“The greatest challenge in life is discovering who you are. The second greatest is being happy with what you find.”

~ Craig Crippen

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The Second Greatest Thing In Life

I found this quote on Pinterest, and while it certainly can stand on its own, I always like to add a “Top of the Mind” twist to what most people would call conventional wisdom to expand its meaning and effectiveness. For example, would it be fair to say that when we discover “who we are,” we often find that we are more than just one person?

Depending on where we look, we can either find that loving, confident, curious, purposeful part of who we are, or we can find our annoyed, stressed, resentful, worried self. Of course, for those who follow my “Life from the Top of the Mind” philosophy, you know that when I say “depending on where we look” I mean whether we are looking up to the neocortex (the upper 80% of the brain), or down to the brainstem (the lower 20%).

The reason for this discrepancy is that these two parts of the brain are meant to do different things. The lower 20% is designed to move us into fight-or-flight when we are in danger. If we had to sit and think about these decisions, chances are we would have been eaten by predators a long time ago. Plus, this part of the brain serves a function even today. For example, if someone is throwing something at our heads and we catch a glimpse of it in our peripheral vision, we will automatically duck without thinking, and this is the good news.

What’s not so great is that the part of the brain that is responsible for whether we access the purposeful brain, or the reactive brain, that has been trained to be hypersensitive to any perceived negative stimuli. This means that while we would probably choose to access the best of who we are in most situations, unfortunately, we aren’t making this choice consciously. Instead, our unconscious limbic system is making these important choices for us, and, thus, controlling our lives.

There is a great quote from Carl Jung that says: “Until we make the unconscious conscious, it will control our lives and we will call it fate.” – Regardless of what we call it, the bottom line is that we don’t want this fear-based, reactive part of who we are controlling our lives, because left to its own devices, it will default to that stressed, worried, frustrated, reactive part of who we are in situations where this lower nature is neither helpful nor effective.

The solution, therefore, is to train the limbic system (that scanner, processor, router part of the brain) to interpret life in such a way that allows us to discover and empower that clear, confident, creative, compassionate part of who we are on a regular basis. In this we we can indeed be happy with what we find, because we will have chosen where to look “on purpose,” and in a way we would recommend to those we love.

That’s what I do in my books, seminars, and counseling. If you would like me to help you and/or your organization discover the best of who you are and bring it to life, feel free to contact me at www.BillCrawfordPhD.com

Take care and God bless, Dr. Bill