Watch Out for Wet-Cement Thinking!
Can you imagine how unpleasant it would feel to sit in wet cement before it turned to concrete? How physically exhausting it would be to move and how sluggish every movement would be? The longer you sat the harder it would be for even minimal movement, and eventually there would be no movement at all. You would be trapped in a concoction of limestone, sand, clay and water.
I woke up the other day and realized I felt like I’d gotten stuck in mental cement for the last few days and better get busy and do something about it; if I didn’t address it inertia could set in. I could get really stuck. Life is about resilience, having the energy and skills and awareness to negotiate whatever is thrown in our way, and if we don’t pay attention, it’s incredibly easy to end up as stuck as insects in amber; no hope of negotiating smarter alternatives to whatever is happening.
“More than education, more than experience, more than training, a person’s level of resilience will determine who succeeds and who fails. This is true in the cancer ward, it is true in the Olympics and it is true in the boardroom,” says Dean M. Becker, founder of the resilience training company, Adaptive Learning Systems.
Staying out of Mental Quicksand
Staying on top of our game—and out of mental quick sand—takes awareness, coupled with understanding and action. And without this mindfulness I’ve seen some incredibly bright folks become entrenched in negative thinking that would take a wrecking crew to get them moving again.
We can change the character of our lives by changing our beliefs and it’s literally a science-based path. As Bruce Lipton says in his book The Biology of Belief, “The character of our lives is determined not by our genes but by our responses to the environmental signals that propel life.”
So we get to choose how resilient we’re going to be by how we respond to everything in our lives today. As you’ve probably heard me say before, misery is optional, and we always have choices. However, when we feel stuck it’s easy to focus on what isn’t going right and why nothing will ever go right again, and on down the slippery rabbit hole of frustration and aggravation. For me the final straw was a day of cell phone not working, ticket from a traffic cop for something I didn’t do (honest), and a few other annoying things. Small, petty things I agree, but if we end up wallowing in them it’s just like the wet cement, it closes around us and we don’t see all our options and all the good going on in our lives.
A man in a class I once taught told me that with his military background, every day when no one died was a good day; he took that philosophy into his civilian life as well. No one died yesterday with all my petty frustrations, so putting things in perspective it was a good day. When we continue to focus on, be annoyed by and share with others all our annoyances, we are asking for more problems. If I want a better day it’s up to me to get out of the mental cement and start focusing on solutions, options and what’s already working. That ends up helping us have the mental stamina we need to overcome anything that comes our way.
A Fully Conscious Mind Trumps Nurture and Nature
Our amazing bodies are made up of trillions of cells and each cell’s life is fundamentally controlled by the physical and energetic environment, with only a small amount of contribution by its genes. Put another way, human beings are the consequence of collective amoebic consciousness, and a fully conscious mind trumps nurture and nature.
I need to remind myself I have no excuses for all that is “happening to me.” I control more than I would like to admit that I do, and if I’m going to be the model that others respond to, I need to realize the necessity of getting out of a sluggish mind set and put steps in motion to create the change I want right now, today.
Creating More Resilience
Here are some steps to stay out of wet-cement thinking and be more resilient:
- Be grateful again and again and again. Look at how blessed you are. Years ago I taught a class at Riker’s Island in New York for 14-16 year old males. At the end of the program I asked for volunteers and got lots of kids on stage balancing peacock feathers on the tip of their index fingers. The message was clear: When you look down it’s really hard to balance that feather, and when you look up it’s a piece of cake, very easy to balance. When we continually talk about or think about what’s not working, we’re going to be off balance and continually get more of it. Thinking about what we are appreciative of (and everyone has multiple things to be appreciative of, even on a bad day) then we are setting up our infrastructure for success.
- Look at what you can do for others today. It may feel counterintuitive to your success but the simple act of focusing on helping others enables us to be more effective in our own endeavors.
- Think like Pollyanna. Years ago there was a corny movie about a girl who saw only the good in everything. She was naïve, she believed only in the goodness of others, and she went around in this starry-eyed state of wonder. It’s typically a slur if someone refers to you as a Pollyanna, obviously you’re not seeing the reality of the situation. Yet if attitude accounts for 90% of how effective we are in everything we do then I’d always rather choose my reality than someone who is going to remind me why something won’t work. I get to choose my beliefs and make them work for me.
How lucky we all are, with so many resources and so many options. I read this question recently, “What are you going to do with your one wild and precious life today?” Let’s make our precious lives count for something today, and appreciate everything and everyone around us.
