If you’re below the age of 30, you might still find it unbelievable that the older you get, the less enthusiasm one might have. Actually, I personally don’t believe it is “true”. I do know, however, that over time, people do begin to experience limiting emotional states, particularly with a wider understanding of the world and how we live our lives.
Let’s take a ficticious example of James. He grows up in a happy family, with little to worry about. As he grows older, he achieves a lot in school and college and ultimately ends up in the place of work where he enjoys. A few years later, his father passes away naturally. A friend of his dies of cardiac arrest. The company that he is working for shuts down as a result of fraud within the uppermost echelons of his organization.
Okay, so you’re James, what do you do? Some people go “geez, I didn’t sign up for this” and they simply find a 30 storey building to do bungee jumping… without the rope. For some, it’s a lesson that “teaches me that whatever happens, good or bad, life goes on”. I believe that in either case, it boils back down to the term resilience. It has been shown that about a third of people in the world tend to be optimists (hurrah for us counselors and therapists). No matter what happens in life, people who are faced with challenges do not remain helpless. Unfortunately, there are a segment of people whom we don’t know what’s going on in their brain or mind (they don’t even seek help), and the other segment who are helpless even before the event occurs due to limiting beliefs and personal identity.
Enthusiasm is an emotional state that can be easily crushed if it is not taken care of. One of my friends had a pet hamster that was accidentally crushed when a pile of her books landed on top of the wandering rodent. Unfortunately for it, that was the last thing it saw (“why is it getting darker all of a sudden”). For her, she was scarred. Owning a tiny, fragile pet was a no-no. Then she got married and got a golden retriever. Why? Because it was bigger and she wouldn’t get to crush this one, not even by accident!
See how we tend to generalize based on our past references. A lot of enthusiasm dies pretty much like this – it gets crushed out of existence because we don’t learn from our experience, let alone foster the enthusiasm. Yes, I strongly believe we can grow enthusiasm for life and be optimists. But the trouble is that most of our emotional control is ceded to unconscious patterns. For instance, it is common for us once in a while to experience lethargy for no good reason. This is the main thing that hits depressives regularly and the normal population once in a long while. But the difference is that those who feel bad and feed the bad feeling keep feeling bad. They nurture the neural structures that sustain this behavior. However, those who are more resilient will change in spite of their feelings. So they realize how bad they feel and they get out of it. They jump right out of their seats and do something. That drives their natural physiological mechanisms of change and cause them to be far more resistant to the formation of bad feelings in general.
So, while I refer to those above 30 years, it merely means that we’ve had the opportunity to experience odd situations like James. Things don’t always turn out the way we intend. But even with those who are under the age of 30, there are relationship issues, quarrels with family, perhaps divorce, disease, loss of a pet, loss of a loved one, loss of a loved item that is symbolic to one’s identity… the list goes on.
Can we avoid all these events? Of course not. Can we avoid feeling bad in such events? Not always. But I can guarantee that if we fall victim to these feelings and stop our daily discipline for enthusiasm in spite of them, we will succumb to failure, wallow in it and perpetuate because it seems like the common thing to do. Then it spreads.
Hmm.
How about spreading a little good feeling on a day to day basis instead?
Stuart Tan, MBA, SDCG, BA (Hons), is a Licensed NLP Trainer since 1997, a trained counselor and therapist since 1999, and a leadership, team performance and change management consultant. He certifies NLP Practitioners and Master Practitioners through a competency based approach. He is also an executive coach and life coach.
Contact him for information about his corporate seminars, certification workshops and coaching services.