I spent a huge amount of time in my book, You’re Not Stuck, advising readers to forgive, leave the past in the past, and ignore the bad behavior or different opinions of others whenever possible.  All of that. I think I said, “Other people’s opinion of you should be none of your business.”  

I wasn’t suggesting, in the least, that anyone operate as a doormat.  If someone else’s behavior is seriously encroaching on your legitimate boundaries, you have a right and a responsibility (to yourself) to make it clear that you don’t tolerate that BS.  Doing that does not entail drifting from your lane.  Enforcing your own boundaries is in your lane.

The lane we need to stay in is the one that is filled with our emotional well-being, our likes, our dreams, and our standards for ourselves.  Our lane is where our confidence, inner-knowing, and self-esteem are located.

Where most of us drift out of our lane is when we are trying to control the behavior of others.  We can’t.  We also drift out of our lane when we allow comments by others to ruin our mood.

We can’t control their behavior, change their opinions, or force them to agree with the way we see the world.  And, yet most of us spend far too much of our time trying to do exactly that and obsessing about it.  When we do that we are leaving our lane and giving away our power.

We know that our vibration is our most important power and yet we are allowing the fact that someone else said something to cause our vibration to plummet.  When you put it that way, it seems ridiculous.  Why would we want to give them that power?

When I was thinking about writing this post, I was focusing on expressing how important it is to stay in our lane. Funnily enough, during the first half hour or so after having that thought, I found myself thinking of at least three situations where someone said something that annoyed me, frustrated me, or revealed some seriously distorted thinking (in my humble opinion).  My lane-shifting was not lost on me.

It’s a habit most of us have, at least some of the time.  By becoming more aware of it, calling ourselves on it (with understanding), and making a decision that we aren’t going to allow another person’s behavior or comments to affect our vibration, we remain in our lane where all of our power lies.

Abraham-Hicks put it well when they said that “You’re giving others too much power when you acknowledge how they make you feel.  What you’ve got to decide is how I’m going to feel.”

We are in charge of how we feel.  No one else “makes us” feel a particular way.

Owning the fact that no one else makes us feel the way we feel enhances our power.  We become more bulletproof, more steady.  The slightly uncomfortable moments where someone else says or does something that we might think “makes us feel bad or makes us angry,” will still occur.  But they will occur less often.  And, we will react differently than we might have before.  We will be re-training our neural pathways to hit pause when we are tempted to blame others for our mood.  A new pathway where we take responsibility will replace the worn-out pathway that wasn’t leading us to our desires.

We need to realize more often that others are viewing things from their own unique lens. They might be being a jerk and they might just have a perspective that doesn’t make sense to us. We are all a product of our unique experiences and circumstances.  When we keep that in mind, it’s easier to let others off the hook when we can. And, by doing that we are also going easy on ourselves.  We are giving ourselves the freedom to choose our own mood, our own vibration, and create exactly what we want.  We are in charge of the circumstances of our own lives.  That’s the lane we want to spend our time in.

If you’d like any support with staying in your lane or manifesting what you want, I’m here to help.  susan@howtoallow.net