Thoughts Pay Rent

Transcript

I’d like to talk about how thoughts pay rent. You have probably heard this expression I guess it’s been going around for five or ten years at least. What happens is someone will be gossiping about another person. That person will think “Oh, I don’t think of that guy at all, I guess I’ve been living rent free in that guys head for month.

If you have ever read the fountainhead by Ayn Rand there’s the opposite example this famous scene based on actually a real situation with Ayn Rand’s husband Elsworth Toohey approaches Howard Roark after years of trying to destroy him and Toohey says to Roark “Listen, there’s nobody else here. There’s nobody else to hear us. There is nobody else to hear what you might say. Why don’t you tell me Roark what you really think of me?”

And Roark says “But Toohey I don’t think of you.” Its probably one of the sweetest burns ever in literature. The point of this is of course we can think about people which generally, a lot of the time can be a huge waste of time. I can’t remember who it was said “I never hold grudges. While you hold grudges they are out on the town dancing.”

Generally it doesn’t benefit us to be thinking undue amounts of thoughts about other people wondering what they are doing, what they think of you or thinking of how they manage their life or thinking about the thing they did to you 7 years and nine months ago which now is lost in the sands of time. It is set in those neurons that keep sparking in your brain, well you can let it go. They aren’t paying rent.

Also with our thoughts. There was some article about it on some site I can’t remember and the fellow was like “I like my thoughts to pay rent.” And by that he says they should have predictive value and it is good for our beliefs to have predictive value and it’s also good for our beliefs to help us to be happy.

So if we can find beliefs that are predictive and help us feel happy, that have that magic, spark or seed that allows happiness to grow. That water that nourishes our sweetest emotions then that is wonderful, you can’t get much better. Something that is practical and beautiful is fantastic.

So how does this work in practice?

Of course many times something will happen, maybe someone is rude to us and we get upset. If we go back and look at that situation and say they…

Well of course normally in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy we talk about shoulding and musting. Like saying I should do this or I must do that. These beliefs are hardly ever realistic. Normally we have a lot of them and have unrealistic expectations about the world.

Of course reality likes to defy our expectations, so we look at that and say people must be polite or they should be respectful in their language and sometimes they aren’t.

So then we take that and say okay what is the more realistic belief here?

It’s something like, sometimes people are rude. And then we go a step further, that’s practical sometimes people are rude and having that knowledge within us to know that people might be rude sometimes and help us avoid a whole lot of suffering for the resistance of having a belief like people must always be polite.

People can sometimes be rude. Or we can phrase it a different way, phrase it positively: People express themselves in different ways. And we can go one step beyond that and say life is more interesting when people express themselves in different ways.

We might find occasionally when we thought people were being rude they actually just forgot themselves, they weren’t being conscious about their words. Or they might have said things incorrectly. And we can find that, we have an opportunity to find that so there’s a little example of how a belief can be both practical and beautiful.

Because we do have when we are aware that people express themselves in different ways, we can get excited about that or interested when things don’t quite go how we expect.

We are likely a lot of the time to find something interesting about others or about ourselves. So that is the thing, we want those beliefs to pay rent. We want them to help make our lives easier and help make our lives happier.

Thank you for being conscious of your assumptions. Thank you for when you do get disturbed by a situation, thank you for acknowledging that there was something happening that you didn’t expect. That you had a contrary or unrealistic expectation.

Thank you for exploring that expectation to find the value in the belief that will pay rent, not just pay rent but dividends for the rest of your life, once you find it.

Good luck.