This is Optimal Living Daily, episode 76. Complaining by Steve Pavlina of stevepavlina.com. Get ready to maximize your potential with Optimal Living Daily, the podcast that brings you the best in personal development and productivity every day of the week. Your optimal life awaits.
Now here's your host, Justin Mollick. Hello, old friends. The whole stands for Optimal Living Daily, and I'm Justin Mollick, your personal reader and curator of blog content. I got an email from someone asking about complaining, and way back when, in episode 33, I read a post from Steve Pavlina called How to Stop Complaining, and this is a little expansion on that episode, or maybe a prequel.
In either case, one worth a listen. Now I'm still recovering from being sick last week, so hopefully my voice will hold up and I won't sound too congested, but I'll still mention that if you want to be in the drawing to win a free book from The Minimalists, all you need to do is be on my free weekly newsletter email list. You only have five days left until the next drawing as of the release date of this episode, so to get on there, text the word OPTIMAL to 44222, and I'll add you into the raffle. You can also subscribe to the email list by visiting me online at oldpodcast.com.
So get in there in the next five days, and you'll have a chance to win a great book, plus you get a bunch of free stuff from me on top of it. And that's that. Let's get the show on the road and start optimizing your life. Complaining by Steve Pavlina of stevepavlina.com Complaining, like all thought patterns, is not mere observation.
Complaining is a creative act. The more you complain, the more you summon your creative energies to attract something to complain about. Your complaints may seem fully justified, but realize that whenever you complain, you're placing your order for more of the same. Complaining is not merely about the past.
Whenever you make a complaint, realize you're setting an intention, a goal, for the future. Note that complaining is not the same thing as having a negative emotional reaction. That first response negative reaction is okay. Complaining is the act of reinforcing what you don't want and intending even more of it.
It's the act of dwelling on the negative. People who complain trap themselves in a reality that constantly gives them more to complain about. Life keeps harshing on them, their luck is below average, they never get any real breaks. Unfortunate circumstances, seemingly beyond their control, keep manifesting.
It seems totally fair, but it isn't. The complainers are merely witnessing the fulfillment of their own requests. Every thought is an intention, and complainers habitually intend what they don't want. So it makes perfect sense they live in a reality congruent with those thoughts.
The complainer may tell you their reality is causing their complaints, but it's more accurate to say their reality is reflecting their complaints. Complaining is also addictive. The more you do it, even within your own mind, the more it becomes an ingrained habit and the harder it is to stop. Complaining and the law of attraction I've seen many a person claim to be using the law of attraction properly, holding on to positive intentions and thinking predominantly about what they want to attract.
Then after a few weeks of little or no results, they fire off an explosion of complaints. Quote, This LOA stuff is nonsense. I give it a real shot, and it isn't working for me. Why haven't my intentions manifested yet?
Why does it seem to work for other people but not me? I've wasted a lot of time on this and have nothing to show for it. Robble, robble, robble. Unquote.
People who really grasp the LOA won't do this sort of thing. It's like planting a seed and then digging it up in a wild thrashing manner to see if it's growing. You just kill the plant in the process. Now consider this.
If someone finds it necessary to kill their plant to verify it's growing, do they really expect slash intend the plant to survive and thrive in the first place? Obviously not. If you know the plant will grow, you won't dig it up. Similarly, if you intend with certainty that your intention is going to manifest, you won't lash out with complaints about your failure.
You'll simply continue holding the intention until it does manifest, no matter how long it takes. In practice, you'll see some intenders hold their intentions patiently for months and years while complainers will usually give up within the first 30 days. Why? You might not like what I'm going to say, but the truth is that complainers were predisposed to eventually give up.
Failure was a true background intention. You see, people who backlash at the LOA for not giving them what they want never fully embraced the LOA in the first place. They were always expecting to fail, simply paying lip service to the idea of positive intentions. But their background thinking remain negative.
You can't fool the LOA. It knows your true expectations and isn't going to release its treasures to those it knows will eventually give up. Intentions and time. Recognize that the LOA is timeless, not time-bound.
Here's how I like to think of it. Any thought you hold at any time is a timeless intention, so all thoughts and all times influence your results in all times. Now that's a gross overgeneralization, but if you accept it as true, it'll help you understand why you must treat your intention as timeless commitments. Your lifetime of thoughts acts like a resonating band of intention.
That band's overall signature at some point in the future, that complaint will subtly affect you today. Let me give you a real-world example. Suppose your car broke down this morning and it was totally unexpected. What caused that breakdown?
Some might say it's a law of physics. An LOA advocate might say that you were unconsciously putting on intentions before then to manifest the breakdown, perhaps for reasons that may not be clear to you. However, I'm suggesting something else may have caused the accident. How did you react to the breakdown after it happened?
Did you complain about it? Did you keep going over in your mind making your negative reaction stronger and stronger? Do you realize all those thoughts are intentions? I'm actually suggesting that your act of complaining about the accident after it happened is what manifested the accident in the first place.
If you weren't going to complain about it, the accident might never have happened. I know this runs contrary to how most people think about cause and effect. However, if you play with this idea for a bit, you'll come to a new understanding of the LOA, one which I believe is more consistent with its actual functioning. If you begin to see intentions as running backward and forward through time, you'll recognize just how crucial it is to keep your thoughts positive at all times if you want to manifest a positive life.
Even complaining about the past is a thought pattern you must eventually drop. People commonly assume the LOA only travels forward in time. I don't think so. In fact, I'm fairly certain that isn't true at all.
The complainer seed. Here's another way to think about this, one that might be a little easier to accept and if that seed is there, you can bet the LOA is going to pick up on it. Really positive people who are good at manifesting don't complain. Even when things don't go their way, they keep directing their thoughts towards the positive side.
They expect that things will eventually go their way. They also take action to participate in the positive manifestation. Setbacks don't make them throw in the towel and curse the LOA because they don't harbor the complainer seed. They're not going to be perfect about it, but this is their dominant pattern.
If you want to create the life you want instead of only one you merely tolerate, you must eventually uproot the complainer seed. This seed is so destructive that it'll keep killing the positive seeds you plant. It knows it can eventually destroy them. It knows you're only fooling yourself.
It'll make you think the positive seeds you're planting are really weeds such as wishful thinking or gullibility. When you finally recognize that the complainer seed will continue to sabotage your efforts as long as you harbor it, make the conscious decision to dump it. Only then can your positive intentions take root without being uprooted. Whenever you catch yourself complaining, visualize that complainer seed and imagine yourself uprooting it and throwing it away.
Feed it to the birds, give it back to source, or just toss it in the garbage. Then visualize a positive thinking seed, plant it, fertilize it, and water it. Say to yourself, I hold the seed of happiness. Complaining may be a compelling addiction, but it needs to be a life sentence.
You just listened to the post titles Complaining by Steve Pavlina I've never heard that theory before. And like I mentioned, this post goes hand in hand with the post How to Stop Complaining, which I read back in episode 33, so you might want to check that one out as well. And don't forget, I'm giving away a book in only five days on the first of every month, and to be in the drawing, all you need to do is be part of my weekly email newsletter. So to join, text the word optimal to the number 44222 or visit me online at oldpodcast.com and you'll automatically be entered.
And that should do it for episode 76. Let's try going the next 24 hours without a complaint. See if you can do it. And I'll see you in tomorrow's show, same time, same place, where your optimal life awaits.
You've been listening to Optimal Living Daily. Be sure to hit the subscribe button to stay up to date on each new episode and head to oldpodcast.com. That's oldpodcast.com for a free gift as well as more actionable tips and resources to help you maximize your potential. Thanks for joining us and remember, your optimal life awaits.