Make Misery Optional

Being without power in the summer heat can be a bear of a time!

I hope you are weathering the storms in your life without too much difficulty.

A recent thunderstorm knocked out power for about 500,000 people here in Minnesota. The heat and humidity wasn’t pleasant to begin with, but spending almost two days without electricity or the ability to get anything done can make it seem much worse.

For more than a day, there was no estimate of when power would return. We had no breeze, just still, sticky, humid air. And no computer, just books! (insert winking emoji here)

I could have been miserable, but I chose differently.

Instead, I decided to apply a Positive Intelligence? technique to reduce my stress while I was dealing with the outage.

After complaining to myself about the discomfort and uncertainty, I decided to do PQ Reps on the situation. I put all my attention on the sensations of how the sticky, moist heat felt on my skin and body. While doing PQ Reps, I tried to actively let go of all the misery producing thoughts like, “Ugh, this is so uncomfortable! When will the power come back on?”

I stopped and had to chuckle. The situation wasn’t really so bad. I was making it seem worse than it was. When I let go of the negative feelings about it, it transformed my experience. I was just feeling the heat, but not the misery. And I could be creative and do other things with my time. Some that I hadn’t gotten around to because I was so often attached to my computer!

As Shirzad Chamine in his research into our brain wiring has found, I discovered that most of the suffering was produced not by the situation itself, but by my thoughts about it. Instead of activating the survival region of my brain with those thoughts that caused suffering I was now activating the PQ region which generated feelings of peace and acceptance.

Try this for yourself. There are many things in our personal or professional life that we do because we have to, not because we choose to. Whether it is washing the dishes, handling a conflict, talking to the unhappy customer, preparing the budget, or writing the report, we take the action while feeling the resistance, the reluctance, the “waiting for it to be over” kind of misery. Today, choose to take the action minus the misery.

See if you can minimize the misery producing thoughts of "I don't want to be doing this" or "When is this going to be over?" or "Why am I stuck with this?" with PQ Reps before and during the action. PQ reps are 10 seconds at a time of attention to a single physical sensation or feeling. Feel the warmth of the water on your hands as you wash the dishes. Feel the texture of the keyboard, or hear its clicks as you type the report. Feel the weight of the phone in your hand while you speak to the unhappy customer. Keep dismissing the thoughts of resistance and reluctance as they come.

Life imposes a whole lot of things on us that we would not necessarily choose. Having to deal with them is not optional, but misery is.

I think you’ll find that you can get through far more than you thought possible with grace. Have fun with the practice!

As always, please contact me if you’d like help implementing this or any other business or leadership strategy.

Not sweating the heat,

–Steve

P.S. - Credit to Shirzad Chamine of Positive Intelligence for the suggestion and research on how to do this technique (and others).