It is no secret that there are millions of things we can waste our time on. From Facebook to Candy Crush there is always something available to distract us. Those precious moments that turn into days and hours are truly lost forever. Time is the only thing we can not get back. It is one thing to squander our time in pieces, but it is another to create a deilberate plan to lose time now and in the future.

What do I mean? Who would create a scenario where they wasted time on purpose? WE ALL DO! It has been said that high emotion equals low intelligence or when emotion walks in the door intellect goes out the window. Using that idea, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine the kind of emotion you would feel if an armed robber walked into your home. Your heart would race, a million things would go through your mind from how to protect yourself to worrying about children, pets, possesions and even if these were the last moments of your life. That is all very reasonable. When the event was over you would be able to look back and critique your “performance” realize what you did right, and mostly what you could have done differently. Ultimately, you would be happy to be alive and work toward preventing that situation from ever happening again.

That is an extreme circumstance and many of us will never experience a real life robbery. On the other hand we hold ourselves hostage EVERYDAY and many of us don’t even realize it! We would NEVER invite that armed robber in, but we think or say negative things to ourselves all the time, that rob us of precious time and productivity. We get so comfortable with our own negativity that we don’t realize it is negative. It literally becomes a part of our routine like brushing our teeth, going to the store, or checking the mail. Our thoughts are our constant companion. When we repeat our negative beliefs they become part of our brain and then the thoughts change how we behave toward ourselves and others.

It starts gradually, with small comments or thoughts, “Oh, I’m not a very good cook.”, “I’m probably not his/her type.” and it continues until these NO statements are a part of our belief system and we can look back and say, “I told you so.” Once we get to that point we have robbed ourselves of joy, hope, motivation, and eventually we lack the ability to want to go forward at all because it just won’t work.

We protect our homes and cars with alarms, we provide our children with safe words to keep them from strangers, we put locks on our phones, now we need to harness our words and thoughts to protect ourselves. We each need to realize we are a priceless to the gift to the universe and we have all the potential we need right inside of us. Now that we have the tools we need to use them properly. Listen for your negative self talk patterns. Next time you catch yourself being negative, STOP! Now turn that statement into a positive. If you hear yourself say “This won’t work.”, change it to “I can make this work! I’ve got this!” if you practice turning negatives into positives for just 21 days you will create new patterns and begin retraining your brain. Eventually, before you even know it, you will promote positive thinking and your motivation, joy, and hope will be restored. You will have more time on your hands because the possibilities of what you can do will be endless.