A couple of years ago I coached a woman who was desperate for romance.

She’d been without someone for a while, and it was becoming a problem.

It was taking ‘too long’, she’d decided.

But there were helpful tips coming her way.

‘My girlfriends tell me I’m just too critical’ she told me, ‘and they’ve urged me to lower the bar when it comes to partners’.

Sure.

Because that’s how this works, right?

We deliberately create love bars and then we’re bound by them, unless we lower them of course.

One day you just start feeling things for people who used to be totally out of your scope, simply because you’ve decided to do so.

Sure.

Just like we create personal preferences, just like we’ve decided on our height and our ability to learn a new language and our love for playing the piano.

We obviously love spinach because we’ve chosen to do so.

We never visit Switzerland in the Summer because it looked like a good thing to create an aversion.

Sure.

I can’t get over how ridiculous this is.

Especially when it comes to falling in love.

Why do people even think that this is up to us?

Since when are we the ones who decide where our love and attention drops, and who will sweep us off our feet?

I guess that if you sit down with an average person and talk about this, they’ll eventually agree on the impossibility of creating a love bar.

It’s not very difficult to crack these myths.

And yet, we hardly ever do it, or even try it.

There’s this mysterious fog where many of our beliefs simply disappear when they turn out to be stupid or wrong, and when we come out on the other side, nothing has changed, and our ideas remained firmly in place.

In my coaching, I come across this ALL the time.

People who KNOW that specific behavior is dumb or dangerous or non-sensical or totally useless, but keep on doing it.

People who know that their fears aren’t aimed at something specific, yet keep being anxious all the time.

People who know that fantasies about the future are made up and purely imaginary, but still get caught up in them.

Most of us never REALLY reflect on the majority of the things we do or avoid, not because we don’t want to, but because the mind runs the show and it doesn’t steer us in that direction.

The mind is not in the business of exposing or debunking itself.

It tells us where to go and when to stay, what to believe and what to feel, it tells us when it’s time to become angry and frustrated and worried and confused, and it also tells us that we’re really stupid for aiming too high when it comes to lovers.

Sure.

Did you ever order the mind to lower ANY bar or standard or expectation?

How did that work out for you?

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(Photo by @copperheadphotography, for Unsplash)