Beliefs that Keep You From the Love and Life You Want by Otto Collins

I just got these shoes I’m wearing in this picture shown here.

A financial advisor I know wore a pair of these and when I saw these (supposed) dress shoes with wing tips on the top and white comfortable soles on the bottom…

I swore I’d never own a pair as long as I lived.

Every time I’d see my friend wear these I swear I thought they looked ridiculous.

I thought they didn’t look professional, didn’t look like “real dress shoes” and thought he was just trying to find an excuse to wear athletic shoes to work.

But, here I am sporting a new pair of these for a dressy casual event I recently attended.

What changed?

What happened?

Why a sudden embrace of something that once repulsed me?

It’s simple and it’s the same thing every single one of us do when we make any kind of change in our lives.

We decide to let go of one thought that seemed real just a moment before and we decide to take another thought, make it seem more real and more important than another thought.

Then, we call that new thought our new reality of what is (and what isn’t) acceptable in our lives and we live from that reality.

Crazy isn’t it?

But that’s what we do any time we make any change in our lives.

We just decide.

We decide one way of seeing or being in the world isn’t working for us any more.

Then, we adopt a new belief (we start calling real) and we start doing something else or living in some other way because of our new way of seeing the world.

Like…the time I decided I didn’t like the me I was when I was drinking.

Like …the time I decided I would take a job that didn’t pay very well so I could be with my son more of the time when he was young.

Like… the time I came up with the idea to sell the nicest house I’d ever lived in up until then…

We all have these places in our lives where we made a simple decision one minute and our lives were forever changed the next minute.

What I’ve found is we all make these simple decisions all the time that can be completely life-altering.

These days I’m looking MUCH deeper into my “whys” more than I ever did.

I’m wanting to ask myself questions like …

“What will doing this (or choosing this) give me that I don’t already have?”

If the answer is “nothing” I always know what to do.

Nothing.

If the answer is opening to new possibilities, I go for it.

I wasn’t always like this.

Now I know that happiness, pleasure, love, success or anything else is never “out there.”

It’s always an inside job and I can change what I make real at any moment.

This, as I always say… Is good to know.

So what about those shoes that I’d thought were ridiculous but now proudly own a pair?

I had not only seen that I’d unfairly judged that financial advisor years ago…

But I’d also given myself permission to change my idea of what was real and made sense to do in this moment.

I didn’t hang onto an idea that I now saw wasn’t real.

And that’s what we can all do to create happier, more loving relationships.

We can choose to be kinder.

We can choose to listen better.

We can choose love instead of fear and anger.

If you have a question about how this can work in your life, contact me here…