Doron Hafner is a personal and business coach, and writer for Vision, Belief, Change, which inspires people to live the life they want, through opening their minds to new perspectives and possibilities, and providing them with practical tools for achieving their goals and dreams.
Can you allow yourself to grow when facing uncertainty?
When facing uncertainty, we can find ourselves stressed, anxious, and even terrified.
Whether this uncertainty involves your work, your family, your close relationships, or financial concerns, your mind can automatically be alarmed.
When your stress button is switched on, a cocktail of your ‘classic’ old negative thoughts and negative emotions mixes with the new circumstances.
This cocktail is the way your mind protects you. For years it was conditioned to guard and keep you safe from any changes and uncertainties, but these thoughts are not who you are.
Your soul is immortal. Nothing can hurt it, nothing can dim your light that shines from within. You are an eternal and infinite being, something that your mind is too narrow and limited for perceiving.
So, when you are facing uncertainty, remember, you are more than a physical body and a mind that has thoughts, you are a spiritual being.
But most of the time we don’t feel that way, right?
Most of the time we are being sucked into the notorious cocktail, trying to predict and control everything that will happen, and trying to limit our infinitesimal nature.
As author Brené Brown states, you have to – “Let go of who you think you’re supposed to be; embrace who you are. Perfectionism is a self-destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought: If I look perfect, and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame.”
When you are constantly focused on doing everything perfectly and trying to control and minimize your feelings, you are preventing yourself from experiencing the many possibilities that live inside you and that life holds for you.
What is ‘Perfect’ anyway? Isn’t it just getting 10 out of 10 in what you’ve been taught life is?
Why would you want to limit yourself only to what you have seen so far in life? Is there no chance that something wonderful and exciting exists out there, just waiting for you to arrive? What about what you don’t know yet? The things that you have not discovered yet in yourself?
When you think about it through this perspective, uncertainty might be the perfect growth catalyst, since it throws you out of your conventions and conditioned mind, and gives you a chance to find more in yourself.
It will probably be scary and stressful in the beginning for you to let go of control, but facing uncertainty and allowing yourself to grow can definitely come easily and peacefully for you, once you realize some key elements.
New Experiences, New Reactions
How do you usually react when something new and unknown appears in your life? Do you think that these reactions are good for you? Or not?
Your mind is constantly trying to find the path of least resistance, and when you are falling into the same automatic and often stressful predictions and evaluations, you are generating more of the same.
Your mind signals your body to prepare for a stressful situation, and it does so very thoroughly, by running all the bad scripts and worst-case scenarios as vividly as possible, based on past experiences.
And the same is also true for new things that you know will be positive. Like when someone throws a birthday party for you, or your spouse asks you to clear your schedule for a surprise weekend, or when you know that you are going to get a promotion or a bonus at work.
By trying to predict and process these future events you are depriving yourself of possibilities.
In the words of Wayne Dyer: “Judgments prevent us from seeing the good that lies beyond appearances.“
By making judgments of how things are supposed to happen, you are limiting your reality, and excluding the good that might be lying beyond your sight.
When you give yourself the gift of being free of judgments, you will get new results. When you will allow yourself to experience new things, not your past judgments and perspectives, you will get new reactions, and a new you.
But why does it have to be so hard to avoid this overthinking when facing uncertainty?
Breaking the Habit
Why is your brain mind making you feel so bad? This suffering, whether you are aware of it or not, whether you like it or not, is your habit.
It might have been formed when you were young, due to a painful situation, or you might have inherited it from your parents or siblings.
It can be so hard to get over this familiar suffering because you are so used to it. And when you repeat the same negative patterns, you are also solidifying them.
It’s not that you chose to be that way, it is just that you have been doing things that way for so long that your body and mind do not know anything else, these emotional patterns are stored deep inside.
How can new ideas, thoughts, and reality grow through these powerful binding patterns?
Again, nothing can happen to you, the real you. And when you know that, you are much more capable of making new choices, that will lead to new experiences; that will lead to new reactions; that will lead to a new you.
And this is why uncertainty is perhaps the perfect chance for personal growth, because it allows you to open your mind to something new, something that never happened to you before.
Uncertainty is a Door to a Different Reality
When you are truly connected to yourself when facing something new, with no prior judgment, you are allowing yourself to grow.
You get to choose something different, not a product of your habitual thoughts and past. Something that is an expression of your true self, your infinite being.
When you give yourself an opportunity to experience something different, you’ll find more in yourself.
Can you imagine something different? Can you allow yourself to seek something new in yourself? And once you are experiencing something new, how can that change your perspective about life?
Can you liberate yourself from your old habits and negative patterns, and give yourself a new opportunity?
In the beginning, you might still be running the same scripts and patterns, and that’s natural, as you have been doing it for so long. But you just have to keep going, one small step at a time, and the miracle of momentum will do the rest of the job for you.
If you give up thinking for being, you will find more, as a new reality will emerge into your life in ways that you could have never imagined before.
If you will not try to control and predict it, uncertainty can be the growth opportunity you were looking for.
Read More:
How to Shift from a Fixed Mindset to a Growth Mindset
5 Power Poses that Can Boost your Mood
Breaking the Negative Patterns of your Subconscious Mind
