”What’s the meaning of this” exclaimed the 4-year old girl. You could see the pained expression and anger in her face as she plucked the one burnt french fry from her McDonald’s Happy Meal (trademarks of that corporation) and held it up in front of her face with disdain before throwing it to the ground at her mother’s feet.
The reaction of anger and outrage is a typical reaction to FEAR, the feeling we are not going to get what we want or that we will lose what we have. It fires off our amygdala and adrenals in less than a heartbeat – literally. But I tangent.
This blog is about that fantastic question “what is the meaning of this?” You see, everything is meaningless until we assign a meaning to it. And isn’t it interesting how we jump into a disempowering state of assignment and emotion – I did it myself yesterday during a contract negotiation . But I noticed the patterned response, and then challenged myself to find a better meaning, and a more empowering response, one that would bring me the feelings of gratitude and happiness. So yes, I lost $41K from a contract that I had not even signed off on, but I rationalized that if that happened to another dozen or so contractors then one lucky one would be notified that the agency had come up with funding for their tech. Congratulations to whoever you may be! I am cool with that. It’s a much better meaning – and I learned another contractual “dance move” from the experience which will come in handy when the stakes are 10-100X bigger, which should be really, really soon on the Universal Time Scale.
And I thank my now 29 year old daughter for that life lesson she taught me which helped me to avoid a temper tantrum yesterday.
