The fight or flight response. How to define yourself.

I think many of us can agree that life is much like a roller coaster, a ship constantly at sea or whatever adventurous metaphor you would like to use to describe your life.  It has it’s ups, downs, calm days and vicious storms. No matter what stage of life we are in, we tend to feel like we are constantly defining ourselves. That’s just a part of being human. We ache to become better at things, but sometimes we just don’t know how.

For many of us, we like to keep our life simple for our own sake. No sense in complicating things. The bad part about the lack of conflict in our life is that it can actually hurt us more than we realize. There is nothing wrong with having a great month or year where nothing really goes wrong, but it’s easy for us to throw away conflict. The idea that conflict adds no value to our life is very common thought. Many would probably think it removes value from our life.

That is not true at all.

Conflict and struggles we face can add so much value to who we are. How we react to conflict truly defines us. Sure, conflict is not something we want in our life, but it prepares us for greater problems we may face in the future. When we resolve an issue in our life we learn not only a lot about how others react, but how we react. We become educated in reactions we create by our actions. If we mess up, we learn to do it differently next time. If we resolve the issue well, we know  how to fix the problem in the future.

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We don’t just educate ourselves in finding the best resolutions to problems, we also refine our character. Who we are.

We have a basic choice in life when it comes to conflicts that arise. We either choose fight or flight. If we fight, we build up courage and strength to defeat the conflict. We gain wisdom from every fight we pursue. It doesn’t matter if we are victorious or fail, either way we learn from it. A warrior’s failure creates more wisdom than any coward could ever gather. If we stay true to ourselves and face problems with honesty and humility, we will make great strides in our character.

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If we chose “flight” and decide to run away from our problems or just not try to resolve them, we end up falling down and sometimes into a hole. Thinking that problems will just go away and solve themselves is no way to live life. Sure, some things are healed with time, but if that is your answer for everything, you could be missing out on great opportunity to grow and become a much better “you.”

We are truly defined by how we react in times of stress and consequence.

So do you choose fight or flight?

 

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