According to Lucy Hone, an expert in resilience, one of the keys to highly resilient people is that they accept that bad stuff will happen to them.
It will happen to all of us. It’s part of life’s journey. Suffering is part of the human experience. And if we ‘embrace’ the suffering, we can grow from it and become better human beings.
As Haruki Murakami says, ‘Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.’
However, I found this concept of finding positives in unexpected bad stuff really hard to get my head around. I had fallen into a victim mindset after my Type 1 Diabetes diagnosis in 1993: moaning, blaming, and waiting for someone else to fix it. All of which led me to feeling helpless and turning to other means to numb the pain and suffering I was experiencing.
Stop trying to calm the storm.
Calm yourself,
The storm will pass.
The Buddha
There is a common misconception that humans are fundamentally rational beings who sometimes get emotional. That couldn’t be further from the truth. We are fundamentally driven by emotion and sometimes are able to be rational. For years I was on autopilot, responding immediately and emotionally and this behaviour caused unwanted consequences.
Since 2006, I’ve been working towards changing to a realistic mindset, one in which I accept that bad stuff will happen, but that I have the skills to choose how I respond in order to reach a positive outcome for me and for those around me. With that in mind, mindfulness and self-awareness have become essential skills in developing better emotional control. I still have Type 1 Diabetes. It’s still all-consuming and pretty awful lots of the time. However, I now have the skills to manage my emotions and make better choices to achieve better outcomes.
‘It is not my fault I have Type 1 Diabetes, but how I manage it is my responsibility.’
How would you write this sentence so it’s relevant to you, so it enables you to feel empowered and take back control?
‘It is not my fault…………. But how I respond/manage it is my responsibility.’
What does the world look like, sound like, feel like when more human beings are able to take personal responsibility and develop increased self-awareness and emotional control?