Life is how you see it

Exploring the power of mindset and belief. How our sensations and perceptions shape how we experience the world around us. Life is how we feel about it.

Those who know me know that I don’t often make declarations about the way people are or the way life is. After almost a decade of being in the helping profession, I feel pretty assured of this unsettling truth about the way we are and the way life is:

Life is exactly how you see it.

Life is exactly what you think it is.

Life is exactly how you feel about it.

Life will be what you make it out to be, unless you go and seek to change it.

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.” — Anaïs Nin

If you think the world is only a dangerous and scary place, you’ll sense and perceive it to be so. If you’ve experienced people as harmful, crude, or insincere, then you will see and perceive them as so. If you only notice negativity, the world around you will only appear to be so. If you only imagine catastrophe, you will start to anticipate catastrophe at every turn, even in situations where catastrophe doesn’t exist.

Life will, therefore, be exactly how you’ve come to see it.

This does not mean that our emotions and thoughts always create an accurate perception of what’s happening; our thoughts and emotions do not always match reality. We interpret, sense, and perceive things correctly and incorrectly every single day.

However, there is enough scientific proof to suggest that our thoughts and emotions aren’t just responses to our environment— they actually create a new environment inside of us. Our thoughts and emotions are therefore not just a response to being alive. They help us adapt to the situations happening around us.

Life will be how you see it

Life presents us with situations and in those situations we have responses (thoughts, feelings, and actions). These responses are driven by the senses and perceptions we used the most in previous situations. In that case, life is a product of how we’ve seen it and our lives are a product of how we’ve experienced it. We use the roadmaps from the past to inform how we see the present.

Life is how you see it, but that doesn’t mean it matches what others see. This is how emotions and thoughts can be valid while your behaviour may not be. This is also how life is not just about how you see it, but how we all participate and co-create it. As a culture, we’ve started to fight about who gets to be in charge of reality. Whose stories and whose realities shape the larger cultural narrative? The truth is, our own stories and our own realities shape our lives and how we live it.

Life becomes what you think it is

Listen, our thoughts are powerful. They are powerful enough to impact our mood and amplify our level of stress. Simply calling up a painful experience or imagining a negative outcome can change our inner landscape. The thoughts we think the most are the ones we turn to when times get tough.

If our thought patterns are negative, when times get tough we only have a baseline of discouraging thoughts to fall back on. When our thoughts are compassionate and loving, when times get tough we have a baseline of caring and supportive thoughts to rely on. We should not underestimate the power of our thoughts, especially for their powerful ability to shape and change our reality.

Life is exactly how you feel about it

Contrary to common belief, we are not just a thinking-based species. We are primarily an emotional one. Our emotions drive a lot of our decisions and the big ones often influence how we think and behave. Our emotional experiences throughout our lives shape who we are, how we think, and how we behave. If we grew up with a high degree of emotional care, we can provide ourselves with the same loving kindness. When we don’t receive enough love, we have little to draw on when our emotional needs start to deplete.

Our emotional roadmap helps us understand ourselves, the world, and each other. When we haven’t felt safety, love, and warmth, it is hard to know what that’s supposed to look and feel like. To that end, we cannot become someone we’ve never known and we cannot deeply feel the things we have not been made to feel. We only feel how we were shown to feel. And we carry that felt knowledge inside of us in order to understand the world. Life is how we’ve felt about it… unless we change it.

Pulling it all together

So, imagine this scenario: Your heart starts to race. You turn red in the face. It feels like life is closing in on you. What do you do? Some people take these feelings in stride. Some people take them as an invitation to freak out, worry, or lose their cool.

These feelings do not just change our thoughts and perceptions, they present us with an invitation. Life hands us a situation in the form of an invitation. We can either respond to the invite the way we always do or we can try something different. With each new situation, regardless of our reaction, we have an opportunity to create a new roadmap and write a new blueprint.

Who said you have to keep thinking how you’ve thought in the past? Who said you have to keep feeling down on yourself and your circumstance? Who said you have to?

Life is how you feel it to be and there might be more feelings for you to explore and unpack.

Life is what you think it is and a new way of thinking is also possible.

Life is how you see it and there may be a different way of looking at it.

Life is what you make of it and with each new situation comes a new opportunity to change how you think, feel, and respond.

Take really good care,

Jake