What does that mean?

I work at a pretty cool place that sees the value in investing in and bettering the lives of their employees.

Our leadership team brought in an executive life coach to conduct a few sessions over the course of a year. It's been crazy insightful.
The whole thing is about taking responsibility for your own life. The idea is that if you wait around for someone else to come and make things happen for you or apologize for wrongs against you then you will never be happy.
In the most recent session he took it a step further as he talked about how we assign meaning to things that happen to us. I will probably butcher this, but here we go.

When something happens to you have a physiological response and your brain will assign meaning to it. In order for you to take 100% responsibility of your life, and to be happy in doing so, you have to learn to assign positive meaning to that response.

In order to do this you need to find the truth of what happened. The truth are the actual facts of what happened without your feelings or responses. So, if the love of your life leaves you then your response might be that you're a victim or that person was the one and you'll never find anyone because you have the worst luck with relationships... and so on.

None of that is the truth. The truth of the situation is that you were in a relationship and now it's over. All the other stuff is all thoughts, or meaning, that you made up. Your job is to stop those thoughts and make them more positive. Obviously you still mourn over the loss but you don't make the damaging responses to your situation. You realize that you loved and loss but you gave it all you had. You learned from that relationship and you can apply what you learned to make your next one even better. It's hard to do, but if you can master it then you will benefit because it's a proven fact.

So, what do I assign meaning to? What's the point of this post? Caitlynne and I made the decision that we felt it was best for her to stay at home with Paxton instead of going back to work. In our eyes there were more pros to her staying at home with him as opposed as him going to daycare. Not knocking daycare. I went to daycare growing up and not everyone has the choice to stay home with their kids.

We went from a double income, no kids lifestyle to a single income with a one kid type of lifestyle. There have been times where I question the decision in my head, or I think "I wish we could do this, or go on this vacation." What those thoughts will lead to is ultimately questioning our decision and maybe even coming to the conclusion that I regret that lifestyle change. It could make me unhappy and possibly resentful towards our situation, or even worse, Paxton.

So, I'm vowing to stop assigning negative meaning to this situation. Instead of buying those season tickets I get to stay at home with my family, or go to the zoo. I get to spend time with those that are most important to me. Not having a lot of disposable income (or any sometimes!) means that we get to spend quality time together, or have close friends over for a game night.
That's what Caitlynne staying home with Paxton means to me. I encourage you to take a look at your life. What do you assign negative meaning to?
There is a great book that goes hand-in-hand with this curriculum. It's called Success Principles by Jack Canfield. I just started. I plan to write posts about it as I find valuable information that relates to my life as a dad.