Perspectives: How Do We React to Life?
Dana Nicula
On a mission to win people's hearts ?? through social media while helping brands share their most authentic values
You know that saying:
“Life is not what’s happening to us, is how we react to it.”
Recently I got to work on my perspective of reacting to difficult situations and being more aware of what is my first thought and what is the story I am telling myself about the events happening in my life. I got to stay at the same table with my saboteurs, acknowledge them and strengthen my sage so that I can live a better life.
One of my main saboteurs is being a stickler (you can find out your saboteurs with this Saboteurs assessment). I use to be very critical and if somebody doesn’t do their job properly (according to my high standards), I have this saying: “Come on, you had one job”.
Let’s take a concrete example from my life:
One of the project managers I am working with takes, what I call, a bad decision about a project in which all team members are involved, including myself.
As I started analyzing my first thought and reaction, I can see that the first thing I am doing is to roll my eyes (even though nobody sees me ??) and think: “Come on, you had one job to do what’s best for the team and for the business, not to please the stakeholders. This makes no sense.”
Why am I reacting in this negative and irritating way that adumbrates my joy of life and empathy towards people around me? Because this is how my neuronal pathways are built. This is how I learned to react in childhood with parents (schoolteachers), in situations I had no other resources, I couldn’t say no because my parents would get upset, so I just did what I had to do, even though I was so unhappy doing it. And this is how my brain knows how to handle similar situations today, as an adult.
What can I do better to change my thinking perspective into a more positive way is intercepting the way of reacting and change it into something like: ‘Ok, we can experiment and see what we can get good of this and what other ideas that could bring.’
The more you train your sage muscles, the more you would react to life in a more positive way. And this is not an easy job, it requires a lot of work and engagement in the process. I have been working at this in the 6-week Positive Intelligence Program of Shirzad Chamine, using the PQ app, doing daily exercises to change my neural pathways that are no longer serving me. And the discipline and results I got are life-changing.
But now I want to bring another layer to this neural pathways’ perspective.
I do believe that how we react to life is a percentage directly proportional to our inside healing.
And hey, don’t tell me you don’t have anything to heal. We all come in this life with things to heal, to learn, to grow, that’s our main goal in life.
Building new neural pathways to serve us better and move away from what we learn in childhood in terms of reactions seems a great idea. But what we also need to do is to heal ourselves from the situations we were pushed to create certain neural pathways in the first place.
Project Management | Learning and Development | Process Improvement and Transformation | Francophone | Former IBMer
3 年Life (style) changing experience indeed
Technologist, Innovator, Board Member, Executive, Educator
3 年Fantastic read, Dana. Thank you for sharing the "Come on, you have one job!" maxim. As we are all on a path of taking steps forward, we are going to hit obstacles that take us back a step. (two forward, one back). The pleasure I received in your writing is the encouragement to have more self-command and empathy (for self, others, and situations) while we learn and grow to take more positive steps. - Thank you!