Naked Leader Week 847 – 11 November 2019

Time to Read: 42 seconds (The meaning of life)

 

 

Let’s do this one logically, stripping away the psychology jargon…

Our brain’s biggest role in life is survival – to keep us alive.

That’s very helpful of it – thank you.

In order to do that, it – you – ask yourself, every time something happens, what that something means. Every time, every day any event happens.

By doing this the brain helps us, and for the most repetitive things in our lives the brain will pass over the allocation of such meanings to the subconscious, so they become automatic.

All well and good.

Except…

This is not always helpful, because in this rush for meaning, if we are unsure what something means – e.g. words in an email – we will tend to defer to it being negative – psychologists tell us this is because of ‘survival instinct’.

Indeed, it’s not events in themselves that cause happiness or unhappiness in our lives, it is the meaning we give to those events.

Three stages to sort this:

1. No event, or word, or anything, has any meaning other than the meaning that you choose to give it.
2. This means that you are free to give anything and everything whatever meaning you choose – it is one thing we all have total and absolute control over.
3. Given 1 and 2, always decide that everything that ever happens, helps you, rather than hinders you, by asking the question ‘How does this event help me/us, move closer to achieving my/our outcome?’

And if an event really does hurt you, this approach at least puts you in a frame of mind to do something about it – not least, for example, by forgiving yourself. We know this in Naked Leader from our work with charities and people who have suffered in their lives.

A great example of this approach is given by David Festenstein, the subject of our last Leader Feature.

With my love and best wishes

David

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