DAY51 Change Your Mind

从零开始，再度起航。喜马拉雅的朋友们，大家好，这里是60天零起点英语晨读计划。60天，让我们蜕变成一个完全不同的自己。我是杰西，这是我们陪你一起进步的第五十一天。

DAY51Change Your Mind

As a recent college graduate, I was starting to figure out this adult life thing —

I got a job, found a place to live and managed to balance a social life with these new responsibilities.

Things were going according to plan, until they weren't.

I lost my dad suddenly to cancer, and that's when it felt as if nothing would ever be good again.

I rethought about all of my choices and simultaneously assumed that everyone else had it all figured out.

I counted the ways I felt cheated:

My grief felt crippling; my job started to lose its luster; I didn't have the bank account I wanted; I didn't like the way I felt on the inside, which translated to how I felt about how I looked and how I acted. I was cranky... a lot.

I was tired of seeing friends accelerating into adult life while each day felt like a challenge I had to overcome.

I was sad from top to bottom and from the inside out — until I heard a quote that quite literally changed my life.

"If you can't change a situation, change your mind."

I was in the middle of a yoga class, and it felt like the teacher was speaking directly to me.

I can't remember which pose I was in, the song that was playing or the day of the week, but I do remember feeling his words reverberate in my bones.

It was a wake up call, and I chose to listen.

Grief is real. And the things dragging me down were mostly out of my control, but my attitude was something only I could manage.

So I started over. I fiercely protected my attitude and reactions to situations the way a mother bear might care for her cub.

I had always been such a happy person and I wanted to be that person again.

I wrote the quote down on post-it notes and stuck them everywhere: on my bedroom mirror, across the back of my phone case and even on my laptop keyboard.

I doodled it on my to-do lists and wrote it in my journal.

I repeated it to myself constantly. I wanted to feel better, and now I had a plan.

Timing is everything. If I wasn't ready, the best advice of my life might have fallen on deaf ears.

But I wanted so badly to feel better. Slowly, I formed a new habit.

"If you can't change a situation, change your mind" became my go-to response for everything from a claustrophobic subway car to a terrible date to a disagreement with a friend.

Of course there were days when I felt awful despite my best efforts.

And there are still moments when negativity gets the best of me.

But I made a promise to myself to wake up every day and try.

Feeling angry and upset won't change anything about so many situations I found myself in —

In fact, it usually made things worse.

Changing something I could control, like my mind, made all the difference.