Playing The Odds Insures Your Life’s Results Remain at 50-50 - Grasshopper

If you never take a gamble, going forward you can count on your results being roughly the same as they’ve been in the past.

Reality seems to be a 50-50 proposition: you win some; you lose some. So how do we increase our odds?

 

Not by denying reality; that never works.

 

Our odds increase when we begin to cooperate with life’s realities. It seems to me that’s a gamble that relatively few ever take.

 

Cooperating with reality begins by noticing its existence in our lives. How often do we poke our head in the sand and declare, “This is not happening.” Reality is always happening. It never takes a day off.

 

Once we notice and acknowledge our reality, we don’t waste time wishing. We, instead, spend our time responding to rather than reacting to reality.

 

Our programmed reactions to reality will get us the same results we got before - 50-50 or worse. Responding to reality is the gamble that’s necessary to increase our odds.

 

Responding means to observe our conditioned reaction as it comes up and just let it go by. Way too often we invite our reactions to hang around by stopping to argue with them. That has the same odds of arguing with a dog over a bone: you lose.

 

When we let our reaction go by, lined up right behind it are a number of other possible choices. These are unconditioned responses. The gamble is to select one of these and roll the dice.

 

It takes some practice to let our reactions go by and gamble on a response instead. No, you won’t win every time with this strategy, but enough times to make the coin flip in your favor more often.

 

All the best,

John