Are you feeling under pressure? Does it sometimes feel like your head is going to explode with the number of thoughts and tasks racing through it?
You are not alone. It is very common for the mind to become so full of our thinking that we struggle to have any mental clarity or peace of mind. This makes decision-making seem ever more urgent, yet ever more difficult. It leads to exhaustion, yet often results in a lack of sleep, as the mind whirs and leaves us unable to fall to sleep or suddenly wide awake in the middle of the night.
Photo by Pat Gaines
Pressure from the boss, pressure from your spouse, pressure from your kids, pressure from your finances. It all feels very real, and for many people, until they have insight about the true nature of our experience, they are left in a place of mental overwhelm, often warring with themselves and with others.
David’s story
“Before I experienced War to Peace, I was in conflict with my boss and I couldn’t stand the sight of her. She was unfair, she didn’t listen to me and she just kept piling the pressure on me. I was stressed and when I got home, I took it out on my wife and kids, which left me feeling terrible and led me to hating my boss further. I felt like I’d tried everything, but nothing made a difference and it was even affecting my ability to sleep at night.
I was pretty skeptical about a workshop called “War to Peace” and wondered what on earth it could achieve in just one day. I was very pleasantly surprised. Aside from learning how to quickly change how I felt, which is a resource I now draw on regularly, I gained insight about the nature of my thinking and how I was the person creating my experience at work.
That’s not to say that things became different over night or that my boss is a changed woman, but what I have found is that I am experiencing her differently. I have more understanding of her motivations, because I realised that by being at War with her, I couldn’t listen and wasn’t interested in what was going on for her. Even though I often don’t agree with the way she handles things, learning to be at Peace with her has allowed me to have much more clarity at work and I take things less personally. And though my workload hasn’t changed, I don’t feel anything like the pressure I felt before the workshop. Best of all, the constant mental whirring has stopped and I can be present and enjoy my family when I get home.”
There’s more good news
There is no pressure in life. At all. Ever. Even when it feels like it. It is all self-created through thought. How we think about something determines our experience of it. Unless we have a thought about something, there is no feeling; it is not in our consciousness. As soon as we have this realisation, we see that all that ‘pressure’ out there is only as real as we make it in our thinking.
With this realisation, that we are the creator of all our experiences, all this unnecessary thinking tends to fall away. We realise it is us who is doing it to ourselves (not the circumstances or people outside of us) and it’s no longer required. In the space that opens up, where worry and anxiety once resided, new thinking, ideas, creativity and clarity come forth.
Accessing your mental clarity easily
If you ask around, you’ll probably find that people will tell you that their best ideas or solutions to a problem happened: “when I was in the shower”, “when I was on the golf course”, “whilst I was driving”. They were all doing anything but looking at the problem or situation that needed addressing.
Realising that we are the creator of our experience provides us with the power to minimise the time we spend feeling anxious, stressed or hard done by. We can become the observer of our state of mind, rather than the victim of our negative feelings.
Over to you
- Begin noticing your warring, stressful thoughts – and stop listening to them. We do not have control over what comes into our head, but we can still see that they are just thoughts, nothing more or less.
- Instead of trying to change your thoughts (or fix your circumstances or the person you’re finding difficult), just become an impassive observer of your thoughts. For example, you might observe yourself in this way “oh there I go again blaming my boss (family member, neighbour, ______ fill in your own blank) for how I’m feeling.” Or “Ah – I’m having those stressful thoughts again. Glad I noticed those and caught them before they fooled me into believing them.”
Give it a go, remember not to take your warring, stressful thoughts too seriously and do let us know how you get on.
Could you, or someone you know, benefit from War to Peace®?
If you, or someone you know, could benefit from learning more about how to remain effective and untriggered at work and at home, consider War to Peace®. These workshops can be held in your workplace and away from it. Spaces for our next public course that anyone may attend can be booked here:
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