Drop the Bags Bitch
Drop the Bags Bitch
River of Misery
This episode explores:
- the one skill that living the life you want depends on.
- A practice to develop and hone that skill
Book a session: https://calendly.com/gerdungmelinda/coaching-session
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Find out more about my work: www.melindagerdungcoaching.com
Book a session with me: https://calendly.com/gerdungmelinda/coaching-session
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Beat Provided By https://freebeats.io
Produced By White Hot
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Hey my friends. One of the things we all have in common as human beings is our fear of the unknown. The unknown terrifies us whether we want to admit it or not. We go to great lengths to avoid the unknown. We will tolerate huge amounts of pain even to avoid the unknown. For me, when I was contemplating leaving my marriage, the fear of the unknown played a huge part in me staying for as long as I did. My marriage might have been awful, but it was a known awful. It was predictable. Leaving was full of unknowns. How would I pay for a place to stay by myself? Would I be able to keep my chihuahuas? Would I ever find someone again? Will I die alone? Can I even make it on my own? And there was no way to know any of the answers to those questions. They were unknowns. So a lot of the time it felt easier to stay in the miserable known than to venture into the unknown. And logically, I knew that leaving meant the possibility of things being better. But I also couldn't know for certain that it wouldn't be worse either. And that fear kind of made it hard to make a decision. It was easier to debate with myself and desperately try to grasp for some kind of certainty than it was to plunge willingly into the unknown. And this is an evolutionary feature of our brains. We naturally fear the unknown because back in the day what you didn't know could literally kill you. If you wandered into a forest you didn't know you could get lost or you could stumble upon a vicious animal or a hostile rival tribe. Like this is a feature that contributed to our survival as a species. It comes from the most ancient part of our brain as opposed to the more recently evolved part of our brain that gives us things like reasoning and logic and all that. And sometimes people think they're defective when they find themselves frozen in place because of the fear of the unknown. But it is not a defect at all. It is a feature that is common to all humans. In fact, the lack of this feature would probably be the defect, like a sociopath or something. Nope, if you are scared shitless you are normal. Normal as it may be, it is still really frustrating. At least I find it frustrating. I have though found one antidote to this paralyzing fear of the unknown. And that is learning the skill to tolerate uncomfortable emotions. And that is a skill. Most people when they feel uncomfortable feelings, they try to do something to make them go away. They don't want to feel them. They avoid them whenever possible. Right? We'll go to great lengths to avoid the feelings that we don't like. But if you learn to tolerate even the most uncomfortable emotion, you become unstoppable. You become unflappable. The fear of the unknown doesn't stop you anymore because you are willing to feel the fear. You're willing to feel the fear and plunge into the unknown anyways. And this is a skill that I teach my clients and it is a skill that I am constantly working on myself getting better and better at. A few years ago, I got laid off from my job and that layoff coincided with a car accident. So I found myself at home, without an income, needing a new car, and having to pay medical bills, and also having to try and find a new job. And I had decided that I would take the opportunity to give myself a raise. I was going to ask for a salary that was $10,000 higher than the salary at my previous job. And it was scary to even think of that number because it was more than I'd ever gotten paid before and I didn't feel 100% sure that I deserve to make that much. But I was gonna go for it. I had decided. So the time came when I started getting interviews and the interviewer would ask what my salary expectations were. And I would tell them this new number and this was in the days of COVID. And I'm so glad these were phone interviews because every time I would say this number I would wince so hard and like dig my fingernails into my palms. Because it was so uncomfortable to just even say that this was my salary expectation. I had a lot of the jobs that interviewed me say that the number was too high that they couldn't pay that for this position. And so I would turn them down and say that it wasn't a good fit then. And it's so easy to just say this matter of factly now but at the time, it was terrifying. I had no income. I didn't know when I would find another job and I didn't even know for sure that I could get this higher salary that I was asking for. I was worried about how long I could stay unemployed. I was scared of losing everything that I had worked for-- all my savings, my house. It was fucking terrifying. And every time I would hear an interviewer say that it was more than they were willing to pay, I kept feeling self doubt. I kept feeling like maybe I was being outrageous. Maybe I should just accept whatever they are offering because at least I would have a job and I wouldn't have to be so worried all the time. The whole experience felt like absolute fucking ass. It was filled to the brim with uncertainty and all of the terror that comes along with that. And this went on for months. It went on as I kept having to pay bills without bringing anything in. It was intense. But I was committed to staying the course no matter what it felt like. At that point, I was in the habit of practicing feeling uncomfortable emotions and not trying to make them go away. I was building a tolerance for them. So that's what I did. I kept asking for the new salary and kept tolerating feeling like fucking death along the way. And this story does have a happy ending. I did end up finding a job that actually paid 15,000 More than I was even asking for. So $25,000 more than I had was being paid before. And I never would have gotten there if I hadn't been willing to feel like ass along the way, if I had just settled so that I wouldn't have to tolerate that extreme discomfort. But even worse than that, if I had settled it would have formed my view of what is possible for myself. It would have gone on to be so called evidence for myself that I couldn't ask for more. That I couldn't get more and I had to take whatever I was given and be grateful. It would have reinforced the behavior of settling and would have snowballed to me settling in other areas of my life. So often what keeps us from going after the jobs we want, the relationships we want, the life we want is the fear of the unknown. The lack of the guarantee of our success. Like how because you can't be guaranteed to find the love you want to have, it feels safer to just settle for whatever is readily available. But the only thing that 100% guarantees the lack of success is not trying in the first place. Sometimes the only thing between us and what we want in life is the ability to feel negative emotions. I have a mentor that calls the distance between where we are at and where we want to be the river of misery and I find that to be an incredibly accurate description. The only question that determines whether you will live the life you want is are you willing to traverse the river of misery without turning back?Without giving up? One practice that I was taught to increase your tolerance for negative emotions is to regularly put yourself in situations that will cause discomfort. I have a mentor who invented a challenge called the daily dare. She will make people do a month where every single day they have to complete a dare for the day of something that will make them incredibly uncomfortable. It might be singing and dancing in the aisles of the grocery store. It might be asking the waiter to comp your meal just because. Whatever is gonna make you want to crawl out of your skin and die. That's what you do every day for 30 days. And by the end of those 30 days there's nothing you can't do. You become an absolute fucking gladiator. And full disclosure, I have yet to make the full 30 days. I've made many days, but a full 30 I have yet to make. One day I will. I am determined. But I would invite you to try this for yourself. Maybe not a whole 30 days to start because it is really fucking intense. But try one dare. Try doing one thing that makes your skin crawl. And let me know how it goes. I would love to hear what you discover about yourself in doing your dare. If you want help, you can use the link in the show notes to book a session. Until next time, my friends be well.