If you haven’t already, check out part 1 here. 

Can you relate to either of these scenarios?

• You wanted a luxury car and your friend beat you to the punch.
• Instead of being married by 30 you’re walking in yet another friend’s wedding.
• You were looked over for a promotion and it was given to an employee…who you hired/trained!
• The girl you’ve pined over for years just got engaged.
• Your friend is a speed demon yet you are the one the police ticketed for going 10 over the speed limit.
• You’re running late for work when you get rear-ended…again!

Do you know how frustrating it is to feel like bad things always happen to you? Or to feel like good things only seem to happen to the people around you? Or to tack on a smile so you don’t look #bitter? 

In my last post, I talked about how it can lead to comparisons. If you’re tired of feeling that way, then here’s one thing you need to stop doing to change your luck for good!

Could you have cognitive distortions?

If you’ve read my blog before then you’ve probably heard me mention cognitive distortions before. This term describes common thinking errors we make that keep us stuck. A lot of us are stuck not because we have bad luck or can’t make changes in our life; it’s because our brain has us convinced that no matter what we do or try, things will never work out our way.

Cognitive distortions are so common that I guarantee you’ve probably engaged in several of them already today. Don’t believe me? Ask yourself these questions:

• Are you currently feeling stressed?
• Depressed?
• Anxious?
• Abandoned?
• Rejected?
• Hopeless?

Then yes, you’re definitely a victim of some cognitive distortions. And did you know that you tend to gravitate to the same few cognitive distortions?

What do I mean by that? 

Maybe you tend to jump to conclusions without evidence. Or maybe you tend to use words like ‘always’ and ‘never.’ Or maybe you tend to blame yourself when bad things happen. Or maybe you tend to make decisions based on your feelings. While everybody does these things from time to time, the reality is they’re dangerous!

While there are several I could discuss today, I wanted to focus on just one that Mona, who I discussed in my last post, engaged in quite a bit.

Overgeneralizing

Yep, just like it sounds, overgeneralizing describes our tendency to use one—yes, just ONE (1)—bad thing that happened to us and then generalize it to other situations.

If you’re an overgeneralizer (yes, I made that word up!) then you rarely stop to consider that just because something happened once, does not mean it will happen again. 

Instead, you start to believe that the one time it happened is just an indicator of a) who you are as a person, b) how others will perceive you, and c) how your life will inevitably go.

Here are some examples of overgeneralizing:

• You finally muster up the courage to ask your co-worker out on a date…and they say ‘no.’ You then refuse to ask out anybody else because you just know they will also reject you.
• You tell a joke at work and it falls flat. You then refuse to make anymore jokes in public because you’re positive people won’t find you funny.
• You’ve been rehearsing your presentation for weeks. When it’s time to present, your anxiety gets the better of you and you bomb it, big time. You refuse to do anymore public speaking because you know you will choke when it’s time to speak.
• Your boyfriend’s mother hates your guts. In every subsequent relationship you go into it assuming that you will never get along with your in-laws.
• Or, the guy you like asks your younger sister out instead. You then declare that you will always come second to your sister in everything (at least, that’s the overgeneralization Mona made in the first episode of Half & Half 😂).

The problem with overgeneralizing is it makes everything that happens to you the rule rather than the exception. Tweet this!

If you want to change your bad luck for good then you must catch yourself when you’re overgeneralizing and remind yourself that just because something happened once (or even twice) doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed to become a long standing pattern in your life. Keep an eye out here for my next post in this series.