When you replace your “Can’t” with “Can”

Memoona Sajid
3 min readFeb 13, 2021

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I wish

Sometimes, we confuse ourselves so much even in making small choices like no else can make us that much confused. At that time, it becomes very difficult to make a small decision. On one side. It feels like I am ready to make things happen and right after some time, negative thoughts start emerging in your head and you become fearful about how are you going to make that thing or task happen. Your thoughts start changing and sometimes, some negative thoughts get stuck in your head and end at I Can’t do that.

All is lost

Here, I am going to share my own story when one negative thought gets stuck in my mind but before that thought brings me down, I abruptly replace that with a positive thought. Almost 2 months back, I started my Amal fellowship journey with this belief that I have to become more and more productive and will have to bring positive changes in my life where personal grooming will be on my prior list. The journey is supposed to end after 3 months and traveling on this journey wasn’t an easy task for me because I would have to manage my research work alongside.

The first two weeks were very challenging for me. I wasn't able to manage my time effectively. At that time, negative thoughts were pushing me to quit from fellowship but before that, thoughts became dominant on me, very situation-changing thing happened to me. In one session of Amal fellowship, we all fellows were discussing the course named “Problem Solving Through Design Thinking” with our instructors. At that time, one of our instructors Ma’am Rabeea asked everyone to think about the problems you all are facing at that time. When everyone has written down his or her problems, the next task assigned to us by Ma’am was “try to figure out solutions whatever the problem you people have written down”.

Solution

The problem I was facing at that time was managing my studies with this fellowship was harder and the thought of quitting from the fellowship was emerging. The solution I figured out of this problem was if I start managing my time effectively and both things my MPhil studies and this fellowship will go side by side in a good way and I can make this fellowship to the end. After finding a solution to my problem, I just put this positive thought into practice and this really helped me to remove my negative thought. I made my mind to complete this fellowship to the end and now I am at the ending stage of this fellowship. This activity helped me to replace my can’t with a can. After achieving this success, whenever I face problems, I quickly focus on solutions without wasting my time on overthinking. This fellowship helped me move from a problem-focused to a solution-focused mindset.

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