Opportunities and problems go together, often masked as one of the same. It’s your perspective that determines how well you exploit this dialectic.
It’s always easier to play the role of a pessimist. Bad thoughts are typically stickier than good ones. Optimism is harder to produce.
However, when you look at your challenges with a pragmatic lens, you realize there’s hope.
There will inevitably be some wins along the way, even if they’re incremental. After all, the Chinese word for crisis combines the characters for danger and opportunity.
“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”
William James
The mind quickly identifies fake and forced positive thoughts. It also catches you from falling into a morass of negativity.
When you run away from a problem because the amygdala has told you to play it safe, you pass the opportunity by.
Dancing with the tension between thought and action motivates the search for solutions. He who hesitates caused by the dizziness of anxiety — a type of failure in advance — is sure to be lost.