In today’s post, I deconstruct one sentence I wrote in the previous post; “Life has a funny way of bringing you opportunities that will make you step into yourself more fully.”
Life has a funny way of bringing you opportunities
While this is true, one slight problem is that many people fail to recognize these opportunities because they disguise themselves as crises, adversities and challenges. They’re also shrouded in uncertainty, and as humans, we’re not really big fans of uncertainty.
A study published in Nature Communications on this revealed a strong relationship between stress and irreducible uncertainty. Apparently, knowing that there is a small chance of getting a painful electric shock can be more stressful than knowing for sure you will be shocked [1].
But here’s the thing; there will always be uncertainty – it’s like the white noise that’s always humming in the background of this thing called life. So rather than spending a lot of time and energy trying to minimize uncertainty – sometimes by building walls around yourself – it’s more important to manage the anxiety associated with uncertainty.
“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door. You step into the road, and if you don’t keep your feet there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of he Rings
Make you step
Just because opportunities exist doesn’t mean that people actually take advantage of them. It’s much easier to withdraw rather than step into anything, and mostly the problem stems from a lack of self-confidence.
So forget having people stepping into themselves at all – let alone, fully. Again, this is related to uncertainty. Many of us withdraw because we’re uncertain about things working out so we’d rather not try. But a lot of times, you miss out on really great opportunities by failing to try.
So where does self-confidence come from?
You can’t pull it out of thin air. And no, you can’t 3D print it (not that I tried or anything).
But here are a few truths about self-confidence:
1) Confidence is the willingness to try because of a realistic expectation you have of succeeding at something given your level of competence and the risk involved. So the more time you spend doing something, the higher your level of competence becomes and you become more confident.
But what happens at t=0, when you’re faced with a new challenge?
2) Estimate where you lie on the competence-risk matrix, and start by tackling challenges with a high level of competence and low levels of risk.
Unfortunately, you’ll hear a lot about doing 30 Days of Rejection challenges where you’re pushed to do things with a high risk of rejection. The rationale behind it is it’s supposed to desensitize you from the feeling of rejection. But rejection always feels bad, and what really happens to most people is they become more risk-averse and self-conscious. Also, the feeling of rejection is bad, but you know what feels worse? Regret. Wondering, what if?
3) You never know until you know. I have to admit that nowadays, the only thing that drives me to try out new things is pure curiosity – I want to know if something I’ve heard was true, I want to know if things will work out or not, I want to know people and the treasure trove of knowledge they carry in their head, I want to know how stories will unfold. I just want to know.
4) The risk is always magnified in your head. A good way to ground yourself is to actually answer this question, “What’s the worse that can happen?”
A lot of times, the worse case scenario is not as bad as we imagine it to be. Besides, I’ve come to learn that things that don’t work out always make a good story.
Fully
‘Fully’ in this context means giving something your entire attention, and being present while you’re doing it. The problem with us is we equate busyness to productivity so we try to do a lot of things – maybe times at once – but there are costs to multi-tasking, both in terms of lost time when you try to switch from one task to another, and the cognitive load imposed by real-life multi-tasking [2].
You can never really appreciate the tapestry of the whole human experience without being present. This means;
Feel emotions fully.
Taste food fully.
Listen to others fully.
Simply live fully.
So yeah, maybe life does have a funny way of bringing you opportunities that will make you step into yourself fully, but the question is, will you grab those opportunities or let life pass you by?