Winning In Spirit When Logic And Your Senses Say You’ve Lost

At one time or another, each of us has faced, is facing or will face a situation in which we hit a wall and don’t see how to get past it. It could be a challenge in business or career, or it could be a challenge in personal life. For example, you have what you think is a great service or product concept, but have not yet been able to generate the revenue or other financial support to build it into a viable business; and time and resources are running out. Or you’re unable to solve a technical, quality, customer service, or staffing problem and the situation has become critical. Or you have lost your job or business and have been unemployed for many months. It’s at such times that we need to reach beyond the evidence from logic and our senses, and find the strength to persevere, and to open our minds to creative new possibilities.

It requires belief that such options are possible even though you can’t perceive them logically or with your senses. A suspension of disbelief is needed. All of the negative emotions and attitudes that have accumulated as a result of frustration with the problem or problems must be overcome. You overcome these by looking closely at them; observing them; sensing them fully. As you do this, their sense of inevitability will dissolve, and you’ll realize that though the facts may not change, your emotional reactions to those facts are not inevitable. You can cling to those emotions and accept them as uncontrollable forces that imprison you, or you can let them enter your awareness and then pass on. With practice, it becomes a matter of your choice.

These emotions such as frustration, helplessness, anger, hopelessness, are actually the seeds of the solution to your problem. They are your internal representation of the external challenge that you face. Getting a handle on that internal representation can give you leverage to solve the external problem. I recognize that the natural tendency is to want to continue to obsess about the external problem, and to think that the way to make these negative feelings go away is to first solve the external challenge. But it’s more likely to work in the reverse order.

In the SOPPHIA coaching model, there are 7 Dimensions of Wisdom; seven areas of skills or competencies that lead to success. The last of these, represented by the ‘A’ in SOPPHIA, is Assurance or faith. It’s the ability to seemingly reach beyond yourself when your resources are exhausted, and find the motivation to continue and to achieve success. This assurance or faith may be religious or non-religious, and can be defined and experienced in any number of ways; but it has a quality that defies logic and the evidence of the senses.

You may have a particular activity that helps you to call on this additional resource. It may be meditation, prayer, a walk in the woods, exercise or something else. For me it can be all of those things, but the primary activity is writing; a process of finding, bringing into awareness and articulating, things of which I was previously unaware. Find what works for you.

There are three main aspects to this process of activating assurance or faith. The first is to change your emotional and mental state. As you engage in this process through your particular activity, you’ll become calmer, less anxious, and begin to feel more at peace, or assured. Your external situation hasn’t changed, but your emotional reaction to it has changed. Once you enter this more peaceful state, the second aspect of the process is activated. This is the generation of new ideas. You’ll begin to see possible options of which you were previously unaware. These may involve small steps towards solving your external problem, or they may be more dramatic. This leads to the third step of assurance; which is to pursue the ideas while retaining a positive emotional state. Some of these ideas will bear fruit, and some will wither. The key is to not allow this winnowing process to push you back into your previous negative emotional state.

You’ll win in spirit and ultimately in your life situation if your continue to engage in this process of activating assurance or faith; to change to a positive emotional state, to generate new ideas, and to pursue these ideas through trial and error while retaining a positive emotional state.

I’m Dr. Bernard Brookes, you can contact me for business of life coaching at www.sopphia.com