Mind, on the rocks?!

It doesn’t happen often but sometimes, just sometimes, you pick up a phrase in a film or book and it sticks with you, nay it becomes a life lesson.  These are mine and I warn you now my taste in books and films have been described as eclectic, and I don’t think it was a compliment… I’ll start you off with something well known.

With great power comes great responsibility – Uncle Ben, Spider Man

Ah, who can forget uncle Ben, bleeding out on a sidewalk while trying to pass on one last pearl of wisdom to young Peter Parker.  This single act illustrates the most extreme application of the lesson, our greatest powers comes from choice.  In reality you would probably never have to make a choice between conserving yourself waiting on a pair of ENTs or passing a vital teaching on to someone in your stead and well dying.  More likely you will be in a very comfortable chair with a wide eyed individual in front of you and a strange question to answers, pretty safe, mostly.

You always have some form of power over a situation because you really do always have choices. Power takes many forms and exists everywhere you are. You have power ‘granted’ to you by your family and friends, strangers in a hardware store and in traffic every day, yes even in traffic, to mention but a few spaces.  Will you allow this person into your lane?  Will you help someone in the hardware store find the correct potting soil?  Will you be honest with your friends and family and decline the beetroot salad?  All choices that give you power, not every choice is easy to make but it is there.

If choice is great power, then great responsibility is understanding it’s consequences.  Every single choice you make, regardless of how trivial it is,  is an execution of your power and inevitably carriers a consequence.  Your choices, the power you wield, could shape minds, enrich lives, help others make better choices, help yourself to understand your own choices, and as with many other elements in life, we must all become accustomed to the extent of our power and the responsibility that comes with owning it.

Understanding that our actions extends beyond ourselves with far reaching effect.  When you realize that you have power to make choices that can influence outcomes beyond the present moment.  When you understand that you can create benefit beyond your own interests simply through making choices, you will have lived up to the fictional image of uncle Ben, but hopefully without having to shed your mortal coil.

Is the juice worth the squeeze – Kelly, The girl next door

One of my favorite lines, that I must admit I still fail at regularly. The line itself is pretty straight forward, is the input worth the potential reward. Read that again slowly, is the input worth the potential reward. Yes no surprises here just because we are aware of the input doesn’t mean we are always mindful of its true cost.

Don’t get me wrong there is a difference between ‘is the juice worth the squeeze‘ and ‘what’s in it for me‘.  The latter is choice made out of pure self interest and serves no one beyond yourself.  This however does not mean that everything you do has to be selfless, and that is completely acceptable.  Sometimes you have to make investments in yourself that adds value to you, and if that investment adds value to someone else that’s pretty darn good investment.  

The truth is that many times we invest ourselves without understanding the true personal cost of the investment.  How much can you really afford to ‘squeeze’ and how much ‘juice’ will you really make?  Is the juice even worth making ? This is a completely valid question to ask that is not asked often enough by many of us when assessing our “personal investments”.  Investing in an endeavor,  situation or people because we believe the potential reward to be worthwhile is a noble choice, this choice is many times easy to make, choosing to “get out” of a bad investment should be just as simple, and it mostly is.

I have had many Pyrrhic victories in my life, sometimes we make investments regardless of the cost just because it feels right regardless of the reward.  There is something to be said for ‘getting out’ when the cost becomes too high for the potential reward.  There is a difference between abandoning something or someone and making a conscious choice based on the personal cost to you, don’t confuse stepping away with abandonment,  be honest with yourself and make a choice, exercise your power .

Do or do not, there is no try – Yoda, star wars

For the uninitiated Yoda is a wise character from the Star Wars franchise. In this specific scene Yoda explains to Luke Skywalker that there is no difference between moving rocks with your mind, a.k.a the force or moving an entire spaceship.  But you have to either choose to do it or choose not to, there is no middle ground.  Just YouTube the title you will find countless video’s of the scene.

Putting aside all the business with ‘the force’ moving objects with your mind and spaceships,  this short statement at its core is immensely powerful . The essence of the statement is simple, commit to something or actively choose not to but make a choice that stands clearly defined.  Too many times we make half decisions and in doing so commit ourselves to failure because we don’t take enough time to evaluate our situation and our ability to commit to it.  Regardless of your choice you can always ask yourself “if the Juice is still worth the squeeze” at a later stage but go into the situation knowing that you are there 100% or don’t go in at all.

Simplifying the choice by making it a ‘fully committed’ or ‘not committed at all’ decision is more empowering than you might think.  Essentially there is always a choice to he made and a consequence to be carried this concept can be crippling to many, I find it frightening to say the least, but if you start the decision making process by understanding that you are either ‘fully committed’ or ‘not at all’ makes it a hell of a lot easier. Getting to this decision is a combination experience and intuition, basically your brain and your ‘gut’.

Use your brain, Trust your gut.  Regardless of how much you apply your mind sometimes a voice or a feeling inside of you says ‘go for it’, that’s your gut speaking, your intuition desperately wanting to help you feel the right way forward.  Many times the crippling fear of the unknown will try to silence this voice, be mindful of it and allow that voice to speak. Try to evaluate what your are feeling versus what you are thinking. Making a solid choice, evaluating and understanding the potential and the consequences goes a long way in determining the worth of an endeavor, some refer to this as “a calculated risk”, others choose the word “Adventure”,  either way go have fun and learn something!

Always believe in yourself. Do this and no matter where you are, you will have nothing to fear – Baron Humbert von Gikkingen, The Cat Returns

A whimsically beautiful statement made in a Japanese animated film by a peculiarly polite and well educated cat.  It feels lighthearted and it is intended to be, but it cuts down to the core of most of our limitations. We don’t believe in ourselves enough, some of us are so disconnected from ourselves to the extent where many times the external world is our only measure of truth, and this leads to so much of our fears and failed commitments.  The ‘half in half out situations’ we have with friends, family, work, hobbies, life, everything is driven by the fear created from a lack of belief in ourselves.

A lack of belief in ourselves is nothing more than a self made prison for our abilities. I suffer from it in many areas of my life, and if you are going to be honest with yourself you probably do too. The great thing is everyone does to some extent, no one is immune.  Being aware of your self doubt and that of others makes a massive difference in our ability to be mindful of how we go about breaking ourselves down and building ourselves up.  In other words perpetuating the cycle of self deprecation or promoting the cycle of  self discovery.

Trust your self, trust your ability to make good decisions, if you get it wrong treat it like an opportunity to improve. We all get it wrong sometimes, it’s how we handle failure that makes the difference.  OK if you die because the situation involved a rather ill tempered bear it’s pretty much done, and it had nothing to do with your self confidence,perhaps your judgement, but regardless this is just nature at it’s best.  But if this is not the case and you live,  you gain new knowledge, new experience, new opportunity to build up your confidence, winning all round really.

I’m not saying it’s easy, oh my it can be hard, but I am saying that it can be done.  What you ‘say’ to yourself, how you treat yourself becomes your new reality and this has a direct impact on your self confidence.  If you are mindful of how you speak to yourself, the language you use to evaluate your experience and participation in events, the language you use to describe your treatment and those who are involved you will have made a huge stride in the direction of building your confidence becoming more connected with yourself and in doing so allowing fear to pass you by.

You can only get smarter by playing a smarter opponent – Mr Green, Revolver

If you haven’t seen the film Revolver yet, please do yourself a favor and watch it, also see the introduction again you have been warned.  Admittedly I have been banned from choosing films for movie night by my friends and more importantly my wife, but Jason Statham with long hair and some form of mental disturbance is a crazy trip, the whole film is, and it’s worth watching.

Getting back to the line, its pretty simple to understand, you only gain new knowledge and experience if you expose yourself to smarter more experienced people or more challenging situations. An interesting concept to play with is that you learn more from failures than success, so exposing yourself to a challenge should be approached with the idea of learning regardless of outcome, unless you are learning to handle venomous snakes, in that case add a healthy scoop of caution to the mix and the outcomes do have an impact.

It’s not just about finding people and situations, this ins’t fight club, it’s more about the challenge presented.  Challenging yourself or accepting a challenge outside of your comfort zone that might target your existing skills and beliefs, your principles and practices, your short comings and fears this is where the doorway to growth lies. Breaking our of your comfort zone, overcoming the initial fear and shock, using your brain and intuition to make good choices and actively seeking out the lessons,  this is the path to growth.  Be mindful that not every ‘smarter opponent’ is a humble teacher.  Many times the lessons are “hard learnt” and in some cases plain humiliating, you must seek out the lesson in order to grow and that responsibility lies with you and no one else, it is nothing more than a choice.

There is another side of this coin, sometimes you are the ‘smarter opponent’. You are the one with the opportunity to present the ‘challenge’ to others and it does come with a strange responsibility but also a profound opportunity. You are in a unique position to shape a mind or change a situation and this is an moment that should not be taken lightly.  Being mindful of your responsibility to turn a failure into a learning opportunity is what differentiates an opponent from a teacher and allows growth to take place.

There are no such things as problems Mr Green, only situations… – Avi, Revolver

Another one that at first seems like a plain as day statement. However it deals with a much deeper concept, the concept of self programming, also there is more long haired  Jason Statham craziness.

This line specifically deals with how situations are labelled and defined before they are explored. Does labeling a situation a problem make it a problem, or is it still just a situation that has yet to be defined? Does the situation need a definition in order to reach a conclusion? How does the labeling of a situation or a person change our reaction and approach?  How different would it be if they carried no label, would there be more or less emotion would there be better or worse logical reasoning applied? This all boils down to treating something for what it is not for what we perceive it to be.

We all program ourselves on a daily basis and labeling stems from our programming. Everything you think and say to yourself, everything said to you or about you that you believe, every experience and interaction you are part of becomes part of your program.  Your program forms the basis of your decision making framework, that framework is used to govern your life, it allows you to find comfort in identification.  This same program is designed to protect you and make sense of the reality you find yourself in.  Your mind and the program it runs is the single largest labeling machine in existence and everyone has one.  And herein lies the fundamental failure, our programs are a culmination of our collective experience and beliefs not necessarily our instincts and intuition, in short our gut feeling is many times left out of the process, exchanged for easily applied logic that reduces risk, we are but human.

You would be surprised, as I have many times been.  Solutions are found or difficult situations are defused by stripping away labels and tuning down the program for a few moments.  Just allow a situation to define itself, set it’s own conditions and principles and then, by all means, allow your programming to kick in. Draw from your vast collection of knowledge and experience, use your intuition and emotions and deal with whatever has presented itself to you.  At least now you are dealing with something that defined itself not something you labelled and decided was a giraffe, but was in fact a book shelf.

 

Choice is Power, Consequence is Opportunity, Challenge is Growth,  Connection to self is Strength, Programming is Key. 

If I could leave you with just one thing,  try to add less labels to yourself and others,  allow yourself to be mindful of your choices and your program will quickly start to change.