Stephanie Anderson

Last time I wrote about tackling  a long-haul flight from Australia by switching into a ‘zone of acceptance’ – a space in my head where I could make the most of the trip (as a thinking time) rather than struggle against the inevitable tiredness and discomfort of the twenty-three hour flight.  This ‘state of acceptance’ is I believe a skill, an art, that we can learn and get better at with practice.

Sometimes we can make changes in our life to bring it closer to how we’d like it to be.  Or we can change our perspective, shifting our focus to the aspects we are happy with and away from the ones we are not –   making a situation we don’t like easier to live with.  But there are times we may find ourselves fighting against a situation we can’t change, for the time being at least, and living with the stress and exhaustion from wishing and willing it to be different.

Some of the people I’ve coached have wanted to make career changes and my role has been to help them work out their new direction and a possible route for making the change.  In one or two instances they can’t make an immediate switch to their new career – often because their commitments are dependent on their current salary.  Rather than feel miserable and trapped they have to learn  to live more comfortably with their present situation while they take the necessary steps for the longer-term change. They have to accept things as they are – for now.

A friend of mine has a simple phrase for situations she doesn’t like but is learning to accept – she says “when it just is”.  When I repeated her phrase to myself later, while locked in the middle of a ‘worry circle’ of my own making, I found myself sighing and letting go of tension as I did.  It’s a short phrase packed with meaning.  So now when I come across a situation I’m struggling to accept I call it a ‘just is’ moment.  It doesn’t mean that I resign myself to something realistically I could change, nor does it deny the strength of feeling I might  have have about it, but it does put me in a place where I can accept it as it is and for what it is, with the peace of mind that comes with it.