Author: Blaz Kos
I firmly believe that everyone can be creative. If nowhere else, you can easily witness creative behavior in every single person when the time comes to make up a good excuse for not taking action or to face irrational fears. With no exception, we can all get so creative when it’s time to prevent ourselves from getting out of the comfort zone. There’s even an expression for such behavior. It’s called creative avoidance. You basically find every possible way to stop yourself from taking action. The subconscious goal of creative avoidance is to protect yourself from danger. But ironically, many times you are not protecting yourself, but rather stopping yourself from progress, growth and new wins. Creative avoidance can be the tough goalkeeper preventing you from entering a bigger league. It doesn’t make sense to invest your creative potential at avoiding your progress.
Milo of Croton was an ancient warrior who decided to carry a newborn calf on his shoulders. Day by day, for more than four years, he carried an animal on his shoulders. While people were laughing at him, the small calf slowly grew into an adult ox and Milo got stronger and stronger along the way. Don't you think that was an awesome idea? Every day, when Milo woke up, he lifted the calf, put it on his shoulders and carried it around all day. After four years, Milo was lifting and carrying around an impressively big ox. By then, people stopped laughing a long time ago, when they saw Milo’s muscles grow. That's how Milo became very famous Olympic winner. Do you wonder what Milo did in the end, when the ox was fully grown? Well, I invite you to read his story.
You view the world through your schemas. Schemas are mental structures providing a framework for representing some aspect of the world. They not only help you organize the vast majority of information in a manageable way, they also provide lenses for interpreting reality. Schemas are cognitive structures for screening, coding, and evaluating every stimulus from the environment. You do use schemas to organize your current knowledge, but they also provide a framework for further understanding – predicting what will or should happen in the future. They influence your attention and absorption of knowledge. They also represent your core beliefs and values. Schemas are like lines of code that run in your brain, giving you instructions for how to interpret things, feel about different events, react and, in the end, also predict the future. They create feelings, thoughts and lead you to certain decisions and actions.
All situations that happen to you in life have no inherent meaning. You are the one who signs a meaning, seeing a situation through a certain frame. With cognitive reframing, you can change the way you look at something and consequently change how you experience it. That kind of an approach enables you to implement the ancient wisdom that you can’t always control what happens to you, but you can certainly control how you react to different situations – no matter how tough your position might be. And that’s the ultimate power you always possess. If you want to change something, be it how you feel, how you do things or what you believe, the change always begins with you switching your thoughts and reframing how you see reality. Your thoughts about the situation that happened to you are always more important than the situation itself.
No matter how big or small a failure is, failing sucks. Period. It’s true that you can learn much more from failure than from success, and it’s true that every successful person went through a series of failures before reaching the top, but still … winning is sweet, and failing sucks. The problem with failure is that if it’s not managed properly, it can do serious damage to your life or potential. A big improperly managed failure can get you financially or emotionally bankrupt, stuck in the comfort zone forever, or even cause you to quit when success is just around the corner. That’s why I decided to write a (short) manual on how to properly deal with failure. In this article, you will learn all the important things surrounding failure and how to turn it into a big win.
