Fighting a fact
View this email in your browser (|ARCHIVE|) When faced with adversity, you have two choices in how you cope with the negative thinking that comes along with it.
You first option is resist.
Mind over matter. Try to think positive thoughts. Don’t think about the negative ones. Block them out.
This is a form of denial, |NAME|.
It works well for life’s little problems. But for larger unrelenting ones, it leads to a chronic state where all you are capable of is reacting, resisting, judging.
Fighting a fact is a cause of suffering in life.
That is what you are doing when you block negativity as though it were a muscle that you’re flexing.
Like willpower, it eventually tires.
That weariness is how stress and anxiety manifests. Left unchecked, it’s a recipe for paralysis.
Reframed thinking on the other hand is far less susceptible to that kind of stress, because you are no longer pushing hard against things that feel like facts (but probably aren’t).
Instead you are making choices to feel differently about events and obstacles that are in your way.
Nearly 2,000 years ago, Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius—a guy who had much of the known world in the palm of his hand—took time to write down his thoughts on adversity: “The impediment to action,” he points out, “advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
Stop running from what scares you. Stop seeing your problems as a wall that—unless you resist—will move you hard into a corner.
Stop pushing.
Make a choice to redefine the assumptions upon which obstacles in life present themselves.
As “Willpower Instinct” author Kelly McGonigal of Stanford University invites: “If you embrace stress, you can transform fear into courage, isolation into connection, and suffering into meaning.”
Very best, Patrick
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