Recently a very well-known meditation teacher in Sydney committed suicide. He left behind a wife and children. It’s extremely sad. Evidently his life went downhill during the Covid period when he couldn’t teach. But what does demonstrates more than anything else is the lack of a process that he would have to handle the negative emotions, which in this book I’ve called the blues, that come up in life. This is not a criticism of meditation. What it is is an awareness that a person who gets to the point where a financial or business problem could make them want to sacrifice their existence on this planet means that they do not have process in place to handle the downside of existence and business. Firstly, he couldn’t reach out to people that he knew because he had pride and shame. Secondly those people around him did not become aware of the obvious signal of depression that had overcome him and he may have as a solution, retreated into deeper meditation. The truth hurts. Sometimes things happen that we do not like and we try to reconcile this and at some point may even consider the same pathway as this person. Therefore, it is incredible that we do not teach the skills to handle the negative emotions of life at primary school. Rather, we would rather encourage children not to experience the negative emotions and therefore have no process to deal with them. This is called the helicopter parent.
I’ve written this book as a heads up for those of us who do not have a complete set of process to deal with the inevitable darkness life can bring. This skill set may seem to be a bit negative or dark but the truth of the matter is every human being has every human trait and therefore all of their emotions listed below will pass through all of us at some point in time maybe even in one single week. The question will become what do we do about that.
As a coach, it is all too easy for me to learn from the pain and suffering of others and therefore become a little complacent in my own diligence in managing negative emotions. And so this loss of an amazing man in Sydney through a business down turn and the subsequent impact of that on his ego and pride has been a stark reminder to me to be very diligent and focused on sharing the skills to handle all possible eventualities in our lives. So I’ve made a list below and it might be worth going through that list and ticking off the ones you think you could handle with the process you have in hand and the ones that you could possibly not handle and then bring those red flags to your coaching sessions to continue your learning path. We are not, as students of the universal laws of nature oblivious to the fact that in the blink of an eye, such as the disasters of the world trade centre and other things, that the world cannot turn upside down in a blink. To be a great leader we need to be able to handle the worst of the worst as well as the best of the best.
Please go through the list as well as take a look at the book. It may not be needed for you but certainly it will be needed for someone you know.
YOUR CHECKLIST FOR NEGATIVE EMOTIONS BY CATEGORy (from Google Search)
Negative emotions list
|
|
Latest Posts