To Believe: the Human Differentiator
In my last post I mentioned that “resistance always happened and that systems that showed intelligence, work, patience and flexibility were the most likely to overcome it.” And a human is a system just like any other thing in this world.
Yesterday, my girlfriend explained to me that she was overwhelmed by a decision she had to make in the near future. So we sat down and talked about it. This morning I had a moment to think about our talk and I now think there is a way to relate it to the general concept of resistance and what a human, such as my girlfriend, needs to overcome resistance.
Intelligence? Yes. Work? Yes. Patience? Yes. Flexibility? Yes. All of them are needed. But what I forgot about was: to believe.
What is important when you face resistance is to do, to act, to move forward, and for that you have to believe in something, the driver behind every action. What I thought my girlfriend needed was first of all to believe, no matter what, in order to do something. Intelligence, work, patience and flexibility play a role later on to deal with the something you are doing.
But where does believe come from? Believe comes from understanding. Understanding in the broadest sense possible: when you know how to make use of something in different future scenarios. And understanding comes from interaction, interaction through experiences in all its different shapes and forms. Believe is a result of your interactions. It’s what drives your next action, it’s what drives you deep down to act.
Yesterday night we ended up sitting down and dissecting the difficult decision she had to make, to understand it better. It led to both of us understanding what the decision was made of, what the different components were. This turned out to give us the believe that overcoming the resistance caused by this decision wasn’t that complicated after all and rather simple and it gave my girlfriend a little additional reason to believe that it can be overcome. To take action, believe was needed and it came from her better understanding what her decision was made of.
Stopping to believe is extremely dangerous because it is what makes humanity competitive. It has always been so, and it has allowed us to survive. Today, for you and I, it’s no different.
If you care about someone, you should help them to believe, whatever it is. To not go against it or try to change it, but to support it. What I’ve described here might help you to do just that.