Clarity
Who doesn’t want clarity??? We all do of course. Everyone would like to be clear on who they are, where they’re going, what decision is best for them, etc. So, how do we achieve it? That’s what I’m diving into today…
The largest block in the way of clarity is cloudiness. In life, cloudiness looks like movement and confusion due to blending multiple things together or perspectives being blurred by emotion and/or closeness to the situation. The first thing we need to do in order to gain clarity is to hit the brakes and slow down. Stopping the movement is first. When water is muddy, you can’t keep moving it around to attempt to gain clarity and life is the same way. First we have to stop the movement, slow down and become still.
Once you’re still and everything stops spinning around 90 miles and hour, you can begin to gain clarity. In some situations, this is enough, in others there’s more to do. Very often people blend multiple pieces of a situation together and then can’t see the solution. An example would be: I hate my job but I need it to pay my bills so I’m stuck and I don’t know what to do. First you need to slow down and find out if you really hate your job or if you hate something that’s happening there or someone there that’s making things difficult. Many times people like what they do on a day to day basis but they don’t like the company or their boss. Each scenario can have a different solution so it’s important to gain clarity on the situation so you can go about correcting the problem in the right way. If you like your job but not your boss, you may have to learn to set healthy boundaries with your boss or you might need to find another job doing the same thing but for a different boss. If you don’t like what you do, then you need to start figuring out what brings you joy and then begin exploring options in an area that you would enjoy.
You see when we don’t have clarity, we feel stuck and/or we choose a solution that doesn’t actually solve our particular problem. So breaking down things into specifics and then finding the particular solution that fits your particular problem is very helpful in transcending situations that you don’t like. Perspective is the other thing that helps bring clarity. When we are too focused on a problem or there’s a lot of emotion around it because it involves someone we care about, the cloudiness is immense. To help with this you can try taking a step back and looking at the big picture. If you’re upset because someone did something to you…stop and think about why would one-person act like that to another? When you have some distance, you can begin to see that it’s usually someone acting out because of some type of fear. That it doesn’t have anything to do with you and it has everything to do with what’s going on inside of them. Then you can decide if you should show them love, set up a healthy boundary, give them space, etc. First you have to get out of the victim mentality to gain perspective. If there is a lot of emotion around the topic another good strategy is to pretend the situation was happening to someone else. What if a friend or colleague came up to you asking for your advice with the same issue? What would you tell them? When we take ourselves and therefore our emotion out of the scenario, it’s much easier to have clarity. This is why it’s so easy to solve everyone else’s problems but your own.
There are some practical ways to attempt gaining clarity. In closing, I’ll mention one more…talking it out. The truth is we’re not supposed to be doing it alone, we need each other. That’s the reason it’s so
much easier to solve other’s problems…we’re supposed to be helping one another. So reach out, talk it over with a friend or family member but make sure it’s someone you trust, someone that lives their life in a way that you would like to live yours. Be careful who you turn to, use your head when choosing and of course you can always get yourself a Life Coach! That’s what we’re here for! Best wishes…
