Dear True Self,
I can be really stubborn sometimes and refuse to change. How can I become more flexible?
Sincerely,
Stub Born This Way
Dear SBTW,
I want you to understand what stubbornness is. Essentially, it means that you have planted your stake into the ground and are not willing to move.
Tell me, are there certain situations where this is a useful quality?
The problem is not your stubbornness, the problem is your stubbornness is working against you, preventing your from growing. If it worked for you, you would not be complaining about it.
Let’s say you are stubborn when someone at your work tells you to do your job differently. You refuse, becoming defensive, and the situation becomes dramatic.
It’s so easy in a circumstance like that to just react. The thing about stubbornness is once it kicks in, it is almost impossible to undo. Have you ever tried to reason with a stubborn person who has made up their mind? You may as well beat your head against a brick wall!
So you are a slave to this reaction, and once you react it’s too late to change. But I want you to understand that you could just as easily choose to be flexible and adaptive. If you were as stubborn about being defensive as you were about your own personal growth, imagine how fast it would happen!
Why is it so much easier to choose to be angry, rigid, unwilling? Only because you have practiced it so much of course. How about you practice being stubborn in more useful ways, ways that actually serve you?
But the word stubbornness is loaded. You only associate it as a negative quality. When it is working for you, we may call it by different names.
Let’s say you are absolutely stubborn about meditating daily. You refuse to miss it. In this sort of scenario, your stubbornness is no longer stubbornness. It is discipline, consistency, focus. Essentially you are unwavering.
Can you imagine digging a well, but every time you dig a few feet, you change your mind and dig somewhere else? You will never find water this way. Only with consistent work in one focused direction will you know if your effort was worth it or not.
Like this you are digging a well within yourself to tap into your ultimate nature. But you keep on changing your mind. At the first sign of friction your stubbornness comes in and you drop your shovel and pout! Is this any way to progress?
You ask about how to be more flexible, but I want you to understand that if stubbornness is truly a practiced quality of yours, then being flexible will not help.
You will make a lot of talk about wanting to be flexible, but you know just as I do that if in a moment you want to be inflexible, then nothing is going to change that. So don’t waste time practicing flexibility.
You must shift your stubbornness so it serves you, then you will naturally be flexible.
The way to make this shift is to decide, right here and now. Use all that stubborn energy you have honed for years, and finally, today, make this one choice:
That your personal growth is more important than your defensiveness.
If you can make this one choice in this moment, then you have the power to stick to it better than most. Not everyone is as practiced as you are at being stubborn. There is power there. Channel it in this way, so that no matter what happens, you make the most out of the situation and grow!
Tell me, if you are unwavering and consistently stubborn about your growth, can any situation in life ever be a hindrance? If you have decided that your growth outweighs your reactions and compulsiveness, then even if you initially react defensively, you are not stuck. You have created a new river for that stubbornness to flow into so it doesn’t cause you to stagnate.
This is really not as complicated as you believe it to be. Simply put, can you avoid change?
Obviously, you cannot. Life will constantly be changing outside of you. But even within you, life is always changing. For as long as you live, you cannot avoid change, even if you sit by yourself like a recluse.
So what the heck is the point in being stubborn in any direction other than one that embraces change? Being stubborn and resisting change which is going to happen anyway? Doesn’t it sound so stupid to try to avoid the inevitable?
So embrace change. Accept that you may still react stubbornly. But decide right now that you want to grow and learn more than you want to be stubborn and stagnate. As you practice, the reactions will lessen, and you moving consciously through situations will increase.
When that happens, your growth will rise exponentially, and you will wonder how you were ever so stubborn in the first place.
With gratitude,
Your True Self
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Dear True Self 