I am sitting at my kitchen table staring at the results of a new recipe I tried making today.
*If you are wondering it was supposed to be feta, chickpea and spinach parcels!
When I presented it to my kids, they all said ?Yuk, that was disgusting?, and I couldn?t agree more. Even the dogs turned their nose up at my offering. I had no problem binning the lot without a second thought and all I thought to myself was ?I won?t do that again!?. That?s right ? I had no more thinking other than, ?well that didn?t work, I won?t do it quite like that again?.
So why or why, whenever I seemingly fail in other areas of my life, do I give it so much more meaning. With the dinner fiasco above, I did not at any point:
Take it personally. Make it all about me. Thought what a failure I was.

Verbalise to anybody who would listen, ?This is it!! I?m just not cut out for cooking, I?ve tried but I obviously have no skills. I will just have to do something else with my life.

Sign myself on to the first cooking intensive course that I could find. I obviously had to learn more as what I knew was not adequate.

Ruminate for hours on why it went wrong, how/what/why/when could I have improved it.

Blame it on the oven, ingredients, my lack of time available or the author of the recipe.

No, I gave it no more meaning than ? I won?t do it like that again. I even managed to maintain my sense of humour around this.

So why then do I do all of the above in other contexts of my life?  Take my work projects ? I have at times done all of the above when launching my coaching business, running workshops, being in front of clients. Why could I not take the ?not taking it personally? strategy above and apply it to my work projects, where I give so much more meaning to failing, trying something new and judging myself.  Well that does work some of the time, intellectually changing a strategy for a better one, playing around with the Content of my Thinking ? trying to give something less meaning. There are many techniques to try, though it is quite hard to try and control thought as we cannot know what our next thought will be ? and by the time we have had it ? it?s too late.
So instead of getting caught up in the ?content? of my thinking, trying to analyze it and then cut and paste better strategies to make it better, there is a much more profound understanding to be had here.
My experience in these 2 different contexts ? scared of failing and not scared of failing can only be experienced by me through the Nature of Thought. These 2 seemingly different feelings are coming to me from the same place ? Thought. I could not have an experience in life, if I were not able to ?Think? it first.
The area of interest and to hang out in is ?That I think? and not so much ?What I think?. What I think is made up, created, impermanent, dependent on my low or high moods in the moment, transient, nonsense, babble, a story I keep repeating, not true, put there by somebody else, stale, old, regurgitated. ?That I think? is a gift. It?s a gift which comes as a download in our operating system, to help us experience this game of life. In this paradigm lives Wisdom, Freshness, Unlimited Potential, a clean page waiting for the artist to create.
When you can sit in awe of ?That we think? instead of wasting our time on ?what we think? you will begin to say ?.. So F*&king What??. to what you were thinking.