There I was, about to take a shower and I couldn’t find my shower cap.

“Who took it?”

Various possibilities went through my head–each of them involving someone not caring for me and my stuff. I could feel my irritation rising and my body began to feel the stress of that.

Luckily, I’ve learned the word, “Whoa!”

I got off this train of thought and took a breath. Then I remembered that I myself had taken the shower cap to another house…… hmmmm………

“Good catch,”  I said to myself as I wrapped a towel around my head to cover my hair.

Stopping myself like that was good. I did what you might call an  ‘intervention” on myself. The word ‘intervention” is one that Tony Robbins uses a lot. I am taking the Tony Robbins-Cloe Madanes Strategic Intervention course right now and he always tells us to catch the questions you ask yourself!

I could have asked, “Where did I put it?” but I asked a question that had blame laced right into it. Which is what Tony is trying to get us to see by looking at the questions/reactions that come up when we hit a wobble in our lives. These ‘reactions’ are what I call ‘defaults’ because they show us our general psychological orientation.

Another person might have asked, “Why does this always happen to me?” (victim default)

Or, “I wonder how my partner will feel when I don’t do something HE likes!” (revenge default)

Or, “I don’t have to put up with this crap…..” (anger default)

As you can see, each question/reaction has the emotional pattern embedded right into it.

Of course! We all run our patterns all the time. They just kick in, kind of by default. So, people who blame will seek to blame, people who get sad, will get sad, people who tend to collapse, will collapse. It really has nothing to do with the situation.

This is powerful information because once you know your ‘default’, you can catch it running and do an intervention.  Like I did this morning.

And after I caught it, the shower, was great.

This week, when things go wrong, see what questions YOU ask yourself.