Everywhere you go, you always take the weather with you.

I remember opening the curtains one morning, looking out at a solid sheet of white sky and thinking, there has got to be more to life than this.

I was living in the north of England at the time. I’d been through a rather enormous personal drama, I was in a role I wasn’t fulfilled in and I was utterly unhappy.

I called my Dad and had a moan and he said, flippantly – “Why don’t you move to Sydney – it’s beautiful out there”.

By the next morning, I’d decided that’s what I needed. 

My father said was only joking, but once that seed had been planted, I saw it as the doorway out of my misery.

I wanted sunshine, a fresh start and a completely different life.

And that’s exactly what I got.

Upon arriving in Sydney a few weeks later, I got myself a stunning apartment on Manly beach, I secured a brilliant highly-paid position at a media company, made friends and settled into life in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

Except there was one small problem.

After a while, that familiar feeling of discontent crept back in.

And looking back, I’m not entirely sure it ever left.

For years, I thought happiness was something I’d find when my circumstances changed.

A different place. A different job. A different relationship. A different life.

But here’s what I understand now that I didn’t understand then.

I was unhappy with my life because of the incessant stories I had been repeating in my head since I was really rather young. 

I had these stories going on about how the world saw me – who I was, who I was not, what I had to tolerate. The crazy thing is that I’d made pretty much all of it up – without realising it; a comment here, a mean dig there.

And somewhere along the way, early in my life, I’d formed ideas about who I was, what I had to accept, how other people perceived me and what I could expect from the world.

I hadn’t consciously chosen those ideas.

But I certainly hadn’t checked whether they were true. I just assumed they were factual and showed up in the world accordingly.

I’d repeated them to myself for so long that they became my reality.

I thought I was responding to the world around me, but so much of what I was responding to was my own interpretation of it.

And that interpretation influenced everything; how I felt when I walked into a room, what I expected from relationships, ow I interpreted other people’s behaviour, what I thought was possible for me. Some of the inner chatter was good, other aspects not so great – the key is that none of it was factual.

It even influenced what I noticed.

Whatever you believe about yourself, you can find evidence of that almost anywhere.

Someone doesn’t return your call? There you go.

Someone seems distracted when you’re speaking? More proof.

Someone doesn’t invite you somewhere? Case closed.

I’d walk into a situation and the automatic thoughts would go something like this “They’re going to think….”

But the truth is – how could I ever know what ‘they’ were going to think?!

It was totally and complete made up in this world I was living in inside my mind. 

Meanwhile, you overlook all the evidence to the contrary.

It’s a remarkably convincing little system.

And most of us have absolutely no idea we’re running it.

This is one of the reasons I became so fascinated by the relationship between the mind and the life we experience.

Because the stories we tell ourselves don’t just influence how we feel.

They influence what we expect.

And what we expect influences how we behave, the decisions we make, the opportunities we recognise and the possibilities we allow ourselves to consider.

Which has enormous implications for happiness, relationships, success and wealth.

Think about money, for example.

If you believe people like you don’t become wealthy, how might that affect the opportunities you pursue, the prices you charge or the amount you’re prepared to ask for?

If you believe success always comes with sacrifice, how readily will you allow yourself to have success without sacrificing everything else?

And if you believe you’re not the sort of person who gets everything they want in life, at what point do you stop even asking?

This is what I call False Logic®.

Conclusions we accept as facts, often without a shred of actual evidence, that go on to shape our lives.

And because they sound so familiar inside our own heads, we rarely think to question them.

It took me a long time to understand that moving to the other side of the world couldn’t change what I was willing to tolerate and accept from life.

Because, as the song goes – everywhere you go, you always take the weather with you.

And the weather I needed to change wasn’t outside my window. That day in the North of England when I looked out of that window – that’s exactly what I thought I needed to change. Where could I get the opposite to a forthcoming winter of white sheet sky and rain? Sydney sunshine.

It was years later when I realised the weather of my life had always been inside my head.

So if there’s something in your life you’d love to change, whether it’s your happiness, your relationships, your success or your financial circumstances, here’s a question worth spending a little time with this weekend:

What have you been telling yourself about who you are, what you have to accept, and what you can expect from life?

And, perhaps more importantly, who decided it was true?

Because you may discover that the limits you’ve been living within were never facts in the first place.

They were simply stories.

And you can decide to tell a different one.

Guinevere

The Mind Director™

Beyond Realistic™ | Expect Extraordinary.