The #1 Cause of All Suffering

Recently I did a poll to ask other peoples' answers. There were a lot of really great ones and, perhaps not surprisingly, a lot of overlap.

Expectations, anxiety, fear, attachment (to various things) were the most common.

There were even a couple sneaky folks posted in there who already knew my answer. You know who you are.

So here it is, the #1 cause of all suffering:

Failure to accept what is.

Resistance to the present moment.

Wanting things to be different than they are.

(For practical strategies you can immediately apply, stay tuned to the end.)

We live in the future and the past, in anxiety and regret, apprehension and rumination.

And all too often, forgetting to be here, in this present moment, which is the only moment in which we have the power to direct our own fates.

I used to have a bad habit of worry and rumination, to the point I was afraid I was giving myself ulcers.

Man, the amount of time I spent in shame or anger over the past, insecurity and fear about the future, is not a figure I want to comtemplate.

But gradually over time, awareness by awareness, thought by thought, belief by belief, I shifted that energy and those old habits into something much more productive.

Buddha said, "What you think, you become."

Tony Robbins says, "The quality of your life is the quality of your emotions."

Emotions come from thoughts, thoughts from beliefs.

So in order to upgrade the quality of our lives, there are a few processes and beliefs I chose to adopt that have drastically increased the quality of my results.

1. In the present:

I choose to believe that everything is happening the way it's supposed to happen, because that's the only way it can happen.

Inherent in this belief is that God / Source / The Universe / Infinite Intelligence is operating for our highest good. Trusting that even if we don't know the purpose of this thing in front of us, there is one.

As Einstein said, "The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile Universe." Yes, there is plenty of hostility, but I believe its nature is inherently friendly.

The fact is, our greatest strengths come from our greatest struggles.

I'm sure you can look back at some painful or challenging event and with hindsight, now see how you became more capable through overcoming. Likewise, trusting that our current experience is a gift rather than a punishment, allows us to move into gratitude in faith the purpose will be revealed in time.

And I think you'd agree, gratitude is a far more powerful state to create outstanding outcomes than resentment or anger or fear or anxiety or uncertainty.

2. In the past:

Everybody makes mistakes. The difference is how enthusiastically and for how long people beat themselves up over them.

I believe we're all doing the best we can with what we have, where we're at.

We don't (generally) set out to mess things up and hurt people.

In fact, we don't know if something is a mistake until AFTER we take action and observe the result.

Personally, I look at it as "the result I wanted" or "NOT the result I wanted". I do my best to skip labelling or judging the result at all.

If I COULD have done better, I WOULD have. So the fact that I didn't simply means I couldn't; that option wasn't available in that moment under those circumstances.

It's by looking back and assessing the event that we create new, better outcomes for the future. And so I acknowledge my mistake, and make a new commitment for more productive action in the future by asking myself these 4 questions:

What went well?

What didn't go well?

What's there to learn from this?

What can I do differently next time for a better outcome?

My position is that you can either have the learnings or the trauma, and these 4 questions allow me to extract the learnings from my experiences and dispense with any stored trauma.

3. For the future:

Go download my 2 Minute Anxiety Hack for on-demand relief (https://easyanxietyhack.com).

Here's the thing, y'all. All of the above is super valuable stuff, literally a game-changer for the right person. And I sincerely hope a bunch of right persons finds this post.

And for a certain number of right persons who are driven, Type-A entrepreneurs or leaders who struggle with anxiety and the inner critic, who value time over money and would rather accelerate their journey 100x faster with the only coach who guarantees permanent results, my DMs are open.