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hey this is the leo 4 actualized org and I have a question for you have you ever doubted yourself doubted whether you could handle the kind of tough situation that came up for you in life so maybe life threw you a curveball maybe you're in this position right now where you're just dealing with something whether it's a relationship or some trouble at work just something that is exceptionally hard and you feel like you don't know if you can do it you don't know if you can handle it why is it so hard why is life unfair what's going to happen if you fail how are you going to get through this maybe there's a money problem you don't know how you're going to get those bills paid and you don't know what kind of catastrophe will happen if you don't maybe there's a relationship and it's going to break up and you don't know how to salvage it or what you can do and it seems like it's a lost cause well I think we've all been there I've certainly had many moments like that in my life and one of the things that I've been doing lately as a practice to build myself up against these kind of situations I've been doing affirmations and specifically the affirmation that I've been doing is one that goes like this try it on for size and see how you like it and the affirmation is I can handle any challenge any situation that life throws at me so that's my affirmation I can handle any challenge any situation that life throws at me now why did I pick this affirmation and what's the importance of it so the reason I brought this up is because I've been doing also not just affirmations but I've also been doing a contemplation exercise where I've been thinking about this so by affirmation I mean that this is something that I say to myself for at least five minutes every every day so I'll find five minutes in the day either in the morning in the evening to just sit down and affirm to myself consistently this one message just repeated like a mantra so it'll just go like this I can handle any situation any challenge that life throws at me I can handle any situation any challenge that life throws at me I can handle any situation any challenge that life throws at me and I'll just do that for five minutes straight if you do in five minutes your mind eventually really buys in and gets on board with this and especially if you do it consistently every single day and if you do this and you actually start thinking about what this affirmation really means you'll get this kind of insight that I got and to me what's amazing when you drill your mind like this using these kind of exercises is some of the profound insights that you get and I've been doing it just tonight and I was thinking about what this really means and how powerful and amazing this is that no matter what challenge I'm faced with it really is true that I can handle it I can handle it and why is this true well there's a couple of angles that we can go at this from which I'm going to cover so firstly if you just look at your own life and you look at your own history up from birth until today and you take a look at all the tough times you've had all the really big struggles all those moments where you felt like it was a life or death situation where it was do or die and maybe it literally was that dramatic for you maybe it literally was life and death situation or maybe it was just something that you felt was a life and death situation at the time but then you realize that it wasn't that important after all but just think about all those moments maybe pick one or two that were like your most difficult moments in life and if you think about that and you think about where you are today and where those moments were and how they shaped you what you eventually realize if you're honest with yourself is that those moments first of all they got you a lot of emotional growth they got you a lot of maybe even success as a result of that growth that's the success you have right now but also you just see that you were able to handle it sure it might have been tough it might have been very emotionally trying and taxing but in the end that statement that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger there's a lot of truth in that and that's what tends to happen is that you experience these traumatic events but in the end you're able to handle them and it's not even because you are so great it's just because you are a living organism and it's in your genes to be a survivor so you're a survivor no matter what situation you're faced the most drastic dramatic horrible situation you can put yourself in you could handle that your body and your psychology is designed to cope with it that's actually a really a thought that we don't usually have and when I think about that and I really meditate on it and I do this affirmation then it really grounds me makes me very confident in my ability to go forward and I suddenly see that those challenges that I have before me are not really as big as I thought they were they aren't as important as I thought they were they aren't as catastrophic catastrophic even very serious challenges I'm talking about the death of people you like I'm talking about even your own death you're able to deal with that you're biologically just wired to deal with it you can deal with it you can deal with anything you don't even really have a choice in the matter you're just going to survive through it you're going to survive through it you're going to come out the other end or maybe you even don't come out the other end but you still handle it what I mean by handle is not that you're going to go through and never give up it's not that you're not going to have any emotional labor or pain to the situation it doesn't mean you're always going to succeed definitely not the case there were many times in my life where I've tried things and worked really hard towards them but then still quote unquote failed because I didn't get the result that the external result that I was ultimately after right and in that situation you could say that I I failed in some sense I didn't rise to the challenge or maybe there have been times in your life when you haven't risen to the challenge maybe it was in college maybe was it your job maybe the presentation you're supposed to give maybe in a relationship and you really bungled it you really screwed it up and I'm not saying that you won't have those kinds of moments you will but notice that even in those cases first of all a lot of those situations even though you totally screwed it up does it really matter now where you are right now did it really make that big of a difference I think in 95% of cases it really has no long-term effect no long-term effect of course there are those cases that are extremely traumatic like extremely vivid events traumatic experience in your life that could have a very lasting repercussion on on your psychology on your psyche and on your reality and on your model of how the world works so there's certainly those as well and we've got all got a couple of those in our closets but even with those think about it you survived through that you made it through and right now in the moment that you're sitting in here things aren't so bad you're pretty comfortable the present moment is all right nothing too terrible is going on right now right and that's kind of how it is is that you are a survivor in that even the worst times even those things that you think are just going to be horrible you can still survive there's a deeper perspective on this which I was just contemplating this evening and that is that if you really think about human history and you think about where we came from where are we evolved from then you get a deeper appreciation of our our natural ability to survive and what I mean by that is think about where human society was where Humanity was a hundred thousand years ago so a hundred thousand years ago as far as we can tell we were living in hunter-gatherer tribes and in those societies these were small little cliques of humans maybe fifty to a tribe a hundred to a tribe 150 to a tribe and they lived together and they fought with each other and they had no permanent shelter they had no heating or electricity they had no internet or computers or cell phones they had no access to supermarkets that would provide them with reliable sources of food they had no income there was no money transactions had to be had to be based on bartering system and think about the dangers involved with barter with someone from a neighboring tribe that you might not really know think about the the rape and pillage that went on in in those in that kind of environment when you had two tribes that clashed with each other think about the social hierarchies and people vying for power and dominating each other think about the struggle for food when you couldn't find a herd of deer to daunt or when there was a drought and you couldn't plant anything think about how challenging that was think about not having clothing think about running around naked in the cold and the heat think about not even knowing which which pool of water you can drink from because some of the water could be contaminated think about all the diseases you could get that there were no cures for think about not even understanding what the hell is going on in life think about not even understanding how long you're going to live not understanding basic medicine not understanding biology not understanding any kind of philosophical concepts that we have now about human development not understanding anything about psychology being totally immersed in in mythology and superstition just think about that think about if you were living in that kind of environment well that's what your biology and your psychology is actually designed to handle because we haven't evolved too much genetically from from that phase that we were at about a hundred thousand years ago and so when you think about that it's kind of sobering because it's like damn those people could really survive they could really tough it out and in some sense that really puts our problems into perspective I think it's really important to put your problems into perspective once in a while because sometimes you might be so immersed in getting your business up and running or you might be so immersed in in a relationship problem that you have or you might be so immersed because your children aren't behaving the way you want them to or because some piece of technology is not doing what you wanted to or maybe you get held up at the airport on a layover and the weather is bad or maybe you're having car trouble and you make it to work an hour late and you get so caught up in those problems but think about it think about the real problems those those aren't real problems think about the real problems that people face the life-and-death problems that people faced 100,000 years ago every single day and how challenging that must have been so the point here is that you are actually much more resilient than you give yourself credit for and I think that this is a concept that I'm borrowing for Don Miguel Ruiz from his nice little book The Four Agreements he said he really makes the case so that again you the book that man is a domesticated animal and that we have domesticated ourselves and that's exactly what has happened is not only did we domesticate the dog the wolf turned it into a dog and we domesticated feral cats and turned them into little kitty cats and we domesticated bison and turn them into cattle basically and we domesticated all these animals but the greatest thing we did is we domesticated ourselves fact is now we live in cages these are homes we're very immersed in all the technology we've got around us we're very reliant on it it's making a lives very nice and comfortable and easy but it all is also kind of making us lose touch with that resilience that we have that natural resilience and the fact is that you have that resilience right now so even though you are domesticated and I am domesticated we're all we can't really help being domesticated in this society that we grow up in but just realize that you've got a lot of resilience which means that you can handle any challenge in any situation that's thrown at you this is not just some wishful thinking this is actually a matter of fact this is a matter of your psychology this is a matter of your biology there's no situation that you can't handle you might have an emotional breakdown but you're still going to go through nothing really that bad is going to happen and I'm talking about real horrible situations I'm talking about like someone goes and kidnaps you and tortures you for a month like you'll be able to survive that it's kind of a sobering thought or if you get afternoon to the military and you have to go and you have to fight you have to kill other people you'll survive that you get wounded you might get a leg amputated you might get paralyzed you might get diagnosed with cancer you might lose your life savings in a in the stock market or in a Ponzi scheme someone might scan you and rip you off your spouse might totally desert you might cheat on you you can survive all that you're designed to survive all that in fact you have no other option really you have no other option it's either you're going to die or you're going to survive and that's really the only choice that's it you're designed to handle any situation any challenge that comes up in life and these I'm talking about like grave grave grave challenges most of us are not facing these kind of challenges our lives most of us behave as though we are oh sure our mind likes to catastrophize that meeting at work that presentation that we've got or some little fit that we have with our girl or boyfriend we tend to say that oh this is the end of the world we're going to break up or they're going to fire me I'm going to lose my money something's going to go wrong and we were catastrophizing but this is our mind really playing tricks on us because it did evolve our mind our mind it evolved to handle serious survival challenges which we really rarely face nowadays it's rare that you're facing a life-or-death challenge for real in most cases is your mind playing tricks on you and projecting and catastrophizing everything into a life in that situation and we got to get a lot better with ourselves at telling ourselves when a life in that situation is really a life in that situation and when it's not and so I really want to get you a little bit more aware about the fact that you can handle any challenge because sometimes it does feel like you can't so I'm not saying that it doesn't feel that way at times and I've I've had this I've had this just recently I've had real challenges where I feel like this is not something I can do this business is not something I can lift off the ground you know I can't really handle if I lose my savings really handle this I can't handle that what if this happens just like catastrophes and it feels sometimes when you're in that pit of despair and you're really at the bottom you really feel like you're at the bottom and you feel like you're so down that you can't make it through and that's exactly why I had this affirmation for myself and I'm drilling it to my mom my into my mind and I've committed to drilling it into my mind for the next 60 days because I literally want to reprogram my subconscious so that I totally believe with every fiber of my being I believe that I can handle any situation that comes to me in the future because I've gone through those downs and I don't really want to go through those Downs anymore and I felt like creating this affirmation was a good way to stem that off in the future because I know I'm going to have those challenging moments but I want to also be able to get back in touch with myself when I'm starting to go into that dip I want to be able to tell myself and I want to have my subconscious mind be imprinted with the belief that I can handle any challenge I can handle any situation and that it's never as bad as it seems even the worst things are never as bad as they seem and I want you to take that to heart so if you're going through a really tough time right now that's just the fact you're going through it but number one you're going to learn some good lessons from that and you're going to actually get a lot of success in your life from those situations so that is the silver lining and it's not a wishy washy New Age thinking type of lining it's a real silver lining that's a fact is that you grow with those experiences but then just realize that you are designed to survive and that your ancestors have survived through situations that were much much worse in fact you yourself have survived through situations that were probably much much worse than the one that you're worrying about right now and you do not want to sell yourself short realize that your your resiliency is nearly infinite no matter how much pain you experience you Raziel nc is nearly infinite and it's amazing and one book that I recommend reading on this to get your mind around this idea to really buy into it is read Victor Frankel's man's search for meaning Victor Frankl was a Holocaust survivor and he talks about in very vivid detail about his experiences in concentration camps in Germany through the the middle and the end of World War two and he really talks about in graphic detail about the horrors of the concentration camp and the stuff that was going on there was so horrific and yet the people that were there they were able to deal with it they were able to cope with it somehow and he talks about how he was able to cope with it and he was actually a psychologist and he started he created a whole philosophy and a whole model based on his experiences there and these concentration camps and so really read that book and just take a look because what it'll do when you're reading some of those incidents it's like you're say you said damn like how can that how can that possibly be how could you possibly survive that I couldn't survive that that's what you start to think but then you realize you know what it's not that Viktor Frankl was really special and it's not like any of his friends or any of any of his cellmates in the concentration camp like there were any any different they were there were all basically human beings the fact is that even though we can experience a lot of pain and sometimes you can't you can't avoid that pain we can all survive it we can all live through it and come out better on the other end and you can even survive very horrific things like torture and starvation and humiliation and rape and death all of these things are not nearly as bad as we make them out to be and our ability to live through them and to survive them is there in every one and it doesn't take a special character it's there whether you want it or not because you are a survival machine you have gone through millennia and hundreds of generations of survival of the fittest and you are the fittest of the current generation you are the fittest of all our ancestors and so you couldn't get here you couldn't be here if you couldn't survive that challenge that you're facing in your life right now all right this is Leo signing off I hope you got a little bit of encouragement from this if you're going through a tough time go ahead and I encourage you to actually practice this affirmation I can handle any challenge any situation that life throws at me practice it consistently and grain it into your subconscious mind and you'll find yourself empowered and you'll find those dips much lower than they have to be all right I'm signing off go ahead leave me your comments I'd like to know what you hear about what you think about this topic please like it please share it and of course check out actualize org where 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