Stop taking yourself so seriously!  Your internal conversation is one sentence away from a full season of sitcoms!  We create such drama in our heads!  Listen…’I can’t possibly…”She’s such a….’ ’They always…’ ‘He never…’ ‘Oh, woe is me, it isn’t fair!’   According to John Lennon, “life is what happens when you’re making other plans.”  So, it’s time to get real, get present, lighten up and rock and roll!  Negative self talk is a nasty, self-defeating bad habit that can be changed!  Try laughing at yourself and life’s little curve balls.  It may not solve the problem but you’ll sure have a lot more fun while you’re dealing with it.

Let me give you an example from my own experience.  One night, while I was working with the students who make New Leaf Touchstone bracelets and pocket stones, the girls were fooling around and several boxes of beads spilled on the floor.  My knee jerk reaction was to get really mad.  That was money all over the floor, after all… and the girls shouldn’t have been fooling around… and they know they aren’t supposed to be hopping up and down out of their chairs… and they are being careless and not listening… and they don’t respect me and the value of the beads… and well, you get the point… I was on the fast train to a bad night.  And, do you know what?  The beads were still all over the floor.  So, in a split second, I decided to make a big, funny scene about it…I started singing an opera aria:  “Oh no, there are beads all over the floor”  I crooned at the top of my lungs in my best soprano voice.  The girls all stopped dead in their tracks and looked at me,  I kept singing as I began to pick up the beads.  Then, still singing, I invited them to help me pick up beads with me.  They joined in and before you know it, we were all singing and laughing and every bead that had fallen was back in its proper place!  Problem solved, fun experienced, relationships built! 

This was especially significant for these girls because many of them come from homes where they have been punished for looking cross-eyed at someone.  My little drama helped them see that people make mistakes, accidents happen and they just need to take responsibility for cleaning up the mess that is created, whether physical or emotional, learn what to do differently to avoid it happening again and voila, D-U-N! 

Oh, I love a little drama!  Especially when it’s positive!