Do You Really HATE That...

I hear it all the time and sadly, I catch myself saying, “I hate that!” I’m constantly telling my clients that they have to get rid of their Sinkin’ Thinkin’ and stay positive in their thoughts and behavior. However, I’ll be working on my computer and then a challenge security word pops up and I think or say, “I hate that!” Other times, when I’m just finishing a blog posting for the week, ready to send it off to your editor and my computer crashes with the “blue screen of death,” I’ll say, “Oh, I hate that!” Okay, that might be the one exception: if you get the blue screen of death it is bad and probably deserves a strong emotional statement.

“I really hate that,” is a strong, very strong statement. And in most cases probably too strong. If you hit your thumb with a hammer, Ouch! jumps to mind as an appropriate exclamation. A streak of profanities isn’t. When you are challenged with a security word saying, “This is annoying,” is very appropriate... telling yourself you hate it is just creating negative on top of negative. It’s not helping you.
For those of you that cannot picture a challenge word, this is the pop up window that asks you to type the words, often illegible, into the smaller box. Why on God’s green earth would anyone be so cruel as to devise such a frustrating and exasperating step to logging into a computer site? All you want to do is reply to someone’s comment from your LinkedIn account and you click on the hyperlink and up pops this nuisance.

In actuality these challenge words are a good thing. They interrupt a computer attack from hacking your account. So when you say you hate the challenge words, do you mean to say that you really want your account hacked?  Hummm! Plus, it is also a means to digitize older books in the public domain for free eBook access.

The point here is that we’ve adopted all these negative, sarcastic and pejorative phrases and we say them without thinking what we’re really saying.  Our friends in Neuro-Linguistics will tell us that these words do in fact have an effect on our thinking and emotions. We become negative without even realizing it. So give yourself a break and listen to what you’re saying and put a positive spin on your expletives. “Golly, I didn’t mean to hit my now throbbing thumb with that hammer!” or “Oh look, one of those wiggly words that make the world wide web safe for me to surf!”