Keeping Life From Weighing You Down

I found this quote on Pinterest and loved how it spoke so eloquently to the concept of being in the world but not of it. In other words, it’s certainly true that there is always negative “stuff” going on around us, but we don’t want to let it in to the point where it weighs us down, or sinks our hopes and aspirations.

So, what can we do? – First we need to plug the leaks, meaning we need to understand how the negative aspects of life “get in” and do something about it. For those of you who follow my “Life from the Top of the Mind” philosophy, you know that the part of the brain that tends to “look for” the negative is the limbic system. That’s because its prime directive is to keep us alive as a specie and thus tends to see almost any negative situation as a threat to our survival. This triggers stress hormones such as cortisol and has us trying to deal with life from the lower 20% of the brain.

Given that this lower brain (the brainstem) is not equipped to deal with complicated personal and interpersonal situations, we often feel powerless and ineffective, which only triggers more stress. This is exasperated by the fact that the news we see is also skewed to the negative because the media has learned that this captures our attention… which results in higher ratings.

Since we can’t always change the world around us, the solution is to retrain the limbic system to interpret life in a way that engages the upper 80% of the brain (the neocortex) where we have access to our clarity, confidence, and creativity. This, of course, is easier said than done but can be accomplished because the brain is always wiring and rewiring itself based upon how we think, feel, and act.

Therefore, if we can recognize that our stress, frustration, anxiety, etc., is not due to the situations around us (the water around our boat) but how we have unwittingly let that negative in based upon how our limbic system has been interpreting life, we can begin to change the interpretation which in a relatively short time will change what we let in and thus how we think, feel, and act.

The best way to do this is to focus on what we want versus what we don’t want. In other words, to become clear, how we want to think, feel, and be, (who we are at our best) and use life as a place to practice. I call this “changing the problem to the practice field” and it involves practicing going into neutral and negative situations clear about how we want to be (what we want to practice) over and over until it becomes a habit.

This eventually retrains the limbic system to see life as a place to define who we are in a way we would teach or recommend to someone we love, versus being defined by, or made to feel a certain way by the difficult situations we encounter.

Therefore, if you are tired of being weighed down by all the negative around you, I encourage you to contact me. What I love to do is help individuals and organizations “plug the leaks” and establish a new way of being. This new way of being can weather the inevitable storms that pass through our lives and keep us on course to more clarity, confidence, and creativity, by living “Life from the Top of the Mind.”