3956: [Part 1] What Do You Miss by Greg Audino on Processing What You Miss

This is Optimal Living Daily. What do you miss? Part 1 by Greg Audino of gregaudino.com and I'm Justin Mollick. Today I'm reading a post from Greg, our host over on Optimal Relationships Daily.

If you like this one from him, I recommend checking that show out too. It's a bit of a longer post. I'll read the first half today and then finish the rest for you tomorrow. So that's get right to part 1 and start optimizing your life.

What do you miss? Part 1 by Greg Audino of gregaudino.com. Reflecting on good memories is something we make a common practice of. In good times and in bad, we're even encouraged to remember the good old days.

While spending too much time dwelling on the past can be a slippery slope. One way of keeping tabs on ourselves is to stay conscious of the kind of reflecting we're doing because it's usually as cut and dry as healthy reflection and unhealthy reflection. Healthy reflection comes from a place of gratitude more than anything. It usually revolves around a good life-altering memory such as the birth of a child or a wedding.

Healthy reflections can be tied to other joyful moments too like funny stories and winning championships. But in their purest form, they often have to do with relationships as relationships are inarguably one of the truest foundations of one's happiness. Then there's unhealthy reflection which is much sneakier and is what I'm going to talk about today. Unhealthy reflection can revolve around these very same concepts and in many cases can come from a place of gratitude as well.

But the difference is that it comes with a price tag. A price tag that's very hard to detect both in the moment and over time. While healthy reflection is rooted in love, unhealthy reflection is rooted in fear. And what I'm going to go through now is a list of questions you can ask yourself about whatever it is that you miss, the answers to which can help smoke out fear and move you forward.

Question number one is maybe the hardest one to answer as it requires the most honesty with yourself. Was whatever you miss only there for your ego? So was it really something you cared about unconditionally or was it a source of validation? This is likely to come in the form of anything that whether you realized it or not meant a lot to you because of what it did for your image.

It pops up in the form of the hot girl that broke up with you who you were really only into because she made you look cool to your idiot friends, the job you used to have that you only liked because it paid you a ton of money, or the award you won because it showed how superior you appeared to be over your competitors. If you can trace back whatever you missed as something that was ultimately there to serve your ego, that's the good news is that until you learn what true respect for yourself is, that ego-driven hunger will always come back and catapult you into new forms of false validation. The bad news is that your life will still suck and you'll have to come back to listening to this article. Now the second question here might require you to rewire your thinking a little bit and that is, is what you miss something you still have now but in a different form?

So is this something you have now and can recognize with more cognizance and appreciation? A classic example of this which I have zero shame using is Sandy Cheeks from SpongeBob and if you're not a SpongeBob fan get that out of here. We all remember the episode of SpongeBob in which Sandy is facing a deep depression because she misses her home in Texas. She feels she has no home anymore and decides to leave Bikini Bottom.

Over the course of the episode SpongeBob and Patrick go into a panic, showing her numerous acts of love in an effort to make her stay, including the grand finale of turning the Krusty Krab into a Texas-style party, which includes peas in a can pie and 10-gallon hats which were enormous water jugs they placed on top of their heads. But by the end of the episode, Sandy is finally able to see that she still has a home. It just exists in a new place. She has people, well, underwater sea creatures, that love and care about her, willing to do anything for her.

They just happen to be in Bikini Bottom, not in Texas. I hardly need to say any more after such an ingenious illustration on behalf of SpongeBob SquarePants, but what this means for you is to seek out the core matter of what it is that you miss. If you miss being near your family, the core of that is love, connection, and belonging. How do these things make themselves known in different forms?

Are there other sources of them that are already in your life that you're underestimating? Or perhaps are there ways in which you can create them for yourself through your actions? Next, we have question number three. You hear that on tomorrow's episode.

You just listened to part one of the post titled, What Do You Miss? by Greg Audino of gregaudino.com, and I'll be right back with my commentary. Thank you, Greg. We'll finish the rest tomorrow.

I thought this was a really good one so far. The difference between healthy reflection and unhealthy reflection is something I hadn't really thought about before. Basically, healthy reflection comes from gratitude, and unhealthy reflection comes from fear. The sneaky part is that they can look a lot alike on the surface.

The first question, Was whatever you miss only there for your ego? That's a tough one to be honest about because it's really easy to tell yourself a story about why you miss something when really it was just about how it made you feel about yourself at the time. Then the second question is kind of the flip side. Is what you miss actually still in your life just in a different form?

I think both questions are worth asking whenever you catch yourself dwelling on something from the past. Not to judge yourself for it, but just to get a little more honest about what's really driving it. We'll hear question three when we finish this one up tomorrow. So with that, thank you for being here and listening every day, and I'll see you tomorrow with the rest of this post and where your optimal life awaits.