It’s Time To Start Ignoring The Voice In Your Head That Says, “This Sucks”

Throughout my entire childhood, I was the pickiest eater you could possibly imagine.

I avoided vegetables like the plague. They looked disgusting, they smelled disgusting, and I was absolutely petrified of eating them.

Instead, my diet consisted of french fries, chicken tenders, noodles, peanut butter sandwiches, and frozen pizza — in hindsight, I’m lucky that I made it out of childhood relatively healthy and (mostly) unscathed.

Then, when I was about 20, I started to clean up my diet. I wanted to look and feel better, so I started working out and eating healthier. A big part of this transformation to my diet was eating more colorful fruits and vegetables — the very foods I hated growing up.

I reluctantly sauteed some spinach in a heap of olive oil and topped it with an onslaught of garlic and lemon and salt.

The very sight of the watery, frail, green leaves on my plate made me gag in disgust. Few things had made me so terrified in my adult life. But, I was convinced I needed to change, so I pushed on and took my first bite.

When I tasted the spinach, I was amazed — it really wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t good either, but it definitely wasn’t as bad as I expected. In fact, the worst part was my unnecessary addition of salt and seasoning.

Slowly but surely, I came to love almost every vegetable that I tried. I’d eat them plain, I’d eat them cooked, I’d eat them seasoned — yet I avoided them for nearly 20 years.

Thinking back on it, I don’t think that I even tried vegetables for at least a decade — and if I did, I certainly had a mindset going into the tasting that was negative and fearful, not open and willing to a new experience.

My point is pretty simple:

Don’t let your perceptions about any experience, any person, or any idea influence your actual reality of it.

I can’t tell you how many great pieces of music that I have found by letting my guard down and listening to new genres I normally dislike, or how many people I have become friends with after initially judging them by their appearance or first impression.

Another great example that I think we need to let go of is that work is always hard and boring: I’m not saying that all work is a blast or super exciting, but more often than not, when I ignore the voice in my head saying, “Wow, this SUCKS, can we just go home? Watching Netflix would be so much better”, I suddenly find myself immersed and enthralled in my work. The time flies by and I feel much more accomplished than I would if I were to watch Netflix.

Far too often we listen to the voice when it says, “This music sucks”, or, “I don’t like that person”, or, “This food looks terrible”.

Try ignoring it, for a change.

I think you’ll be surprised by what you find.