Lesson Learned

During my journey to clean up my language, I did learn something very cool...

Because I was committed to my language being corrected, I found it impacting my general behavior. For instance, one day while driving, I was upset about something, and said one of the words I committed not to saying. The second I said it, I caught myself and all of a sudden, I also found myself being able to catch my general mood and calm myself down. It helped me basically, "awake" from my anger and I was able to tell myself to calm down and see things a little different. It was pretty eye opening. After reflecting about this, I have made a realization - When we try to control things from the "top down", or from a general principle level, we often fail because it is too overwhelming (too many things fall apart like dominoes and can't easily be controlled). However, if we work backwards, we can often put the pieces back easier. In other words...

If I want to improve my patience, that is a big word and can include and impact many things. It is too hard to recognize and control at a high level - in a word like, "Patience". However, if I pick out the symptoms/effects I display for my impatience (such as my language), I can make the goal to control my REACTION to my impatience. That, in turn, will awaken my mind to recognize I am being impatient and help me self-correct. This is a cool idea.

The trick is to figure out how to identify other areas of improvement and work on them as well.  Anyway, just an interesting observation I made during my journey.