How You Approach Stressful Situations Will Determine The Outcome
One of the biggest determinants of your success in pursuing a difficult goal is your approach to stressful situations. Situations that you would classify as emergencies, failures, or accidents, among other misfortunes.
You could approach these situations with the mindset of a person reacting to a threat. This mindset causes your brain to trigger emotions related to anger, fear, and danger. The result of these emotional triggers is a decrease in performance, which prevents any possibility of being at your best. What’s more, when you are not at your best in these situations, you have little to no chance of navigating through them successfully.
On the other hand, you could approach these situations with the mindset of a person ready to take on a challenge. When your mindset is of a person who is ready to take on a challenge, your mind prepares you to be at your best. This means you do things better, which in the end makes you better regardless of the outcome.
Given these two choices and two outcomes, it’s obvious which is better. However, only one of the choices comes naturally for most people and it’s not the better choice. It’s far more natural to react to threats than to take on challenges. As a result, if you are pursuing a difficult goal part of your process must be to train your brain to change how it reacts to stress.