
For those lucky few who get hired, they can assume that it was because they were the ‘best qualified.’ But for the people in the other two categories, their assumptions paint a less than positive picture.
Which brings us to the crux of the matter. You cannot control the thinking processes of others but you can control your own. As Raymond Charles Barker put it, “As a thinker, you determine your experience. There is nothing to oppose you but your own subconscious patterns of inferiority and frustration. You can then, through mental treatment, gradually whittle away your deeply rooted failure patterns and replace them with a new self-acceptance that concept that will cause you to create what you want in the world.”
You are not powerless. You hold the knife, so what will you whittle?
I continue to remind myself that attitude has the biggest impact on my life. As they say, life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it. But at times it is hard to remember that. While at times I whittle away, it seems like those failure patterns or thoughts continue to grow back.