Flipping the Script - How to Find Acceptance
On paper, it could be said that I’ve had a pretty rough and traumatic time of it over the last 12 years or so.
In that time I have, as regular readers will know, lost my hair though alopecia.
What I talk about quite a bit less is that I’ve lost quite a lot more than that too: I lost my fab brother, my only sibling, in a car crash; I lost my dad to COVID-19, which he caught in hospital in 2020, so we had to say goodbye over the phone rather than be by his side; I lost my marriage and had to navigate the never-easy path of co-parenting with a separated partner; I lost a whole heap of my confidence and a heck of a lot of sleep.
There is so much life in those words above. Each warranting a full story of their own, but some of those stories I’m not prepared to share publicly. Others are in this blog, here and there, woven through to share a human story which backs up an idea or tool for a more playful way of living.
Whilst there has been some truly s**t moments that have rocked my world, there has also been some points of unadulterated joy; times when I have been astonished by life; moments where I have cried laughing and plenty of experiences that have made me zing with creativity with my imagination brimming over.
Some might say this flipping of the script is toxic positivity. I absolutely disagree and would perhaps even suggest that an accusation like that might not be coming from the healthiest of places. Being able to look on the brightside, even in the darkest of times is far from toxic. It is totally “positive” positivity.
The superpower that lies behind this is Acceptance. The power to be able to accept what you can’t control is massively underestimated. It’s not a skill which is as sexy as, say, confidence or the ability to know your self worth. It’s not a brash, extroverted quality, rather it is a quiet strength which hums in the background but is absolutely the key ingredient in how I have been able to cope and weather the various storms life has thrown at me.
I’m not trying to fling a ginormous pity party here. Far from it. I rarely share some of this trauma exactly because I don’t want to invite sympathy. In fact, I feel incredibly uncomfortable when people do heap pity on me. It happens more often these days as I walk about with a visible difference (my baldness) that many assume is a result of chemotherapy. I am always super quick to explain it’s not cancer as those kind pitying faces I find really quite hard to bear!
I’m sharing because it might be useful. I can see, in my wonderful coaching clients, the beautiful transformation that occurs when true acceptance of the way things are, is found. I don’t mean acceptance of the things that are within our power to change, of course, but the acceptance of the whole heap of stuff we can’t.
Being able to sigh and say to oneself “ah well, it’s far from ideal, but I’ll find a way to work with it and crack on” is possibly the most motivating and mindset shifting thing you can tell yourself.
It’s an ongoing, ever evolving process too. Everyday we are confronted with things which would be so easy to butt up against and get stuck in a complaint thought-pattern about. Often these things aren’t the huge life changing stuff I mentioned at the beginning, but just the niggly little moments in the everyday when things don’t go as smoothly as you’d like or in the right direction.
They happen all the time. My most recent would be a delivery which didn’t turn up on time, going on a trip away and forgetting something which would have been useful, timing dinner wrong so the lovely meal I had in mind didn’t end up on my plate, going to bed later than planned and waking groggy, waking too early and knowing I’ll be so tired later because of it… I could VERY easily go on and on with this list because there are hundreds of examples, happening all the time and, perhaps this is the most important thing to remember, are happening all the time to all of us.
Radical acceptance isn’t some talent you’re either born with or not. It is a skill that can easily be cultivated, but just like physical exercise or practising any skill - you need to put in a regular practice for it to become a superpower.
I’m going to give you some suggestions about how you can cultivate a more powerful sense of acceptance, but, as I say to all my coaching clients pretty much on repeat, hold this advice lightly. Some suggestions will work for you better than others. Following someone else’s step-by-step advice might be useful, but what will be a lot more useful is trusting your own intuition, being playful with trying out different techniques and being aware of which are most useful to you.
Some ways to find acceptance:
- Remind yourself that thoughts aren’t facts - they’re just the way you are choosing to see the world right now and you can change them if you want to.
- Spot when you are falling into all or nothing thinking: “I am never going to achieve that”, “I’m always going to fail”, “I’ll never be rich because…”
- Ask what other perspectives there might be to a certain issue or scenario.
- If you find yourself catastrophising a situation, ask yourself how likely that imagined catastrophe might be, and then again, ask what other perspectives there might be.
- Practise a growth mindset, shifting the “I can’t do that” thoughts to “I can’t do that…yet”. Reminding yourself regularly that we can grow and change is an easy skill to build and immensely powerful.
- Approach things like an artist (of any art form), let your imagination loose and get playful. Start with “OK this situation is utterly pants… but what interesting stories might spring from it? What new ideas are now surfacing? Like a phoenix from the ashes, what might come into being as a result?
