Strength of our minds make us who we are

We all have been there at least once in our life and probably many times in our life, where we have been challenged to confront situations we have always feared facing. Situations, which make us weak to our knees and make us nerve wrecked to our worst forms. As a natural response to it, we have an option of either running away from the situation where we make scenarios and find use cases of not being able to tackle it in the ‘right way’. Mostly, this happens as we have been maybe thinking too much about the ‘right way’ and due to the anxiety of not doing it right, we sometimes backout or hold back to our self-made scenarios.

“There are two ways of solving a problem: Face it or run away. What we choose defines who we are”

Who is responsible for the above behaviour? Maybe your external environment? Maybe some of your known people who have supposedly not been behaving the ideal way. Maybe the door which remained open and hence your dog barged out of the house or maybe the maid’s fault that she could not catch hold of the dog. This way we usually keep on blaming others for the havoc created and we wear a hopeless and helpless attitude which helps us easily skip from the situation. But, what do we gain out of the whole situation? We end up not solving the problem, always cribbing about it and feeling unequipped because of external factors

Another way to deal with the same situation is to empower one’s mind to find a solution to the problem. As stated in ‘Law of Subconscious Mind’ by Dr Joseph Murphy, we can wire our passive mind state to think in a way which works in our favour of developing a warrior’s attitude to face a situation. Our minds are a storehouse of thoughts,memories,facts and emotions all of which we combinedly state as ‘data’ which if we utilise as a tool coming handy in different scenarios can be called as ‘knowledge’. Now you must be wondering how to make our passive mind states active? Well, this involves a series of sessions with oneself where we educate ourselves about the attitude which would help us in any situation. Whenever faced with any inconvenient or uncertain incident, always try to place yourself in one of the following:

1. What did I feel when I encountered the situation?
2. What did I do with the feeling? Was it taking me towards solving it?
3. If not, what was the counter-action to change the situation and feel better about it?
4. Who all are responsible for the situation? Can I change their attitude?
5. If not, then can they help me improve the situation? If yes, then how?
6. If no, then why am I cribbing about those people or situations?
7. What can I do on an individual level to handle the situation?

If you end up answering these questions in a sequence or even one of these questions, you would find yourself in a more clarified and sorted mind state than before. To make happen the last answer to the last question, you would have to take some time to ponder upon the following:

1. Can your weaknesses become your strength?

If you go by dictionary, Weakness if defined are qualities of a person which makes a person feel a little less equipped to perform his best in a specific circumstance and ‘a situation’. Did you notice why I emphasized the word ‘situation’? It might be because the same attribute of your personality which would turn up as a weakness would be your strength in another situation. For eg, the fact that you are easily distracted by squirrels in your classroom is a weakness in your study time, whereas it is your strength if you have to go out on a trek with your classmates. This nature would help you explore nature to its best. A very beautiful talk by David Rendall explains this precisely through his own life story.

So, the point to focus over here is to identify where and how we can utilise our weaknesses as our strengths. In the above situation, you would have to learn to overcome your weakness and maybe develop the strength of being more focussed on the active state. So accordingly to handle a tough situation, some weakness may or may not become handy to find a solution.

1. Strength doesn’t appear by escaping from the situation always

Strength of a person is tested when he is tested to remain in a certain environment which might not be conducive to your mind state, but you still are able to figure out a solution to handle it in a way it doesn’t affect you. There are no specific doables here but certainly don’ts which would help you decide the ‘workable direction’ for you. The doables can be any productive deviation which makes you ‘do your thing’ without clouding your mind with frustration and hatred towards the situation.

“Being in the fire and not getting burnt defines a shield, not skipping from the fire and developing a shield.”

Now, this doesn’t mean that in every situation one starts to stick to the current situation, even when there is a clear cut instance of turning to another path or finding an alternative solution. This is only when you don’t have an alternative solution and still one is trying to find your way out

1. You can discover your strength when you face a situation alone

In a situation where you have literally scumbbed yourself to sweat and you feel like crying on someone’s shoulder, you would as an immediate relief want to find another person who can calm you down and show you a path. Now, doing this is healthy till some extent where your loved ones are giving you reassurance of things becoming fine but looking forward to them to seek an answer to your problems would make you feel dependent on others for figuring out ways. A middle ground between falling prey to others’ support and comfort and feeling helpless being all alone is to do both of these in a moderation to an extent. What I mean over here is to practice a good Emotional intelligence. Possessing a good EQ would help you realize your emotions, share it with others in a healthy way, so that we don’t brood ourselves to irritating others and training our subconscious minds to be able to not find out more solutions. Mark Manson unfolds it in a comic way in his book ‘The subtle art of Not giving a Fuck’.

“Strength lies in being able to face a situation with trials and tribulations guiding you to your way”

Developing a good EQ, sharing problems with others has been scientifically proven to help in our decision making skills. The strength to act like a warrior who crafts a strategy to fight tough times has to come from within us. Others can only do so much to make us feel better. Training our minds to not ‘look out’ for a solution from people who have themselves been strong in such situations is the primary thing. Taking inspiration from them to see through the solution is a way out, but expecting others to come and solve a problem would make you dependent on others and become ‘strong in true sense’.

Strength is a very important trait for survival in changing times. Michelle Obama is a living example of possessing the below essential traits guided by strength. Other traits of patience, perseverance and determination for leading a good life state can only be achieved when one possesses a strong personality in different circumstances in life.

I hope this article would help you find your strength. I would be covering another blog of how I found inspiration to write this article through my own life instances. I would like to cover a few of concepts mentioned in this article in my other writings. Stay tuned :)