Defensiveness and fear are natural. When a person is hurt, when a person tries really hard and fails, they become defensive over the topic and setting. This is natural, a person should learn from failure. Whether they learn that fire is hot, to not trust their father on loan advice, or that some rules can be broken and sometimes you have to triple check before you run it, is not the issue Im addressing here. What Im addressing is the fear that should be focused into importance of learning that lesson, that fear becoming a wave which encompasses a person so they become stagnant. Growth mindedness is the state of overcoming failure, and with consistent or huge failures or trials, growth-mindedness becomes harder.
Recognizing this overwhelming fear is not difficult but it can be impossible. If one grows up in an environment, that can be family or financial or racially discriminant or a large number of things, where failure and hurt is normalized then holding a rationale for reality and society that one is simply “fucked” is pretty easy. The problem with so many self-help books and inspirational speakers is that they come from a perspective of entitlement, victory has been easy and given to them. They title it difficult and paint a pretty picture of the battles they fought, but their premise of overcoming adversity is just words; there’s not truth and there’s no nuance in getting back up when all seems lost. However, that doesn’t mean it is good to attack their encouraging words nor their advice. Rich spoiled people can be very helpful and knowledgable even though they’re offensively dismissing real challenges they know nothing about but erroneously give themselves oceans of credit for. Check the fear that their logic is wrong, that’s where one must recognize the difference in playing fields and outcomes.
Everything is a system of results from strategizing. Learning to bandaid the rich idiots so to get their greater knowledge on how to use success is kin to learning to bandaid the feeling of failure one received from being shorted. In the setting where failure and treachery is normalized, band-aiding this, minimizing this, is more difficult. It is not impossible, it is just new. Deciding to aim higher does seem insane to people who have only known failure and had a culture of defeatism around them. But being insane is often the quickest way to brilliance and its never worse than being defeated; because if you’re beat, then you got nothing then if you take on crazy you have nothing to lose and at least you can have fun with it. Step outside your old field and measure your losses in moments, not as normalized patterns consistent throughout the whole system.
The mind likes to feel safe and danger, exaggerated or otherwise, causes one a need to be safe. When a mind replays dangerous moments or revisits them often, one cannot strategize a better result. One must bandaid a broken moment, in that situation and that time, then one must see their desire results as first crazy and then relabel it as fun and overcoming. This is the only way one can step outside their own cage that our primitive and scared, pattern-addicted brain, can allow. We must see the bigger picture with success as the real picture and our current scared picture of fear and treachery as a moment, as a bad example. Freedom and escaping that glass cage is the goal, not staying safe inside it. Being free is not being safe but learning new and enjoying the abundance of this world.
