Daily Stance
/I have an experiment for you to try.
Pick a day this week and approach it with the mindset that everyone you encounter wants to help you.
Then on another day, approach the day with the mindset that everyone is out to get you or take advantage of you.
I think you and I would both bet that approaching the day with the belief that people are wanting to help you will result in a more pleasant day of experiences. You have probably already noticed noticed how life goes when you take a stance that people are kind versus a stance that people are difficult.
What if we all started assuming people are kind and helpful? What good might come from living with that daily stance?
Are you thinking it will result in good things, or did your brain quickly go to “prepare to be disappointed” or doubting that people want to be helpful?
I did this experiment yesterday before I called customer service at Southwest Airlines. I needed to change part of my reservation and it had the potential to become a complicated phone call. My dread was in thinking that they were going to be resistant to changing one leg of the reservation and would require me to cancel and rebook at a much higher fare. But after I had that negative thought, I experimented with the idea that maybe the person on the other end of the line wants to help me solve my problem and will be gracious in doing so. As soon as I heard the woman’s voice, I silently beamed her love in hopes that she would be kind and help me and I worked to be as kind and patient as I could be with her. It turned out that she was lovely and helpful and the switch was an easy change. I can’t know for sure why it went well, but it felt like my energy shifted before the phone call and maybe that helped the outcome. The call could have gone the other way too, but I’ve decided that it can’t hurt to try it infused with goodness first.
When I start a day feeling that people I encounter will be difficult or challenging, then I tense up, I take things more personally, I interpret things as disrespect, I anticipate that things will go wrong, and I assume a defense mode before the day even begins. This leads me to noticing how disagreeable people are and makes me more negative and the day spirals downward accordingly.
When I believe that people want to help me, I soften, I am more open, I am less defensive and more curious, I see the good in others, I give people the benefit of the doubt, I am pleasantly surprised by grace-giving people, I am more patient, and as a result, I seem to radiate more positive vibes throughout my day.
The difference between these days is an intentional change in my energy, my perceptions, my responses, and my vibration or frequency that I emit. It is mine to choose. I just forget to choose it sometimes. That’s why I’m writing this for us this week, so we all become more aware and intentional about this daily choice.
Some of us are conditioned to think the world is conspiring to help us and others are conditioned to believe the world is out to get us. But, no matter what we’ve be led to believe or taught, we can change this setting and reprogram our default mode. Neuroscience backs this up. We are wired with a negativity bias, but we are also gifted with neuroplasticity.
Our brains see potential negative outcomes ahead of time to keep us safe, but if we only see the negative, we often wind up as very grouchy people alone in the world. If we utilize our neuroplasticity (flexibility in new ways of thinking), we train our brains to balance the negativity with compassion, grace, resilience, and trust. Then the world begins to appear like a more loving place to be and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that we have a more loving human experience.
Maybe the most radical act as a human right now is to hold a worldview that people are inherently good and want to help others.
Currently, it feels like we see many messages that people are evil, but what if we all take the opposite stance and look for the good people who want to help?
Let’s check-in with a more felt sense of this:
What does it feel like in your body to expect bad things to happen?
What does it feel like when you expect good things to happen?
What might change for you if you believed people truly want to help you?
What are the core beliefs you have about people? Where did those come from - childhood, past wounds, messages you hear in our culture?
What feels safer - allowing people to help you or keeping your guard up assuming the worst? Based on your answer, explore that a little deeper with yourself - why does that feel safe and is it true?
When have you received an unexpected act of kindness? And, then what did that result in you doing or feeling?
What would it be like to live as if everything was happening for you, not to you?
Tuning into our daily stance is a continual practice, we have to work at it and keep it on our radar, front of mind. But, the more we do it, the easier it becomes and eventually we might look around and believe that we live in a beautiful world. Because we do.
Working on taking a loving daily stance with you,
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