Category: Personal Choice

Byron Katie writes in her book Loving What Is, “There is no such thing as verbal abuse. There’s only someone telling me a truth that i don’t want to hear“.

I find this quote very relevant, with some qualifications. Byron Katie speaks in that way as part of her healing interventions, and I believe that there are some instances where verbal abuse can really be hurtful and destructive. This quote might not always be applicable, or might be too difficult to apply in really difficult relationships.

However, there is also some truth in the fact that if verbal abuse affects us, there is something that we don’t want to hear or that confronts someone we don’t want to be. We should not take it too literally then, but it might be worth investigating why we react harshly sometimes to what is being said to us or what is being said of us.

There seems to be much benefit of keeping our eyes on the long term prize (benefit) we are seeking so as to minimize the psychological impact of what we have to go through to reach it.

That’s what Valeria Maltoni expands on in her interesting post ‘How Small Differences in Perception can have Potentially Major Consequences‘. Experiments show that by keeping focus on the longer term benefits we get much more consistency in practice and more effort put into it: “we came up with a strategy that we called, “Keep your eyes on the prize.” So this is not the slogan from an inspirational poster. It’s an actual directive for how to look around your environment. People that we trained in this strategy, we told them to focus their attention on the finish line, to avoid looking around, to imagine a spotlight was shining on that goal, and that everything around it was blurry and perhaps difficult to see”

So let’s focus on the prize to reach it more effectively and avoid falling down at the first difficult moment!

Dear reader, you might be surprised that although I value you very much, I do blog in great part for myself.

I find that writing blogs, with the self-imposed discipline of a publication 3 times a week, forces me to sit down, slow down and think about important stuff. It forces me to focus my attention on what is really important and think about the condition of the world around me.

For me it is about writing, but I guess everybody should have a practice that responds to the same criteria, i.e. impose some sort of a discipline slowing down and thinking about what happens around us.

The plus of writing is that writing is a way to concentrate and reformulate ideas until they take a shape that makes sense. In addition, writing to publish adds some quality requirement that does not leave us put our guard down.

I hope you still get a lot of value from reading my blog and the ideas and thoughts I capture to share with you! And maybe you should blog too?