The "Why Me" Problem - Mindset Trouble Is A Cycle Of Complexity - Episode 011

Our minds are always deceptive and leaning towards the negative. It's supposed to be this way. Here's how I learned to combat this enemy and rise up from the dirt. 

This is part of a series on getting through the cycles of complexity. If you want more information you can start at episode 10, but each episode will stand on its own two feet, and you’ll get a lot out of each one independently of the others. These are the principles that I’ve been learning, that have been dramatically changing my life for the last few years – and this podcast is for you AND for me. 

Life is full of complexity. Things aren’t always easy. You go to the post office to mail a letter, and too often there’s something wrong and you can’t mail it. You get the flat tire on the way to work. You try to move some furniture in your house and it just doesn’t fit. And these are the easy ones. I used to think it was me. I called myself the anomaly. I’d say “Every time I try to do something that should be simple, some wrench gets dropped in the gears, and life gives me trouble.” Now, it wasn’t really EVERY TIME. And it also wasn’t just me being an anomaly. But these things happen often, and they happen to everyone. Oddly enough, most people think it only happens to them. It happens to us all. 

To get through these Cycles of Complexity that life throws at us, it helps to understand this method of forward movement. Ethos, Intention, Efficacy, Agency, Adversity, and Elevation. 

I’m focused today on Ethos, which is a good thing because I’ve just had an 8 week struggle with this. 

Your Ethos is your compass and your steering wheel. Your character and your operating manual. It defines who you are. 

It is determined by several things. 

Your mindset, Your character

Your input, what is currently influencing you?

your patience to wait for incremental change (the compound effect)

Your stillness (patience, your relaxed effort – before I found the Cycles of Complexity I was going to call this book Relax and Struggle)

Mindset has been in my thoughts recently, because over the last couple of months I began to see that I’ve been letting some poisonous things slip in. I want to begin there. 

Over the last couple of years, I have dramatically changed my mindset – I’ve changed most areas of my life. But for the last 8 weeks or so I actually felt like I was on a decline. 

Your brain is constantly striving to reach for the negative. It’s an inherited trait that we all have – we’re always looking for danger, looking for the downside. It’s a survival mechanism, built in so that we don’t get eaten by the monster. It’s an incredible tool that we have at our disposal so we can continue as a species. And there is NOTHING wrong with that. 

But in the relatively safe society we’re living in, that part of our brain still operates, and we create problems that don’t really exist. We see social conflict as a danger, the new monster, and we’re scared of it. Even if we tell ourselves that the worst that can happen is a bad emotion, we still experience the same fear. This can be detrimental to our mindset, and the whole mechanism goes haywire even in the absence of physical danger. 

We live in a normal negative. In the absence of our own effort towards the positive, our mindset will favor the fear of monsters. 

All of life is the upward struggle against this downward pull of the normal negative. I’ll be talking about this a lot more when I get to the episodes on adversity, because this is part of the internal and external adversity that we all deal with.