Are you writing off the wrong words?

Our lives our full of so many words, positive, negative, meaningful, neutral, thoughtful, meaningless, harsh, loving, encouraging, inspiring... some people choose their words carefully and others are reckless with what they say. How do you let those words affect you? I say let them affect you because you really do have to make a conscious or unconscious decision to let them affect you and how you feel about yourself.

You would think that kind words would automatically make us feel better and negativity would by nature give us an adverse feeling about ourselves. On the surface maybe, but how many of us take compliments and keep them with us? And how many of us are able to drown out the unfavorable?

Can you take criticizing words, decipher their intention and purpose, weed out what you should learn from and dismiss the rest? Not all critiques are derived out of malice, some are things we need to hear, absorb and learn from but the rest, throw the rest away. It is not worth your time and energy to dwell on the opinions of others. Their opinion is really none of our business. After all, you were not placed on this earth to please any one person, and we all know that is impossible to please all people, so stop trying.

There are people who talk just to talk, the bullshitters, the sales people. They will tell you just about anything to get you to react in a way that favors their own agenda, good or bad. And there are people who we think speak with their heart and not their necessarily their mind so we tend not to believe them either. Those tend to be the people closest to us who we make the excuse that they have to say nice things becasue we have a close relationship with them. But those are the opposite sides of the spectrun. There is everything and everyone in between.

What do you do with the compliments you receive? Do you dismiss them? Do you find reasons why they couldn't possibly be true? Do you undermine yourself? Or do you collect them, save them, believe them and let them feed you to do more, grow more, be more?

Make sure you are writing off the right words you hear. Be honest with yourself, know that it is ok to take a compliment and redeem the positive thoughts when you need them the most and keep them with you always.