Transformative Management Consulting for All Your Worth

Lonely battle

When going gets tough, and when we feel pushed to the corner, our sense of behavioral desire shifts to instinctive level fighting and struggling for survival. We often lose focus and make an ill informed judgment in the process. We ask many questions to ourselves that we hadn’t asked before. We easily lose our way and life gets out of control in many ways.

The worst part is that, what we are going though in our lives is essentially a battle of our own, to the one who is going through it, even with the best support of loved ones in our life. They are onlookers in your life when you view it from your own place. They have their own lives to live. They cannot live your life on behalf of you. You cannot have them to live theirs for you.

You know it very well, even your children, wife, husband, mother or father get sick, even through you could do anything in the world for them, you cannot sick for them on behalf of them. All we can do is be there for them while we live our own life. If that wasn’t hard enough, the cruel reality is that somehow we all are going to need to find the way ourselves to get back on our feet in the end, without waiting someone to come along to get us out of trouble. We are going to need to pick up the pieces, gather ourselves together, and move on with living our lives.

Survival Instinct

Question comes down to how we are going to sustain ourselves without breaking down in the process when we are going through hard times? How are you going to manage those aches, pains, cramps, loneliness, a sense of disappointment, confusion and all that keep you stay awake at night without driving yourself to the breaking point? How are you going to get you out of the bed in the morning when things get too hard to cope and you don’t seem to have anything to look forward to? What are you going to do when you feel like there’s no hope and life seems so meaningless? How are you to going to face the day when you wake up with a heavy heart?

We all experience life differently. The things that can be hardly anything worthwhile to think about can be a life and death matter to someone else. What may seem like a light-hearted frivolous act can be a source of pain and suffering in others. We cannot simply generalize our individual experiences and put them in a box and label them. The experiences that each and everyone of us is going through remain essentially neutral to others, however we may say we understand them. We simply don’t quite get it until the particular experience become one of our own. Likewise struggles attached to the life we are living.

Try to figure out what’s caused what’s going on in anyway you like. Try to analyze how you feel and what you think till the end of the world. Whatever is going on and however it may look on the surface, however way our behavioral performance, emotions and mentality may disguise it, if we can cut through to the core of our struggle, we struggle because we feel our very existence is threatened. Take away all the layers, it all comes down to our desire to survive. We struggle to stay alive. We struggle more because, underneath of our struggles, there is an enduring natural urge to survive and come through within us.

When life is taken away, nothing else matters anymore. Being alive gives us all the reason for what we do. If we are not there in life, there is nothing we can do about it. Life is not death. Being alive is not being dead. Life and death cannot stand in the same place at the same time. We can spend the entire life chasing the reasons of life intellectually and intelligently, but our very own existence knows better:The very fact that being alive matters most above and beyond all reasons.

Struggle is simply a mirror image expression of our natural instinctive desire to come through and make it. Instead of being turned off by the unpleasant and negative aspects of our struggles, we need to honor the mysterious powerful natural survival instinct in us, turn our perspective around and become a partner and an alley to our struggle in order to support one of very distinctive traits of being a live being. What we need to know is how to get through the times of struggle, so we can make it.

Resources to fall back on

We need a contingency plan, on which we can fall back, to get through hard times, by working on resources which are already at our disposal, and under our control.

Contingency plan is about tapping into resources within, by pulling our characteristic and personality strength together, so that we can stand the test of time and continue to be on the journey of life.

Many ways to look at it, but maybe one of them could be like this. Your car, which is your life, has been taken out for a spin, in top gear at top speed at full throttle. You are the driver. Forget about for the moment, the exciting exhilarating fun part of it, when it does the lap in the controlled environment and safety measure put in place.

Look at, for now, the other side. What could happen when things go wrong at that high speed in top gear at full throttle doing the lap on the road, wet and oily, in uncontrolled environment with full of uncertain and unpredictable danger across the terrain? Tough times will be like this.

A split second misjudgment and loss of concentration will see you off the road with your car pretty quickly, no matter how good a driver you are. Impact will be truly felt all around. It won’t be a nice sight either.

(This principle guideline works equally well in business. It’s a matter of modulating the scale of exercise in a more business like term, if that sounds more tasteful.)

Tools of Survival

First and foremost important thing we do in a dangerous driving condition is reducing the speed.

Resource tool #1: Change gear and Slow down

- We have to slow down our pace deliberately to survive. It doesn’t matter what the cause or reason of difficulty might be.

- Unless we survive we can’t get there. Getting there matters.

- Reduce the speed in your lifestyle and pace yourself.

Once our car is brought to a low speed, no matter how slow we go, we can still get there if engine doesn’t stall. The size of engine won’t matter. How good an output it produce won’t matter.

Resource tool #2: Assurance of Evergreen contract

- Your heartbeat is the sound of engine running of your life. It is the evergreen contract you are born with.

- Put your hand over your heart and keep still. The rhythm of heartbeat you are hearing is an indisputable evidence of you that has survived the storm in your life.

- As long as your heart beats, your engine, the contract of your life rolls over automatically.

- Nothing else can be more convincing than your heartbeat to give you reason to get on with life. Don’t tear off the evergreen contract which is your birth right.

When we keep ourselves on the road, we will need to watch fuel consumption to go the distance we need to cover.

Resource Tool #3: Energy conservation mode

- Gather what is left of you, physically, emotionally and mentally. You will need to build up the strength to keep going on with life, and to keep up with what lies ahead.

- Don’t look for what you don’t have at that time, ignoring what you already have, however desperate you would feel in a tight bind.

- Don’t fritter away your energy. Size up what’s left in the tank, and save up what is already in your possession, both tangible and intangible.

- Redirect whatever energy source you have at your disposal to where it needs most.

In order to ensure fatality and injury free safe driving on the road, we are required to take a break, recommended every 2 hour.

Resources tool #4: Take good care of yourself

- This is not about becoming a self-centered person who tries to look after one’s interests and pleasure on ‘number one first’ basis in the face of stress.

- Be with yourself and look around your life. It is about being genuinely appreciative of your being, and the existence of being you are.

- You can come to terms with how you stand with your life, what is important to you and your life, what you cannot live without and what you can take with you.

- Find the way to let out your internal pressure in a healthy way. If you feel like it, cry a river. Don’t talk yourself out of it. That’s perfectly okay. Let it all out. And stop and wipe off tears when you feel enough is enough.

- Recharge your physical, emotional and mental battery with refreshing air of attitude, thoughts and understanding.

Once we are back on the road after a break, we look out for a place to fill up the gasoline and a workshop for emergency breakdown.

Resources tool #5: Take out insurance policy

- Don’t’ try to figure it all out on your own. Take out insurance policy; the support system in our lives that are readily available. Seek help, the right one. We are never alone. Don’t be afraid of asking help when most needed. You will be amazed at the genuine support you never thought you had.

- Don’t look for company loves misery. They are going to keep you at sickbay.

- Keep looking in the right place in the right direction that will get you out of misery and take you to the better place.

- Give yourself reassurance that you are going to be okay, that everything is going to be fine. Don’t give into a fleeting emotion or fickleness of mind’s play that get you down.

Every now and then, we consult the map or a compass to get a bearing on the direction in order to make sure we are headed in the right direction.

Resources tool #6: Follow the sun

- Keep walking towards where you are going to go. Leave the darkness and cold behind you. Don’t look back. Keep going forward towards sunny place.

- When things in life are not going easy and comfortable as we expected they should, we sometimes feel as if something is out to get us. That’s definitely not the case. Don’t lose faith in life.

- When in doubt, when you lose hope, gently lay your hand over your heart and hear your heart beating softly and quietly. No matter how hard it seems, don’t give up. There’s always something in life that keeps you there.

You’ve got a life-time evergreen contract and an insurance policy of your life in order. Nothing to fear. Don’t despair. You will get there.

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