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H ave you ever done a willingness workout?

What comes to your mind when reading the word “willingness?”

Some of my clients have heard words like “open up, sit with, make room for it… ” and so on.

The challenge is that without a context, all those words don’t have any meaning unless you make a decision, a choice, a commitment with yourself to experience “x and all the stuff” ​that comes when facing uncomfortable situations.

So, just to clarify when referring to willingness, I’m not referring to a feeling or something abstract, but to a choice that you can make towards a particular uncomfortable experience you have been struggling with in the name of your values.

Blindly playing-it-safe can be exhausting and draining.

You don’t have to love, approve of, or even like all the content your mind comes up with. I’m asking you to learn to make room for these thoughts as they are and look at the thoughts as stuff your mind comes up with rather than as stuff that you always have to listen to.

Call to action

• What would make what you are going through here honorable and purposeful?
• You don’t have to do this perfectly—just get from point A to point B.
• What do you want to stand for here?
• Is there anything standing in the way of you and what you want to be about here?

What is your mind avoiding?

One of the clever things our mind does is push away, replace, or stop our thinking when we are having uncomfortable thoughts, images or memories. This process is called cognitive avoidance or thought avoidance. Here is how cognitive avoidance plays out in some hypothetical scenarios:

• You had a terrible fight with your friends, and memories from this fight pop up every day. Naturally, you try to replace these upsetting memories with positive ones, such as the last day trip you took with your friend.
• When thinking about your partner traveling to South Africa, you have a thought about her dying in a car accident. The next thing you know, you’re telling yourself to stop thinking that horrible thought.

  Here is our invitation for a way to move forward: What about learning to have all those thoughts—the sweet, old, and ugly ones—without pushing, forcing, or pushing them down?

   

  How to shift from cognitive avoidance to  

Do you want to get unstuck from wrestling with worries, fears, anxieties, obsessions, and ineffective playing-it-safe actions?

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