Low diatribe

I slept horribly last night. Tossed and turned, didn't get a wink. Just my luck — everybody is being annoying today.

Wait. I hear myself in that joke.

Is everybody annoying? Or am I filtering for annoyance?

The circumstance happened to me because it always happens to me. Except it doesn't. I just showed up looking for it.

Your filter isn't passive interpretation. It's active construction. When you're exhausted, you notice every interruption. When you're anxious, you spot every potential threat. When you expect resistance, you interpret questions as pushback. The circumstance didn't change. Your attention did. And attention shapes what you encounter and how you respond to it.

This is how patterns become self-fulfilling. The filter expects the circumstance, which primes you to notice it, which confirms the expectation, which reinforces the filter. The loop closes. The pattern locks.

Circumstance happens to you until you realize you're also writing it. Not the external events — those are real. But how you meet them, what you expect from them, what story you tell about them. That's yours. Every choice you make, every interpretation you apply, every pattern you reinforce — you're holding the pen.

For most of my life, I believed my story was written by an unseen hand. Circumstance shaped me. Experience defined me. The patterns I carried were just the accumulated weight of everything that had happened to me. I was the narrative, not the author.

I've read the Stoics. "You are how you react to your circumstances." It never really clicked. It felt like a mental jump to just "be better" about accepting things. The switch happened for me when I realized our past choices shape our present circumstances, and our present choices shape our future ones. Not just the events themselves, but which ones we notice, how we interpret them, what patterns we let them reinforce.

I was the one holding the pen.

If I can pencil myself into a panic, I certainly should be able to purple crayon myself out of it.

Not for everything. External forces are real. But I can control how I respond to them. What I choose to notice. Which patterns I reinforce and which I question. I'm not just receiving my story — I'm writing it, one choice at a time.

That realization didn't change everything overnight. But it started the long progress toward filtering for what matters instead of defaulting to reflex. Toward choosing the data I surface instead of letting the old pattern choose for me. Toward authoring my circumstance through deliberate attention rather than accepting whatever the filter served up.

I've written before about choosing where to place attention. This is the mechanism underneath that choice: your filter determines what's available to notice. Train yourself to see yellow, and yellow appears everywhere. Look for the teachable moments and you can start to see lessons. The path is visible to those who seek it.

In leadership, the stakes multiply. The leader who filters for threat creates defensive teams. Every question becomes a challenge. Every suggestion becomes resistance. The team learns to stay quiet because speaking up gets interpreted as pushback. The leader who filters for potential creates exploratory teams. Questions become curiosity. Suggestions become collaboration. The team learns to speak up because their input gets interpreted as engagement.

Same circumstances. Different filters. Different realities.

I've watched this in myself. When I filter for what's broken, I find evidence everywhere. When I filter for what's working, the same team looks different. The work didn't change. My attention did.

The filter doesn't just shape what I notice. It shapes how I think I'm supposed to act. I catch myself playing the part my circumstances seem to demand. If I'm sick, I should be grumpy. If I'm under pressure, I should be stressed. If things are hard, I shouldn't be cheerful. So I perform the expected mood, even when it's not what I actually feel.

Somewhere I learned that society expected a certain performance, so I stuck to the script. The script became the path I followed without questioning if it was true.

The stories we tell ourselves become the filters we see through. Tell yourself you're always behind, and you'll scan for evidence of falling short. Tell yourself nothing matters, and you'll miss the moments when it does. The filter is learned reflex. Our go-to. Its effects are instantaneous.

But anything learned can be unlearned. Not erased — the old pattern doesn't disappear. But it can be overwritten with deliberate repetition. The work is patient, unseen, and constant: redirecting attention each time the reflex fires. Choosing a different data point to surface. Building a new default through accumulated micro-decisions.

It takes time. The old filter took years to build. The new one won't install overnight. But the effects can be visible before the reflex fully rewrites. I'm trying to focus on the positive, and a smile actually helps. Not as performance — as practice. The physical act of smiling shifts what I notice. The deliberate choice to look for what's working changes what I find. The filter adjusts incrementally, one redirect at a time. But recognizing you're holding the pen — that you're authoring your response to circumstance through the filter you choose — that's where the work begins.

You can't control what happens. But you can control what you're scanning for. This is an act of curation — of stewardship for yourself and your world. Not controlling what exists, but choosing what gets your attention. What gets to shape your interpretation. What gets to define the moment.

The circumstance is real. The filter is adjustable.

What you look for becomes what you find. I choose to choose carefully.