Don't eat the mushroom soup

You’re in a restaurant. You order the lasagne. Mushroom soup arrives. In all likelihood you point out to the waiter that you actually ordered lasagne and send the mushroom soup right back. If the waiter persists in serving up that same soup, no matter how you explain you didn’t order it and don't want it, chances are you’d consider changing restaurants, finding one where you can get what you want, not what you get given.

What you most probably wouldn’t do is begin to seriously doubt yourself at this stage, asking yourself if you really ordered the lasagne in the first place, or worse, beating yourself up for being so “difficult”. Did you perhaps make a mistake, thinking you wanted lasagne? Maybe you shouldn’t be so fussy, surely the mushroom soup would be just as nice and you should give it a go, just eat it and stop being so picky? When it comes to the little things in life, there is often no way we’d settle for “less than we ordered”, but when looking at key areas such as work, friendships or relationships, another picture emerges.

Even though we often know what we want, when we don’t get it, the knee-jerk reaction is to simply convince ourselves we didn’t want it and there’s really no way of getting it either. In other words, we make do with the mushroom soup that we would merrily have sent back, had we been in a restaurant. We tell ourselves we made a mistake/don’t deserve lasagne/shouldn’t be so troublesome, or whatever our particular brand of self-punishment might be. Many of us are so used to doubting ourselves that getting what we want becomes a bit of a struggle and it might well be easier to just “forget” about what we want. Easier, yes. Happier, no. Not to mention the fact that until we really put our foot down, what we don’t want will just keep coming.

Somebody recently told me I get a bit of a “bee in my bonnet” when I don’t get what I want, the way I want it and I take that as a compliment. Not staying true to what we want, even though we know we want it, is selling ourselves short. It's saying yes when we mean no, it's pleasing other people at our own expense and life's way too short for that. You want the lasagne? FFS, stop slurping that mushroom soup. You really don’t have to eat it, you can have what you want, not what somebody else thinks you should want for reasons of their very own, reasons that may have next to nothing to do with you. Apply this theory liberally to all areas of life and sprinkle with gold dust. Or parmesan.