Recently I overheard a conversation about the “struggle bus”. There were people on this struggle bus. The story involved drama and situations described as hard and unfair.
Since that conversation, I’ve heard a lot of people using the word struggle to describe their clients, jobs, writing, relationships, toddlers, and teens.
Struggle is a verb. A struggle is defined as to “make forceful or violent efforts to get free of restraint or constriction.”
Battle. Conflict. Clash. All the same as a struggle.
Struggle is a thought we choose to think about a circumstance.
When we take a circumstance, such as a toddler who won’t nap, a recipe that won’t come together, or a blog post that won’t flow and attach struggle to it, we feel bad. As a result, we have a negative reaction to our feeling and we may yell, feel ashamed, or sit at our computer and resist the blog post we need to write. The results we get are a crying, non-sleeping toddler, feeling bad about ourselves, or a blog post that’s not written.
When we take the same circumstance (or someone else maybe has the same circumstance) and attach ease or flow to it instead of struggle, we feel a better emotion and we can have a positive reaction to it. We realize nothing has gone wrong and that this circumstance is temporary. We lay on the couch with our wide-awake toddler and watch Caillou reruns, make notes on the recipe and plan to try it again, or we get up from our computer and focus on something else for a while until the ideas for the blog post flows a little bit better. As a result, our outcomes are more positive.
A struggle isn’t real. It’s our mind playing tricks on us telling us something about situations we all face. So we get to choose. Would we rather have battles, conflicts, and clashes, or flow, ease, and peace?
It’s a new year. And a new day. It’s time for the struggle bus to leave the station.
Cookbook author and culinary dietitian Maggie Green coaches aspiring cookbook authors in the process of writing cookbooks, cookbook proposals, and building their author platform. Download her checklist “Am I Ready to Write A Cookbook?”.