Whether it’s in business, during a meeting, in your personal life, or even a passing comment from an acquaintance –have you ever had someone say something that you took really personally?
Of course you have…
It’s part of the human condition to perceive the world through our own lens, but unfortunately it’s not always helpful – or accurate.
You see everyone is operating in their own world. My lens is different from your lens. Your perspective is different from my perspective. (More about this below but we think very differently).
So what do you do when someone freaks out on you?
How can you go along in your day with grace, joy and happiness instead of having this incident completely ruin it?
Well, today I’m going to tell you one of the simplest, most powerful statements I use in my own life to help me stay calm and collected when big or small incidents happen in my life.
I’m human too, remember. I’m no superman. I have lots of things that bug me. Sh*t happens but here’s how I deal with it. If it helps you, then AMAZING. If not, that's okay too, but it sure as heck helps me.
The statement is “Everything is neutral.”
Simple, right? Everything is neutral – until we assign meaning to it.
Here’s how the process works:
When an incident occurs, we look at it with our filters, our conditioning, our views, and we turn it from neutral into whatever we think it is.
So we turn a neutral situation into something completely new and different. We make an assessment, adjustment, or give it meaning, and so on. And it becomes either a good thing or a bad thing. A positive thing, or a problem.
The fact is, there is no problem until you interpret it, give it meaning and judge it.
Only then does it become a problem – for some of us.
How do you know this is true? Because what is a problem for one person is not a problem for another person.
True or true?
What is good for one person is not necessarily good for another person.
Instead, we are the ones who give it meaning.
Is it good or bad? Well, it depends on who you ask. Is it right or wrong? Again, it depends on who you ask.
All of these things are not outside of us, they're all inside of us. This is one of the hardest things to grasp; this is enlightenment.
When you can understand that there's actually nothing going on outside of you except for you putting your filters and your views out there, and that then they become you…then you realize that nothing is simply the way it is until you give meaning to it.
Instead, everything is only how you look at it.
So someone says, “Look how pretty that outfit is,” and the other person says, “What? I think it's kind of ugly.”
Who's right?
One person says “The team played great tonight, didn't they? They just came up a little short.” The other person says, “What? The team played terrible, they lost.”
Who's right?
Someone says, “That is such an awesome song.” The other person says, “What? It's too slow, it's boring.”
Who's right?
Is it the song that's the problem? No, there's no problem in a song. The only one that's a problem is the person who says it's a problem.
Again, I am talking about problems beyond survival. I'm not going to get into the semantics of someone who has no food to eat and they're starving or if someone is sick. I'm not going there.
I'm just going to say, everything beyond survival is not a problem until you get there.
So remember, everything is neutral—and only we can decide how we define the events and experiences that happen in our lives.
Once you realize this, nothing will be able to hurt or hinder you—because you get to decide how it affects your life.
Good or good?
Have you ever found yourself assigning meaning to an event? How do you stay neutral when this happens? We want to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
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