Originally posted on Facebook HERE
For years now, I’ve had a playlist I just call “Feel Good Songs”. The entire playlist is songs that hit my heart in a good way, sometimes just overwhelming me with emotion. Good emotion. I just went and started track #1 — which is “Love Untold” by Paul Westerberg, and was immediately taken away mentally to another dimension. I *LOVE* that song. The entire playlist is like that. If I’m ever having a down day… where I’m just not “feeling it”, you know? — this playlist can change that. Music can do that. It’s what I love about music. I think it’s one reason I’m good at music, I’m not afraid to let people see how much it affects me when I play. Gotta just go for it, you know? I do not have a playlist called “Songs I Hate”. What would be the point, right? Put it on to torture yourself?… but let’s take a second here and explore something. All of us have words running through our heads, always. Every day. And the words we run through our heads often have patterns to them. Similar to a playlist, right? Or a soundtrack. And, often — without really thinking about it — we run soundtracks that create anxiety and tension over and over every day of our lives. We run soundtracks that say “I’m fat”, “I’m ugly”, “I’m unloveable”, “I’m bad with money”, “I hate my job”, “My life sucks”, and many, many other really negative judgmental thought patterns that become self-fulfilling prophecies. If you’re going into work each day thinking “I hate my job. I can’t stand the people I work with, especially Ed. God, I hope I don’t have to deal with him today” — and you get in to find out the first meeting of the day is run by Ed, well — you’ve set yourself up for failure. What if instead, you decided to choose the soundtracks you listen to rather than just follow the ones that got preprogrammed into your psyche for you? Two of the soundtracks I run through my head every day are “My life is great, and I do great things” and “Everything I do, I do out of love”. So, if you started to repeat that to yourself, and deleted the old “I hate my job” soundtrack — you would approach your day, and that meeting, with a much different attitude, right? You might even start to realize that — “hey, my life is great — I do great things — this job is terrible and doesn’t fit with my reality, so I need to move on”. Either that, or all of a sudden the job you hate starts to become better because — you need to see things and believe them in your head before you’ll ever see them in your life. So many people operate from a mindset of “lack” — what if you ran a soundtrack that just said “I have more than enough” — another one I run every day. It’s hard to truly be generous with a mindset of lack. My wife and I put 10% of everything we make away in a fund to just donate and gift to people who either need the help, or to shock and awe someone we feel deserves a gift of some sort. Money that hits that fund is never spent on us. We always give it away. You can’t be truly generous if you’re worried about that donation making it hard to pay the bills. We started the fund back when that was the case, too. With a really small amount of — like $5/month, maybe? A number that we were comfortable with at the time. That didn’t create stress. With the goal of someday doing 10% of everything we made. It took years to build it up, but even with a small amount — that “I have more than enough” soundtrack kicks into gear, and the longer you do it, the more it takes over. But whatever the soundtrack is — when you catch yourself constantly repeating a bad one — stop and figure out a better soundtrack to listen to. Why are you playing tracks from the “Songs I Hate” soundtrack at all? Try “Feel Good Songs” for a change.
Today’s post was heavily influenced by the Jon Acuff book “Soundtracks” — Great book. Highly recommended.
