Natural High, Natural Low - Avoid Mistakes With Both - Second Mix Episode 006

CS Lewis was a genius when it came to delving into human nature and calling out the rough spots in humans. Believing his “why” is up to you, but it's hard to deny his knowledge of emotion and motivation. It's impossible to deny that we all go through ups and downs. 

The interesting thing here is that whatever state we're in, we naturally think that we're going to stay in that state. And that creates tension for us, whether we're up or we're down. In fact, if I'm up and feel good about life, then when I get down, it's disappointing and I wonder, what did I do wrong? What happened? Or I blame someone else or something else for this down period that I'm going through. And when I'm down, I feel like I'm going to be in that state forever.

So I get even more down because it doesn't feel good to be there. It feels like I'm in this for the long haul. So in the end it looks like this:

When I'm, when I'm living in natural high, I think I'm going to be there forever. And when I fall down to a low, I say, “this sucks. I'm going to be here forever.” What we rarely take a hard look at is the natural occurrence of ups and downs in life. We're momentary creatures. The past doesn't really exist to us and neither does the future. So what we feel right now is all we feel. One of my personal development heroes. Jim Rohn, had a lot to say on the subject, but I want to narrow it down to a couple of really important lessons that I learned from him. He said that life is like the seasons and he compares each season in our lives 

So the spring is opportunity - planting the crops. The summer is adversity, protecting and defending  what we're growing. The fall is the harvest. And then the winter is the dark and downtime. We all have winters in our lives. Seasons where nothing seems to be working out. Life feels boring, or at least it feels unexciting. It feels unproductive and bleak. We have physical winters. We have emotional winters. This is the downtime in your life. And it doesn't necessarily line up with the winters that nature gives us. The frequency of the downtime is actually faster. The ups and downs, we feel are constant and they happen a lot faster than the actual season of winter. You can choose to be sad that a downtime is coming, or you can choose to be excited that an uptime is happening. That choice is yours and yours alone. 

When you're in a winter, instead of lamenting that you're in the middle of winter, you have the choice to use the winter to get better, to get stronger and to get wiser. So when you are in a winter, what I do is I read the books, take seminars, classes, work on my skills, work on my gifts. I take time to reflect on past wins past losses. During a winter, become a student of your own life. You can use the winter to improve. You can use it to grow, use it, to improve, use it to become more than you are. 

Or you could watch Netflix and eat potato chips and make excuses thinking of other reasons why your life is so hard. That choice is yours also. 

And this next thing from Jim Rohn comes from something he called his Ant Philosophy. It's a great philosophy. Someday, I will talk about the entire thing. But one thing ants do is they think winter all summer long. So the entire summer, they keep thinking, “we won't be here long.” We better get ready for winter the entire summer. Then they're out, collecting everything they need to get through the winter. Ants understand that now is temporary. And that winter is coming on. 

The reverse side of that is ants also think summer, all winter long.