Be the Best You Can Be
If you believe you are a “work in progress” with the potential to improve, you are on the road to becoming the captain of your life. Your brain is designed for learning and making choices that contribute to creating positive and negative outcomes. Imagine making “high-road” decisions to consciously control your positive response to people and situations. Can you feel how good it is to be skillfully navigating your ship?
So, take a deep breath, relax, and learn how to continuously move toward being a “neu” and better you. The power of neuroplasticity is alive and available to anyone willing to engage and unleash the power within.
1. Accept that you are doing the best you can in every moment, given:
- Your thoughts (composite of beliefs, attitudes, values, and life experiences)
- Your physical state (pain free or hurting)
- Your emotional state (positive, negative, neutral)
- Your outer environment (events; situations; mental, physical and emotional state of others)
2. Embrace that you are a work in progress and capable of positive change. Your choices are framed by your life experiences that include the “good, bad, and ugly.” A full range of experiences is a blessing in disguise, because you have the gift of contrast to form the basis of improved future choices. How do you know what constitutes a comfortable and tolerable temperature unless you have experienced hotter and colder conditions?
3. Review events and situations involving good and positive outcomes
- Recognize that “good” is relative and always subject to improvement.
- What were your mental, physical, and emotional states?
- What personal thoughts and behaviors contributed to the “good” outcomes?
- What would it look like if you could revisit, rewrite, and replay a situation as a “neu” and better you?
- Establish a checklist of best practices; continuously update with improvements.
4. Play “Monday morning quarterback” with events that had negative consequences for you and/or others; these are situations where you have a sense of regret, personal responsibility, and ideas for how you could have done better.
- Remember, you were doing the best you could in that time frame.
- Be gentle and kind with yourself.
- View the analysis as a valuable learning experience.
- What were your mental, physical, and emotional states?
- What personal behaviors would make this situation better if it emerged again?
- Reenact (in your “mind’s eye”) the situation with a new script; practice until you feel like a “neu” you.
5. Ten seconds are all you need in stressful, volatile, or emotional situations to:
- Put yourself in “neutral gear.”
- Disengage judgment.
- Suspend your need to emote, attack, defend, and “be right.”
- Think: What are my best behaviors here for a good outcome?
In summary, being the best you can be is a continuous, never-ending cycle of learning and growth. All learning experiences are equally valuable. Negative outcomes provide the gift of contrast for better future decisions; forgive yourself and know you can and will do better the next time around. You can react, unconsciously, through prior and possibly faulty programming, or respond, consciously, with your highest-road behaviors. Self-awareness of your potential to improve, coupled with a willingness to make better choices, is a sure fire way to get on the pathway to being a “neu” and better you. You can do it! Up-shift your thinking, change your life!
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