Acceptance is Power
It is not giving up
When we are dealing with our own shortcomings or with the frustrations of life, we exacerbate our stress by considering ourselves to be failures. We are not doing what we want to be doing and as if that were not painful enough, we dogpile on ourselves by beating ourselves up for not achieving that.
Acceptance is a tool that we can use to break out of this negative feedback loop.
At first, this seems strange. Acceptance seems to mean giving up, not pushing yourself or trying to get to a better place but instead just stopping where you are, never trying to progress.
We think of perseverance as an active thing and acceptance as it’s opposite. This is not an unreasonable interpretation but it actually misunderstands what a powerful tool for progress true acceptance can be.
Acceptance is not passive. It does not mean giving up. That is resignation. Instead, acceptance is engaging without attachment.
That sounds like a contradiction, after all how do we engage when we don’t care. But that’s the wrong word, it’s not that we don’t care, it’s that we do not wrap our sense of our self worth up into our success or failures.
The opposite of acceptance is not perseverance. It is drama. It is taking the molehill of a mistake and making it into the mountain of unworthiness. More than anything, acceptance is about perspective.
We still care about our ultimate outcome but we don’t attach our egos to it. We try our hardest and while we keep our goal in mind, we compare our progress to where we started from not only to where we are trying to get to.
Acceptance is more about changing your focus from what you can’t do anything about to what you can. It means not giving up, it means steering rather than stopping. It allows us to change our minds as much as it allows us to continue on the same path.
More specifically, in terms of our day to day decision making, acceptance is about not attaching ourselves to the wrong turn we took or mistakes we made and instead just calmly steering back into the path.
When we confuse the path for the goal, when we measure success by how we are sticking to the plan rather than how much better we are than we were before, we confuse day to day mistakes for ultimate failure and become discouraged.
Acceptance of our minor stumbles allows us to focus on measuring our progress not ourselves. We accept mistakes as minor details we encounter on the way to achieving ultimate success.
At a high level acceptance is therefore about clarity.
As we persevere through the ups and downs of the path, we may start to realize that the initial outcome we are working towards isn’t necessarily what we want.
This could be a reason for anxiety and confusion but if we’ve practiced acceptance it merely becomes information that allows us to change and modulate our goals.
It’s not that we were wrong, it’s that we have more information now and can make a better decision based on that. Our ego doesn’t feel attacked when we change goals because we are not attaching our ego to our goals..
So far we’ve been talking about acceptance of our outside circumstances. But we can also apply acceptance more directly to ourselves. Specifically, acceptance of our feelings allows us to feel those things but not be driven by them.
We don’t ignore or (even worse) control our feelings. There is a sense of just letting ourselves be. Of feeling our emotions without reaction or judgement, feeling uncomfortable but not acting on those feelings.
There are certain times when discomfort is expected, when we are exercising or otherwise doing an immediate unpleasant activity so that we can do something more pleasant later on. However when we feel discomfort that is unexpected or that we didn’t choose, then our reaction is to try and eliminate that discomfort.
So discomfort in one case we consider to be a price we pay, but discomfort in another case is a problem that needs to be solved. Acceptance is a way from moving from the second case to the first.
When we feel afraid, we accept that fear, we don’t try to fight it, and instead of becoming this big issue, it just becomes a part of the path. Acceptance is how we thread the needle between putting energy into achieving our goals and being able to separate ourselves from those goals.
We give up our power when we stubbornly fight our feelings instead of accepting them because we are validating the discomfort as a problem rather than just information. We give up our power when we resign ourselves to our “fate” instead of persevering because we are saying our external circumstances are measures of our self worth.
So the next time you make a mistake or feel doubts and anxieties about what you are doing, just accept those feelings and take back your power.
