Inquisitive Report 29/52

Week Ending August 17th, 2018

Content Covered: The opposite of joy is not sadness but fear.

We are our biggest critic; we’re guilty of self judgment, self pity and sometimes even belittling ourselves. At times, I’m guilty of it too, after all it’s much easier to find what is wrong, what is lacking and what doesn’t work than to believe in what does and what can.

Believing takes faith, and faith, as we discussed last time, is our ability to find the strength to let go of our fear of uncertainty; it’s about finding courage to lean into the possibilities that things will work out and that we are enough.

The most common method of avoiding the pain associated with faith is to lower our expectations. The logic follows: if I care less about the outcome, then if things don’t work out at least it won’t hurt me.

The problem with this approach is that when we lower our excitement and don’t share our expectations with our close friends and family – it doesn’t just take the pain away when something doesn’t happen in our favor, it minimizes the joy when it does.* The tradeoff of certainty is never truly engaging with experiences wholeheartedly.

And therefore, the opposite of joy is not sadness but fear.** When we shy away from believing we will achieve what we desire and sharing our hopes, dreams, and wants– we are allowing the fear of uncertainty to win.

Equally, the negative downside of not sharing our expectations with trusted others, is that we don’t have a support system for when things don’t work out. However, when we share the excitement, anxiousness and / or anticipation of the goal that we are working on, we allow connections to be strengthened, joy to be multiplied and buffers to be created.

Personally, I’ve found that this is a much better model of approaching the world than staying in fear of “what-if.”

I wonder what do you choose?

*Thoughts from Tasha Eurich’s book Insight

**Quote from Brene Brown’s book Wholehearted Living