All tagged Controlling how we react
At a commencement speech years ago, the author David Foster Wallace recounted a story of two young fishes who meet a couple of older fish as they’re swimming along. One of the older fish greets the young fish and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” The boys continue swimming and a short while later, one of them asks, “What the hell is water?”
There’s no worse feeling than being in the midst of a difficult situation and feeling helpless, not being able to do anything about it. The result is the noise in our heads that is anxiety.
But difficult situations are difficult for two reasons: lack of comprehension and lack of perceived control.
Before we can make the leap from doing ‘what we’re told’ to ‘doing what we want’, we have to accept four ideas. That:
What we’re doing isn’t aligned with what we want to do
We don’t have to do what we’re doing
We can do something else
We should go do whatever that ‘something else’ is
