Use This One Superpower to Change Your Life

Ignore your mood for just one day, and you will see what is possible.

Life is exhausting and unfair. To say the opposite would be a lie. Each of us has to wrestle with a thousand things simultaneously, and no one wants to give us a break.

When we come home after a long working day, the dishes are waiting, the tax return is still unfinished on the table, and the damn tap has been dripping for two weeks.

To make matters worse, the bank account is at low tide, and the boss criticized you today in front of the assembled crew. Everything has conspired against you, it seems. The worries are eating away at your energy, and the frustration is deep. In short, your mood is at rock bottom and your motivation to do anything to improve your situation is zero. You can’t even manage to do what you need to do to keep your life from getting even more out of control.

The external circumstances are, without question, discouraging. But they are not what keeps you from standing up and fighting. A robot in your situation would simply do what needs to be done to change the situation. He would have no fear, no doubts, and no expectations. He would simply do what is necessary.

But we are not robots, right? We are sentient and thinking beings who do not operate logically and always have too little data to make decisions.

But what if we pretended to be robots? What if we would at least ask ourselves what a robot would do in our place right now? If this question seems too cold to you, let’s just rephrase it. The question you can then ask yourself is

What would I do if I could ignore my mood?

Imagine you are coming home from work. It is already dark, and you are completely exhausted. The dirty plates are piling up in the kitchen, and you know that you won’t have the time or inclination to deal with this problem the next morning either.

Everything inside you is resisting to roll up your sleeves and clean up the mess in the kitchen.

And then you ask yourself this question: What would I do if I could ignore my mood now?

The answer would probably be that you would just go for it and wash the damn plates.

Fine, so this is what it would be like if you could ignore your mood. But what good does that do you? Well, if you leave it at the question, it actually doesn’t help you at all. But you can take the next step and realize that it is absolutely possible to ignore your mood.

At work, we do things all day long that we don’t feel like doing. Why? Because we are commanded by someone who has power over us. So doing things we don’t feel like doing or that we don’t feel able to do is absolutely possible. Each one of us will find plenty of examples of this in our lives.

And now take another look at your kitchen. You’re still completely exhausted, you don’t feel like lifting a finger, and you could cry. But you know that you can ignore all that and just start cleaning up.

If you realize this just once and then act on it, your life will never be the same again. You have created a precedent that you can use again and again in the future.

Of course, you may manage to ignore your mood once and then continue as before. But it is much more likely that you have learned something from this unique experiment and want to use it again.

Imagine that you see the clean and tidy kitchen in front of you and finally drop down on your sofa, exhausted but satisfied. Before your eyes close and you fall asleep, you ask yourself, What if I could do this all the time? You think of the thousand unfinished things that lie heavy on your soul. And then you realize that each of these problems can be eliminated — one by one. You just have to do something every day that you don’t want to do. You just have to keep ignoring your mood and do it anyway.

What is the consequence if you ignore your mood again and again?

Maybe you say that it is not good to suppress your feelings. That sounds human. But is it right?

Your mood is so bad because you have the feeling that you are overwhelmed by everything and can never do everything. Then the circumstances are not the problem at all, but your reaction to the events makes your life hell.

Ignoring your mood and tackling your problems anyway can’t hurt you. Instead, your mood will lighten up by itself over time because the mountain of your problems will get smaller and smaller.

Ignoring your mood today means that your mood will be better tomorrow.

If that’s not a superpower, what is it? Anyone who is not depressed in the medical sense can use this superpower. It only takes one decision. Once you have used this power, it can change your life forever because you have found evidence against your own powerlessness.

A clean kitchen, a completed tax return, or a repaired faucet are tangible proof that you can do it. And what you have achieved once, you can achieve again and again.

Use your superpower. Then nothing can stop you.

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