“It is at our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light” Aristotle Onassis
How many times in the past have you felt despair, overwhelmed, unable to cope, or that all was hopeless?
Yet you are still here, living breathing and surviving – well done!
The most important thing in life is to survive, and survive we always do! How much grace and fun we have in that survival process depends entirely on us and on how we rise to the challenges presented to us!
A good friend always makes me laugh when, under severe pressure, he repeats to himself and everyone in ear shot… “ok, right, lets slow down to a panic, we are not dead yet!”
Now we may laugh at him, but he has found a very important stress coping technique – to focus and observe before making decisions or responding. He naturally understands that our immediate life and death survival is taken care of buy our instinct, and as such, our feeling of being overwhelmed and un able to cope is something that comes after we have already survived – it is a secondary conditioned response!
Because of this, we are always able to take at least some of our power back in any situation and chose some responses that suit us.
To take our power back and make better decisions while under pressure, we should always try to change adversity into challenge, then rise to that challenge, conquer it and move forward. It may sound like a cliché to say that we don’t have “problems”, we have “challenges”, but that is exactly what we want to try to do! This re-labelling process changes the way we see the problem, it gives the “problem” a positive import which automatically presumes that we can triumph over it.
This is a subtle subconscious, psychological trick and it very simple and effective!
This weeks challenges
Observe your “problems”
Write those “problems” down
Change each problem into a challenge
Develop a simple strategy to rise to the challenge
