I was recently coaching a client. She was ecstatic because since her boss left, she had been loving her job. She had so much freedom to grow, add her own element to her work and really flourish in her job.
Then she found out that they were promoting one of her peers into the open leadership position. Instantly, she was livid. I asked her why it angered her? She said because all her hope was gone. I asked why? She said because this would just be more of the same. I asked her what that meant? She explained how the previous boss had stifled the organization and now that was happening again. Her mind instantly went to the past, gathered up all the evidence why this would be horrible and served it to her on a silver platter. Does yours do that too?
All of these thoughts are natural when we resist a future that is different than we imagined. And then we perpetuate things by leaning into the resistance and creating our own reality.
We stop thinking creatively or moving our own projects forward. We don’t keep an open mind to possibility or what could be. We disconnect with coworkers who are happy with the news and excited about the future and more importantly, we disconnect from our highest self and block the good around us because the brain has been instructed to go find problems. It no longer sees what is working well. In effect, we hold ourselves back from possibility, so of course the freedom and hope is gone.
But what is real? The peer hasn’t even started the job. Unless we are fortune tellers, we really don’t know what is going to happen for sure. The only thing that has happened is our brain created a story about what it could be, we took it for face value, didn’t like what we saw and rejected all of it.
That’s so fascinating.
So if we can make up a story about the future, why don’t we give ourselves permission to make up a really good one instead? Or at least explore options on both sides of the fence and give ourselves some relief from the pain and suffering that our default story created. By doing so, we start to see that maybe, just maybe, doom and gloom isn’t the only possibility. If positive feels unreal, we can also explore neutral.
The key here is that every challenge we face can become an opportunity, if we just shine a different light on it.