Today’s Navigate the Chaos question is “How often do you treat triumph and disaster the same?
People who navigate the chaos often spend a good deal of time working on their self-awareness so that they treat triumph and disaster the same.
For those with a high level of self-awareness there is no difference between triumph and disaster. Both provide lessons. Both symbolize the end result of action. And both offer opportunities for begin again.
Instead of seeing life as a series of wins and losses, those who navigate the chaos focus on the process of continual growth by treating triumph and disaster the same.
English journalist, short-story writer, poet and novelist Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem for his son John in 1895 entitled “If” that highlights the defining characteristics of someone who maintains a high level of self-awareness.
“If you can keep your head when all about you, Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; if you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools: If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’ If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it. And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!"
How often do you treat triumph and disaster the same? Can you, even for a moment, consider that both triumph and disaster offer opportunities to begin again.
Instead of seeing wins and losses, can you change your thinking and view triumph and disaster as impostors? Doing so just may help you navigate the chaos.