What I tell myself when I’m having a tough time
If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s this: I’m going to keep having tough times.
No matter how much I achieve or how many accolades I get or how many things I tick off on my to do list…
Even if I get married or if I go on vacation or if I get the cutest little puppy ever…
And no matter how much coaching or meditation or therapy I do…
No matter what…
I’m going to keep running into struggles and problems for the rest of my life.
There is no “arriving.”
There is no “being done.”
The day I stop having problems is the day I die.
So here’s what I tell myself when I’m having a tough time—
This is the exact struggle I’m supposed to be having.
The fastest way to make your tough time harder…
…is to resist the fact that you are having a tough time.
It’s to tell yourself things like:
“What’s wrong with me? Why am I so stressed out about something so small?”
“This is slowing me down. I can’t afford to feel bad right now.”
“I need to fix this. If I could just believe in myself or think more positively, I could do this.”
“Everyone else has this figured out. I’m the only one who struggles this much.”
All of these statements are you resisting, judging, pathologizing, and invalidating your current reality.
And all of these statements make it TWICE as hard.
Because you still have the original thing you’re struggling with…AND now you’re judging yourself for struggling.
You end up with TWO layers of difficult emotions instead of just one.
If you’re really good at this, like I am, you can even judge yourself for judging yourself for struggling and create a whole infinite spiral of feeling bad.
And the fastest way out of this infinite spiral?
Unconditional acceptance of every bit of your current state.
Accept your struggle.
Accept your resistance to the struggle.
Accept how uncomfortable or painful it feels in your body.
Accept how it slows you down and clouds your problem-solving.
Accept how it makes you spin around in confusion or lash out at others or go backwards.
Accept ALL of it.
And the way I’ve been doing that recently is by telling myself—
This is the exact struggle I’m supposed to be having.
Nothing is going wrong here.
I’m not off track. I’m not behind.
I’m not doing it wrong or destined for failure.
I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.
This is what it takes to build the toolkit I need to do what I want to do.
And it IS this hard. It actually DOES take this amount of time and effort and struggle.
Nothing is going wrong here.
This is the exact struggle I’m supposed to be having.
Resisting your current state takes a lot of energy.
And when you’re in a desperate rush to get out of where you are, you’re often LESS effective at getting out.
You’re haphazard and frantic, and you fall back in the hole again and again.
Accepting where you are frees up that energy.
There’s no rush to get out of the hole.
And when you’re not thrashing against reality, you have lots of energy available to calmly assess your situation.
You can see: “This is what my situation is like. It’s dark. The walls are rough. I can’t see any light at the top.”
And you can see: “This is how my automatic brain is reacting to the situation. I’m scared. I’m cold. I’m hungry.”
Accepting what’s currently happening allows you to stand outside of it.
Outside of the situation at hand…
AND outside of the automatic reaction your brain is having to the situation.
Complete, total, unconditional acceptance of what is currently happening…
…lets you stand on a small, sturdy perch and watch the storm instead of being in it.
And from that small perch of acceptance, you can find yourself again.
This is not something I figured out by reading one article, or doing one coaching session.
I figured this out slowly, piece by piece, over a series of coaching sessions and real live practice over several weeks.
It takes time and practice to go from “I understand this in theory” to “I have figured out how to implement this in practice while my emotions are flared up and every part of me wants to fight what’s happening right now.”
Reading my posts will teach you things in theory.
Hiring a coach closes the implementation gap and helps you put it all into practice.
It doesn’t help you if it’s just in your head. You need to be DOING it for it to make a difference :)
And when you learn the skill of accepting where you currently are…AND the skill of shifting your brain to more helpful thoughts and emotions…
You can solve any problem that comes your away.
And you can create the life you actually want.
Look around at your life right now.
What would you most like to change?
If anything was possible, what would you want your life to look like?
Get those answers clear in your head, and then come talk to me.
Let’s get to work :)
What my clients have to say…
“I realized that you can always create a space of abundance, even when there's scarcity.
This process has allowed me to go so deep into myself and realize: Just be more yourself. You don’t have to change.
And that abundance helps me to make better, less fear-based decisions.”
—Client | CEO, PE-backed company
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