On my walk yesterday, The Grasshopper popped in and had this to say: “People run scared into the arms of their conditioning.” It took the whole walk to glean some meaning from his musing.

There’s no doubt in my mind that we are a fearful society. We’ve been conditioned that way, and the conditioning gets stronger with each passing generation.

I harken back to when I was a kid on summer vacation from grade school. I would get up, get dressed, eat my breakfast, brush my teeth, wash my face, comb my hair, and head out the door looking for a friend to play with. We would explore the nearby woods, play catch, shoot hoops at a schoolyard, work on an outdoor Cub Scout project, or walk to a playground and work the monkey bars. We were gone all day and didn’t come home most days ’til dinner. No one was concerned for our safety, nor thought it unusual that we didn’t return home until later in the day.

Somewhere along the way, as I moved closer towards adulthood, “Stranger Danger” got conditioned into society and now it’s a way of life.

We have learned to be fearful and we pass that along to our children, and they to theirs.

I call it the “World War II Water Down Theory.” I believe most people will agree that their great grandparents had it harder than their grandparents, and their grandparents had it harder than their parents, and their parents harder than them. We’ve become a protective society over the generations and what got watered down is our resiliency, which naturally increases our fear factor.

We are less trained to deal with adversity with each passing generation. And when it hits, we run and hide. It’s really not our fault; we were conditioned that way. But conditioning is no excuse to remain cocooned in fear.

The remedy is recognition – to recognize that you have the ability to respond to any situation vs. react to it. Application of this recognition acts as our reconditioning agent.

We have to retrain ourselves to trust our resiliency to get us through. We’re all resilient; we’ve just forgotten, and that forgetfulness fosters our remaining frozen in fear.

It is possible to bounce back to our natural ability to be resilient. The first step is recognizing that we possess it, and step two is to employ it more often. What you’ll find is that you’re tougher than you think as you break the link to past conditioning.

All the best,

John

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