“We see signs along the way, we just don’t pay attention,” Loren Ridinger.  This is about the lies we tell ourselves when we know something is wrong with a situation and we stay.  We ignore all the warnings even when we know that something just isn’t right.  We stick with the things we know will hurt us, the things that can break us and then we act surprised when something backfires.  If we get really honest with ourselves, we can admit that we knew what was coming.  My family has a long history of staying.  Like, when shit hits the fan and we know we should run, we stay.  When we know someone won’t change but we have hope for their potential, we stay.  When we know an opportunity is for us and that little voice is telling us it isn’t, we stay nice and secure in that little bubble.  We set up our own destruction when all the signs were there along the way.  The brain can convince itself of unbelievable things. 

So what happens if we start paying attention?  I think of the time I could have saved and all the things I could have accomplished if I had cut my losses on some facets of my life sooner.  I think of the ease of that life, the one I convinced myself I wasn’t worth having.  I paid attention and I turned down each and every one of those chances that came my way.  I stayed in the rut knowing full well I was burying myself deeper, not building a ladder.  Whether it was in any type of relationship or goal, I managed to get myself right back to where I started.  This is an easy arena to fall into the could have/should have nonsense.  And it is nonsense (even if it’s right) because we can’t change it anyway and the universe said it had to be THIS way so that’s why things went down the way they did.  But what I learned is that we can start paying attention now.  We can start believing in ourselves now. 

When we know who we are and familiarize ourselves with stepping out of the bubbles we made, we start to take our interactions more seriously—or at the least we start to consider or view them differently.  We recognize the truth of the situation sooner than we would have previously and we are better able to navigate and steer ourselves away from a course we don’t want.  We learn to trust our instincts and know that what we pick up on and act on what we know is true.  This is different than impulse—this is about specific decision making.  The truth is not everyone is toxic or has motive to hurt other people—far from it.  That doesn’t make them any less self-serving, so we always need to be on the lookout.  It becomes easier to know what to do because the path is laid out in front of us.  All we have to do is stop pretending we can’t see it.