“Oops! I didn’t mean to go there,” my eldest son said as he brought the car fully back into our lane. “I was looking over there.”
“Yeah,” John answered our son. “You tend to go where you look.”
As the teaching and practice with the driver’s permit continues, there are actually some valuable life lessons to be learned from it all. For example, just like in driving, in life you also tend to go where you look.
Are you looking for conflict in your relationship? If you are, you’ll find it and probably even get more of it. Are you looking for a call from another bill collector? For your teen to come home late? Or maybe for your boss to criticize your work? You’ll tend to get more of it when that’s what you’re looking for.
On the other hand, when you are looking for what you do want, you will get more of it. If you have a goal, focus on how it will be and feel to have achieved it. If you want a new car, take it for a test drive, so you can really picture what it’ll be like. If you are wanting more intimacy in your relationship, maybe you can deliberately create a reference experience–a time when you are more intimate–so you can keep picturing it.
And don’t focus your attention on the barriers. Don’t say”This is terrible, it’ll never happen!” Instead, ask yourself, “How can I make this happen?” And picture it completed. That way your subconscious can get to work on making it happen.
It can be so easy to focus on what’s going wrong, that is the way we don’t want it to go. I see people complaining all the time. They shoot off a Facebook post about what’s going wrong in their lives. They keep looking at the negative and that’s where their lives will continue to tend to go.
If you want your life, or even a specific part of it, to go in a different direction, look that way. Focus on what you want and what it’ll take to start going there. Do you need to take a class, get a mentor, find some new friends or a new job? You’ll get where you want to go in steps. Things are way more likely to go the way you want when you’re focused on the positive you want. Remember, in life as in driving, you’ll tend to go where you look.
