Helping teens and adults navigate stress and uncertainty with more confidence | Training practitioners to join the mission
Sometimes your Best Move in Life is Admitting You Don’t Have All the Answers
Today’s video is about the idea that sometimes in life less effort on our part can lead us to more clarity and forward-motion.
I saw this recently after hanging out with a close friend of mine named Elaine. Elaine had been a chronic cigarette smoker for many years, and then one day she stopped. So I asked her how she quit.
Over the years she’d tried repeatedly to quit using will-power, restraint, fear tactics, and distraction – all the tricks she’d heard and read about, but nothing worked.
Until Elaine gave up on the strategies that involved effort, struggle, pressure, and discipline, and tried a different approach. And that approach did it. She quit that afternoon and hasn’t smoked since.
“What is unknown to us often appears complicated until it is known. Then it becomes simple.”
— Sydney Banks
What worked for Elaine, which I share about in this video, was the result of what I’d call a change of heart. And it doesn’t come from will-power, trying, or ‘doing.’ In fact it’s quite the opposite.
I see this phenomenon happen every day in my clients, friends, and family where someone struggles to find their way through a difficult decision, a big breakup, or overcoming a bad habit. Then one day they wake up with new clarity around the path they need to take. And they take it. All the complication and overthinking falls away.
They suddenly see a path, a way through, or a new idea, that they didn’t see before. This new path appears seemingly out of the blue, and brings a sense of confidence and certainty.
This is captured in the book The Enlightened Gardener Revisited by the late Sydney Banks: “What is unknown to us often appears complicated until it is known. Then it becomes simple.”
For Elaine, quitting smoking went from complicated to simple in a matter of moments. That power and potential lives in all of us. That’s what today’s video is about.
erika bugbee
I’m a global coach who works with teens, individuals, couples, and practitioners that are open and motivated to change.
