I love reading, though admittedly not for the sake of reading. I don’t really know if I have a type of genre that I prefer, but I do know that I am often drawn to the exact book that I need to read at any point in my life. I don’t know if everyone else feels this way, but for me I see books as the universes way of delivering important messages to me. At the moment, I am reading a book that was given to me over 3 years ago by a dear friend when I was successful in taking over her role as she moved away. The book had been given to her by our manager whom we both respect and admire for all the insights he has given us. Up until now, I’ve never been drawn to reading it, I understand why that is now. The book is all about how to understand and perform under pressure and right now is the peak of pressure in my life and in the world! So, it’s very timely.
I’ve only read a few chapters, but already it’s been incredibly helpful in enabling me to better understand my own thinking patterns and behaviours, which ultimately don’t expand me and or help me progress in my life. Progression for me is not the same as success and achievement. It’s more so aligned with growth and evolution, whereby I am moving like the waves and not stagnant like a pond. It’s what I have come to value over perfection, though daily reminders of this are necessary as my nature will always be a perfectionist.
One of the current take away’s of the book is the reminder of how strong our cognitive appraisals are in enabling us to manage our experiences of the world. For those who may not be familiar with the psychological term, cognitive appraisal is basically the process we undergo in defining what is happening to us or around us, resulting in how we interpret and perceive the world. We have control over the cognitive appraisals that we apply in our lives, which ultimately means we have control of how we experience the world.
I have been brought up in an environment where I’ve always been encouraged to be happy in life, but I personally don’t believe that happiness is the aim and actually it’s a very narrow and suppressed view of life. My personal belief is that happiness is one of the experiences we can have, but as humans we have a lot of complex experiences of which some are socially deemed as unpleasant. But that doesn’t mean that we need to avoid them and or label them as negative experiences. When you understand that joy, laughter, tears, sadness, anxiety, fear, excitement, anger, disappointment etc. are all parts of our human experience and that they are all powerful in their own right, you don’t spend your energy on resisting them or suppressing them. Instead, you spend your energy on observing them, understanding them and then applying positive and healthy cognitive appraisals to them so that you can utilise them to further progress in you life, one step at a time.
When everything started to go downhill last year, I felt the pressure and it felt very heavy to carry around because it was multifaceted. But then, post Covid19 lock downs, I was forced to pause and whenever I have time on my hands, my nature is to reflect and get into introspection. During this time, I realised that the pressure wasn’t going to go away externally. If anything, if I wanted to wait for the external pressures to be elevated, I would be waiting for a long time. So, I decided to work on my cognitive appraisals and how I view these experiences instead. I could interpret everything as devastating, heart breaking, soul crushing or whatever you want to label it. But, instead I choose to recognise it as an unfair experience that is shared by majority of the world in some shape or form, as a drop in the ocean of my entire life and as an opportunity to further heal and expand myself, even if it it was in small measures. This doesn’t mean I don’t get anxious, or that I don’t have moments where I feel despair or sadness. I feel all those things and some days they’re harder than others. But, I recognise that I can either go further into the dark rabbit hole that is my anxiety and sadness, or I can hold them with love and compassion until they pass. I can view them as alarms that are indicating that I need to take more care of myself or I can view them as the final outcome of how I will “have to” experience life.
We each have a choice to make and sometimes these choices will be more more difficult and will require more grit than we think we have. But ultimately, the cognitive appraisal we apply to our lives will determine how rich or empty we feel. There is already enough happening in the external world for to have to come to terms with, the least we can do is work on the internal experiences so that we can detox ourselves from narratives and beliefs that don’t serve us.
One breath at a time, one step at a time, one day at a time.
Love Always,
M
Souloom™ 