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Start Training to Live the Real You and The Ability to Feel Confident in the Midst of Life’s Challenges Takes Practice

Why is practicing for life’s challenges so important?

We are biologically designed to access great stores of energy when things matter. It’s how we’ve survived as a species. Life and death circumstances require great forces of presence and action to pull through them.

We obviously don’t face life and death circumstances on a daily basis anymore, but we do face moments that matter to us in areas such as our relationships, health, finances, family and career. Curiously, things that are important to us today, at home or at work, provoke the same energy surges that were initially designed to help us survive in the wilderness. It’s our perception of urgency and importance that triggers a high-energy internal response in us.

Human beings haven’t changed much over the course of civilization. More than 2000 years ago the early Greek poet Archilochus observed, “We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”

That’s good news—because if the level of our training is high, we’ll make use of the energy surges we experience under stress to bring our best to difficult moments.

With training, we’ll be able to act in ways that line up with our highest wishes for ourselves and for others.

But it’s also bad news—because if the level of our training is low, we’ll pour that same amplified energy into the survival programming that all mammals come with by default.

That programming has 3 settings: flight, fight and freeze.

When we act as though our survival is at stake, and do it with a lot of energy, we’re often less than satisfied with the results.

What’s the point here?

We’re still bringing the high energy it would take to escape a tiger in the jungle to our everyday challenges.

And if we haven’t trained to channel that energy toward confident action, it’s going to work against us instead of for us.

Start Training to Live the Real You

Without Training We Get the Worst Results

The relationship between energy and training is shown in the graphic quadrants above. As you can see in the black quadrant, a circumstance of high-stress energy combined with little training gives us the worst result.

And even in low energy, non-demanding circumstances, a lack of training costs us by producing mediocre and unsatisfying outcomes.

Without Training…

OH NO! — In important moments we are more likely to get the worst possible result if we haven’t trained for what we want.

With Training We Get the Best Results

With the high energy that comes with stressful or challenging circumstances, however, the stakes are much higher and with training we can get great results (gold quadrant) or even in low energy circumstances we improve our outcomes when we’ve had training.

OH YES! — With training we shine in challenging situations and improve outcomes at other times.

Find the Real You

You’re a thoughtful person with the best intentions, important goals and big dreams. When you’re not under pressure, you can speak and think clearly about your growth and your future.

That’s the real you.

Neurological research, however, has proven the problem explained above.

It’s often not the real you who takes action in stressful situations.

It’s your primitive instincts—a part of your cerebral anatomy called the limbic system—that tends to take control of your behavior when you perceive a situation or person as threatening.

Some people call this our “lizard brain” and we are neurologically wired to let it take over in the heat of challenging circumstances.

That’s not anybody’s fault, it’s just brain biology.

You’ve experienced these primal reactions first-hand:

·       If you’ve ever blown up at someone who you actually want to stay close to like a friend, family member or colleague.

·       If you’ve literally dodged someone in public or at work because you had something you didn’t know how to work out with them.

·       If you’ve remained silent in a situation where you badly needed to speak up.

·       If you’ve ever jumped to do the bidding of a tyrant when you actually needed to make a boundary.

·       If you’ve hesitated to take on a job where you could have really shined and someone less qualified wound up in the role.

These are the kind of moments that most of us wish we could take back and replace with more confident behavior.

The right kind of training makes confident action in such situations not only possible, but probable.

And that’s exactly why you’d want to develop the skill of being able to coach yourself toward confidence.

Games for Confidence is here to help you move in that direction.

Article from Rick Lewis

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