How to Embrace Confusions and become Successful.

Practical and Actionable step-by-step approach to confusion

How often does if happen to you that you feel directionless and lost. Everything that you have been busy with in the past couple of years/months/weeks seems worthless, it feels like the ladder you have been climbing is leaning on the wrong wall.

Two Types of Confusion

I would like you to note that the confusion being talked about isn’t the one suffered due to things like career or college course choice, deciding whether to start a venture right now or delay it until situation gets comfortable, deciding to spend time on your goals vs spending quality time with your loved ones, or simply which mobile phone to buy.

All the above mentioned situations lead to short-term consequences of your life. The second type or the one that most of us don’t see as confusion is a feeling of complete distrust in yourself, where all the elements you have been working towards for the past days/months/years seem indiscriminately mixed up, where you have a complete idea of the place where you want to be in life but the map which leads to the place seems lost. If are going through a similar set of thoughts right now in life, take a heart!-It is an essential part of the growth process.

Few of us would readily think that a positive learning experience was associated with the state of confusion.

Confusion occurs because the prior knowledge we have leaves us ill-equipped to deal with new information.

But does that anyhow mean that you have actually lost track?

No.

Confusion is an opportunity, and I say it with responsibility that Confusions just can’t pull you down or complicate your life unless and until you judge yourself for being confused.

Researchers have found confusion to be a epistemic emotion that is, an emotion specifically associated with the development of our knowledge and understanding. So, you can very aptly compare it to getting your hands on a new mobile phone and having a hard time the first day you start learning to use it. Now imagine judging yourself for not being able to use that phone, it would just delay and slower the learning process. Right?

1. Optimize Actions & Slow Down:- It is quite obvious that a person baffled with confusion is vulnerable to making one of the most stupid decisions. Your Actions follow your decisions, and for every action that you take for a bad decision, you are wasting energy and resources, the two things that can take you out of this baffled state. Also, taking no action and just contemplating for hours, planning in corpus amounts and just easing yourself to escape from the situation temporarily won’t work either . You have to work out a middle path, optimizing the amount of actions that you take throughout the day.

Not doing much when you feel lost and confused is a healthy action. Most of us go back and forth between totally hiding out from our problems at one extreme, and at the other, pushing-pushing-pushing to try to get life to be better (and that’s perfectionism, which is exhausting).

2. Find the Right Moment:- Have you noticed that no matter how deep in a problem you are , there are moments that you feel just right, you have perfect clarity about what a perfect solution should look like. Such a moment can occur while sitting among your friends when the overall mood is lighter or maybe right after watching a movie or perhaps right after waking up a day. Whenever you come across the right moment scribble on a piece of paper all the good thoughts that come to your mind , if you are with your friends or family just make a note of the thoughts on your phone. Don’t try to keep it short , be a specific as you can and dump whatever occurs to your mind at that time as this is highly likely to be the breakthrough for all your problems.

Creating the right moment if it does’t occur-

Disclaimer: This might sound like a guided meditation practice(and probably is one)

I am someone who deeply believes that mornings are magical. So, plan and wake up super early one day , anything 2–3 hours before your usual time will work. Take a shower and sit back relaxed with a pen and a diary , preferably somewhere apart from your usual work place.Places such as a balcony , a garden or the terrace or anything similar would do.

Take a deep breath and write down 10 things you are great full for at that very moment.

Now, pay attention to all the thoughts that have been puzzling you and write down your thoughts about them , what you think can be the simplest solutions to them.

3. Give it time :- This will sound like a motherhood statement but the importance that this holds makes me ineffectual in eliminating it out of this article. It’s going to be okay. This becomes your mantra when the lost and confused sort of anxiety is nipping at your heels. The more effort you put in speeding things up the more complicate things will seem. Things will soon fall back into place too casually for you to notice. Actualy giving it time is the best way you can start embracing confusions.

4. Make Rational Decisions:- Got tough choices to make? Makes you even more confused?

Let’s make the decision making easy, using a straightforward technique by Suzy Welch.

The fundamental premise of Welch’s “10–10–10 Rule” is that our decisions define us. Each of our choices has consequences, both now and in the future.

Welch advocates making decisions thoughtfully by considering the potential positive and negative consequences in the immediate present, the near term, and the distant future: or in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years.

Next time you take a decision, think about how you would feel about it in the next 10 minutes(Will you regret it?), 10 months and 10 years. If you get a positive answer for 2 or 3 out of 3 times, go with you decision and don’t look back ever again.

Also, the next time you seek advice regarding a decision from a mentor , ask him/her to give you a brief idea about the potential consequences of the decision in 10 mins,10 days and 10 months.

Note:- With decisions having a larger time scale you can obviously change the rule to 10 weeks, 10 months and 10 years.

5. Be Proactively Positive:- While people believe situations and factors in their life are what dictate their positivity, I belive that being happy is a similar practice as exercising- ‘You have to do it instead of it happening to you’. Positive thinking releases Serotonin, a key hormone for making you happy and clearing your brain of distractions.

Positive thinking will make you much more capable and will work against all bad stress hormones being released as a result of. your bewildered state of mind.

We grow. We change. We risk. We dare. We get afraid.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

That’s why, sometimes, we feel lost and confused. We run up against our fear, but we aren’t sure what to do, at which point we feel these distinctly uncomfortable feelings.

The “Why” isn’t as important as figuring out how to shift. As you shift, as you start doing the actions necessary for shifting from confusion to clarity, these set of actions soon become a habit, and instead of trying to figure out the “why” you start going…

Related posts:

I was sitting in the conference room with my boss and the rest of my team. We were discussing an annual project that no one wanted to undertake. It got tossed around like a hot potato every year and…

He asked me to go down. “He Asked Me To” is published by Melissa Steussy in Black Bear.

Why do so many run from love? Is it a deep-rooted fear of intimacy or rejection? Or does the notorious “hook-up culture” defining our modern world foster the ultimate fear of being used and…