highly sensitive power

What’s your first response to a setback? How do you handle bumps in the road, big or small? Hand-wringing, raging, tossing blame around, and giving up don’t get you very far. At best, they’re like running in place. At worst, indulged in habitually, they take you backwards, away from solutions and resolutions.

Here’s a radical strategy: think.

Feelings give us useful information. They alert us to problems. They provide crucial feedback about the journey. But thought steers. Take the time to tune in to the situation with your thinking cap on. Get logical. Reason with yourself. List the pros and cons. Make the case for and against. Reach out in new directions. Plan an experimental foray.

Don’t just think you know. Think until you know.

Actually take time out to use your mind to focus on the issue at hand. Do whatever it is that helps you think. Write it all out. Talk out loud to yourself. Take a walk with a pencil and a scrap of paper in your pocket. Sit in a corner of a quiet library. Make a point of setting feelings aside long enough to engage in a spot of real, hard-core, tell-it-like-it-is, clarifying reasoning.

Convince yourself you know what you’re doing.

{ PEP TALKS deliver a bracing blast of GRACE }

Flickr photo: Contemplation, by Just a Temporary Measure.