What is that supposed to mean?
Whether you are seeking to live your life more effectively or lead a company more powerfully or pursue your creative interest with more passion, you need to tap into the truth buried in uncomfortable realities that the human mind tends to skip right over.
That’s understandable, right?
Who wants to dwell on negatives?
The problem is that skipping over the tough, complicated, even anxiety-provoking stuff
will deprive you of at least three kinds of important knowledge:
What trouble might you have in bringing your goals and plans to fruition? What doesn’t “fit” with the optimistic view of your project or company or relationship or different path forward in life? To fix these things, you must SEE them, not be in denial about them.
What problematic aspects of this situation reflect similar situations you have encountered in the past? Often, when we’ve lived through trouble spots, we don’t want to recall them. But that can condemn you to repeating the past, rather than learning a lot from it and overcoming it (in a big way).
What difficulties do you accept as realities and how can they galvanize your courage and commitment to solve them?
Whether you are the founder of a new venture, a parent trying to shed the less admirable elements of parenting you yourself experienced or anyone trying to become the most powerful person you can possibly be...
Seeking out the painful aspects of the narrative—the story—at hand will greatly increase your chances of success.
It will pay extraordinary dividends to think about past partnerships and projects that did not go well.
Because you may well identify patterns of thought, emotion and behavior common to your participation in those projects that are worth avoiding this time. These insights may lead you, for instance, to be more selective about who joins your new venture, how you convey your vision to those who come aboard or how you give them feedback.
The same process of inquiry—looking for the potential pain points and proactively solving for them—is also true when contemplating another marriage.
The same is true when thinking of how to manage your money.
The same is true when reaching out for a new friendship or attempting to repair one that has fractured.
Looking for pain points and solving them proactively is not the opposite of optimism; it is part of rational optimism. Because it is testimony to your intention to actually make something work to bring into clear sight any hurdles hiding in the way.
Dr. Keith Ablow is the founder of Pain-2-Power, the life coaching and counseling system that fuels self-actualization, drives extraordinary achievement and transforms emotional injuries into insights that free us to overcome any challenge.
Dr. Ablow graduated Brown University with a degree in neurosciences, with highest honors, and went on to receive his M.D. from The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He trained in psychiatry at Tufts/New England Medical Center and practiced for 25 years.
Dr. Ablow has helped clients across the United States and from more than a dozen countries in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. His New York Times and USA Today bestselling books on the human psyche have been published in 8 languages. He was the host of the nationally-syndicated Dr. Keith Ablow Show and has appeared on countless television broadcasts including the Today Show, Good Morning America, Oprah, 20/20 and CBS This Morning. He has published over 1,000 articles in newspapers and magazines and been profiled in People magazine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Psychiatric Times, Good Housekeeping, Boston magazine, the New York Post, the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post.