The hardest obstacle to overcome when attempting to RESET Life Patterns is even noticing they are there.  I cannot emphasize enough how insidious “autopilot” mode is in our life.   Simply accepting our behavior and emotions as they are, without even taking a second look at them, keeps us in bondage.

Have you ever heard someone else say to you, “Don’t talk to me like that!”, and think, “Like what?”  Our voice is just our voice; this is just how we talk.  But if we really stop and pay attention, maybe we were a little tense and spoke rather shortly.

Maybe we were aggravated with something else, and not them, and so we didn’t realize that the inflection of our voice might be unintentionally projecting that we are aggravated with them.  We are so used to the sound of our voice, we become relatively deaf to it – until someone else points it out.  The same thing happens with facial expressions, and even certain words we may repeatedly use.

In my 30’s, my soon to be husband and a friend both pointed out that I often looked angry while walking through the church hallways.  Now, I am not a very angry person, and anger is not one of those things that I habitually carry around with me. Therefore, I was projecting something that I was not feeling because I had a habit of furrowing my brow whenever I was thinking.  And I was always thinking.

My friend went as far as to make a child-like drawing of a face with furrowed eyebrows on it, that said “Watch your face!” and put it on the wall of my office near the door. This way I would see it before I walked into the hallway and had the opportunity to consciously lift my eyebrows in preparation of meeting people.  This is an action I had to practice over and over, and sometimes I still catch myself checking the position of my eyebrows while just standing around.

Another example from my own life is key words I use that have the possibility of being interpreted in a way I am not consciously intending.  One of my husband’s most repetitive complaints about me was that I was a “know-it-all”, that I was always telling him that he was wrong.   When I heard him say that, I thought, “That can’t be true.  I know my husband doesn’t like to be told he is wrong, so I avoid it like the plague.”  But then he repeated to me the words I was using and how I was using them.

I would preface most responses to my husband with “Actually”.  Now what problem could that cause?  What’s wrong with that word?  As my husband pointed out, following someone else’s comment with “actually” means that what they said isn’t “actually” true, and that you are going to enlighten them about what is really going on.   In other words, I am saying, “You are wrong. I will correct you and tell you what is right.”

I never realized that was what I was doing or projecting.  Someone else had to point it out to me, because I was on autopilot.  However, most people will not point these things out to you, so it will be up to you to locate, identify, and deal with them.  You’ve got to turn off autopilot and pay attention to what you say, do and how you feel if you are ever going to RESET your Life Patterns and gain self control over your destructive desires and habits.  This will require praying and asking the Holy Spirit to show you when you do something on auto-pilot and remind you what you should be doing instead.

RESET ASSIGNMENT:

1. What complaints have people had about you that you simply could not see about yourself?  Why did you think they weren’t true?
2. What have you seen in other people that they couldn’t see in themselves?  If you can see it in them, don’t you think people are seeing something in you?
3. Ask someone close to you to tell you something about yourself that they think you do not realize that you do or say.