“If I’m Enjoying My Life, Something Must Be Wrong.”
I was trying to get to the bottom of what a client was telling me when they gave me a hand and said that line. They’d been explaining the feeling they lived in most of the time, one that suggested a peaceful feeling was an unknown occurrence in their life.
Does it make sense to you to feel bad or guilty if the tone of your life becomes quiet, peaceful, or simple? Does it feel like something you need to deny yourself if you want to believe you’re being productive?
I was wondering what might happen if this client were willing to entertain the possibility that they could be simultaneously peaceful and productive. (I was also wondering just how far their mind would be blown if they knew a peaceful feeling would dramatically improve the quality of whatever they happened to be doing.)
If you still subscribe to the old “no pain, no gain” idea, the notion that a sense of peace and high performance go hand-in-hand is a tough one to swallow. I’m not sure why this tired old idea, which is based on a philosophy that says, “Life is a blisteringly difficult veil of tears, place of sorrow, piece of shit that has to be hard,” still has such currency. It’s a piece of “received wisdom” (quotes used intentionally) you can disprove for yourself, if you’re willing to entertain the notion that life doesn’t have to be that way.
It’s more than that. Life not only doesn’t have to be that way, life isn’t that way. We make it feel that way by believing good work requires us to feel stressed and rushed. If you’re doing work of a heavy physical nature, or if you’re an athlete training, that work can be hard and painful, and you you just have to push through it. But taking a physical example and applying it to a mental issue doesn’t always work.
You might as well say, “when I’m doing my work, or living my life, unless I feel as bad as I do when I’m running a marathon, or digging a ditch, I can’t get anything done.”
People do their best work when they’re at their best, not when they’re at their worst, feeling harried, hurried, stressed, and stretched.
A relaxed mind is a curious, flexible, creative, productive mind. This is when all humans are at their best, not when they feel they’re being chased by a pack of attack dogs.
It’s curious to me in several ways when I hear someone say, “I do my best work when I’m under a lot of stress.” It makes me believe this person doesn’t know just how much better their best work could be.
It’s also curious because it’s clear the person who made that statement doesn’t know where the stress they’re feeling is coming from. They’re likely to assume, as most of us do, that stress is contained in the circumstances of our lives. The circumstances of our lives are completely neutral. Stress can’t come from there. It can only come from one place: the thinking we have about those circumstances.
What if you could be easier on yourself, get more done, and enjoy the peace and well-being that you, like every other human were born with?
All that’s keeping that peaceful feeling away from you is your own harried thinking and how seriously you regard it. That’s really all it is, I promise.
Just let yourself entertain the idea that your best work comes from you when you’re feeling your best, not when you’re feeling stressed, and watch what happens.
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