So I’ve been practicing cultivating peacefulness during
my most stressful situations, and I feel like I had a breakthrough moment the
other day. I have a dear friend and co-worker that would agree that sometimes
we can rub each other the wrong way, and we have been known to get into some
pretty heated and hostile arguments. As you’ve seen in past blog posts, he has
been patient enough to work with me as I have tried to navigate the stirring
negative emotions I feel when we get into these disagreements.
About a year ago, as an initial step to work through this
problem, I would get really worked up and angry, then leave, try to split out
what was an emotional attachment on my part versus something that actually
needed to be resolved between us, and I literally wrote out everything I needed
to say and he sat there with me and let me read it to him and we were able to
deal with some issues that way. Very patient on his part. I wrote a couple blog posts about
that (here and here). Since then, I have worked really hard on my communication, not taking
things personally, and staying calm. I was taking things as direct attacks,
assigning more meaning to them than there had to be, getting defensive and
struggling to trust my own words to get my points across.
These days, I have been following a motto I made up –
“Stand behind your words”. I mean what I say, and just because someone doesn’t
understand yet doesn’t mean I screwed up and I need to retract what I said. I
mean what I say, I just need to ADD to it so they can understand from their own
perspective. Gaining that confidence in my own voice has been tremendously
beneficial in staying calm. I’ve also started to gain the underlying feeling
that, whatever is happening, it isn’t the end of the world. I used to feel like
everything was an emergency, and everything was going wrong. This tied into my
low self-esteem and perfectionism. I was taught to take everything I did very
seriously, but I went beyond that and internalized that lesson as everything
being an emergency. I took it too far. I do take life very seriously, and I do
understand when something is a problem, but I don’t need to have a complete
anxiety attack and be so overwhelmed when things go wrong, which is what was
happening. I started to realize EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY, THIS IS NOT THE END OF
THE WORLD. And just by simply KNOWING that, I can collect myself enough to
calmly get through whatever unpleasant situation was put before me. The
Universe doesn’t care if you see how horrible and important a certain problem
is. The Universe just cares about how you handle it. Telling yourself what a
“big deal” something is doesn’t help anything. Sure, some people need to be
told that. And apparently certain people thought I needed to be told that. But
I didn’t. That was not advice that I needed. It doesn’t matter if other people
are aware of that – what matters is that I am aware of it. Take the advice
people give you, send it through your own filter, and as Mastin Kipp says,
“Take what resonates and leave the rest.” That’s it.
So back to my breakthrough moment. I was having a
somewhat technical conversation with the friend and co-worker, and we had
opposing views and priorities on a certain matter. I did see his point, and I
was fine with mixing our two views together, and attempted to express that. He
held firm on his own beliefs, and eventually got to a point where we hit a
resistance wall in our communication. He seemed to put his foot down that he
simply disagreed, and that was that. Now, normally I would have gotten worked
up and angry way before this point, and I would have communicated in a more
defensive/black-and-white/”you’re wrong” way, which would have brought us to
the boiling point sooner. So this was progress. But nevertheless, I hit the
threshold for myself. When this moment occurred, the anger in me began to rise.
My heart started to race. I was aware that this was happening, so I took my
mind out of it for a second. I took a deep breath and told myself, okay, this
isn’t working. Time to take a step back, regroup, and try to come at this from
another angle. And guess what? That completely worked! My heart was still
racing a little, but I was able to word things in whatever way I needed to for
him to understand and agree that we both were right and we agreed on the balance
between our sides. Anyone want to call that a miracle??
I feel very strongly that in cases like this one, you
have to start from where you are, TRY to have a more peaceful and loving
approach, and then regroup and learn from what worked and what didn’t. It is a
process, and the process changes situation to situation and person to person.
But what you’ll find is that when you are calm, you allow the conversation or
situation to not get out of hand as quickly. And as you work and progress, it
gets easier and easier to manage those stressful situations.
How can you apply this to your own stressful situations?
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