A Simple Question to Reframe Reality Itself

What’s up, all you beautiful people? Welcome back to the podcast. Okay, so we just got back from Italy late, late last night. It was a long day with 24 hours straight of traveling, no sleep. It was exhausting, but we’re back home. Beautiful weather, mid six, I think it’s high sixties, low seventies right now. So much, much better than the weather we had in Italy, which was just brutally hot. But Italy was pretty amazing. With that said, though, Italy was also quite difficult.

Anytime you’re traveling internationally, I don’t care how like dialed in, you have your travel systems. It’s always hard. You’re outside of your routines, you’re outside of the familiarity, you’re pushing outside your comfort zone. That’s why I think travel is one of the most valuable things that we can do for expanding our perspective. And again, our reality is often simply a matter of our perspectives. Our perspectives become our realities. And so the more lenses that we have for seeing the world, the more robust that we become. And I think travel is just a fantastic way to do that.

But there’s no easy way around this is that travel is hard. It’s just, it could be grueling. And on this particular trip, we traveled with two other families and they brought their, each brought their four year old child. Four year olds on an international trip, that’s hard. I don’t care who you are, I don’t care how well trained these four year olds are. It’s difficult. And especially when it’s hot and you’re walking around all day, even as an adult, I still have my moments where I want to have my little tantrums, right? So you can imagine for a four year old on a trip like that, it ain’t easy. Now, the thing is, like, I don’t spend a lot of time around four year olds.
Surprise, surprise, right? I don’t have any kids and I don’t have too many reasons to spend at the kindergarten with the, with the little ones. So this was a hard experience for me in the sense that I am very rigid, I am very inflexible a lot of times with how I like things to be. Obviously, with a four year old, you need to learn how to be flexible. That’s that one of us has to bend, the other one will simply break, and the four year old, they will break and they will not concede. So you have to be willing to be flexible with them. So I learned a lot about that on this trip, which was really good for me, getting outside of my comfort zone for sure. But I was finding myself getting cranky at times and complaining in private to my partner, Jamie, about the kids, blah, blah, blah, all the little things, right? Like, it’s always good. Complaining is one of the most cathartic things that we can, we can do, right? Everybody loves a good complaining session, but it doesn’t move us forward.
It doesn’t put us into the right energy or the right mindset for feeling gratitude and feeling love and feeling positive energy in our life, right? And I don’t like feeling those negative things. And yet I still easily default to the negative and to the criticisms and to the complaining all the time, right? And at one point, I became really aware of this, and I turned to Jamie after getting out of the shower, and I said, I need you to help me with something. I need you to help haul me out whenever I’m complaining. I want to stop complaining. I don’t want to be. I don’t want to be somebody who looks and finds the negative in things, and it’s so easy to fall into that trap. And so what I would see as, oh, that’s not a complaint. That’s an explanation.
That’s a justification. I’m just sharing, like, something that made me uncomfortable, right? Like, we make these excuses for things that we’re actually complaining about. So I asked her, I said, just do me a favor and call me out on this, and just point blank if you think I’m complaining, just ask me this question, this powerful question, this little reframe. And this actually served me incredibly well for the rest of the trip. And I never used this question before, so I want to share it with you guys in case it can bring you a little bit of value. Question is simple. How could this be a good thing? How could this be a good thing? It’s just a simple reframe. Whenever something is causing me frustration, let’s say the kids, they’re running around, they’re being loud, right? Instead of getting frustrated about that, instead of getting annoyed, asking the question, how could this be a good thing? And then going on an active search to find the answer and say, what is the blessing in this moment? What could I take from this? You know, in that instance, it could be, hey, I could learn how to be patient.
This right now is a challenge to learn how to be patient. Or it could be, you know what? This could be the lens that I need to see. Like, don’t take life so seriously. These little four year olds running around having a good old time. Like, you could do the same, right? You don’t have to be so serious and so severe all the time. The flip side of that is if you have a four year old throwing a fit on the ground, you could also ask yourself, like, what’s the good thing here? The good thing is like, well, I have emotional control. I don’t. I’m not having this emotional reaction, such a strong reaction to the world.
And I’m sure that they’re, they don’t want to be having a fit right now. So the good thing, the frame for me is that I do have that I have this opportunity to reflect and be grateful for the fact that I don’t have that same struggle. And I just found this question to be very, very powerful. I wanted to share it with you guys because it made a big impact on the rest of the trip and how I was able to get enjoyment out of those little moments that were otherwise like an opportunity for me to find criticism. So how could this actually be a good thing? How could I make this into a good thing? Use that reframe. And I think you guys will find the things that were annoying you, those little criticisms that you have of other people or circumstances, they go and they shift. And instead of life happening to you, it is life happening for you, and it’s for you to take the message, to take the lesson from that and move forward, because things are not good or bad, but thinking makes it so. And so your thoughts about whether a situation, a circumstance, is good or bad, that is what makes it good or bad, not the objective reality of that situation.

Because the universe doesn’t care at the end of the day, right? The universe doesn’t have an objective measure of good and bad. It just has. So take this, run with it, and I’ll see you guys in the next episode. Until then, stay happy. Focus, my friends. Thank you.