You know how in personal development seminars you keep hearing that challenges make you grow, and how challenging people who test and resist you open up resources in you, and consciously you go "Yeah, exactly", while your sub-conscious goes "Yeah, keep telling yourself that, it may make you feel better, but I'd rather have things go smoothly, thank you very much!"?
On some level, you may be able to see how it is true with big, monumentous events, although part of you may still sometimes bicker "well, you can make good out of bad, but how exactly would it have been worse if it hadn't happened in the first place?!", but when you are in high energy states you may still see how it really all served you, even if it was painful as hell in the moment. But the every-day small annoyances, people shutting you down when you just want to help, administrative hurdles and such, how can that possibly be a good thing?
Well, I got two examples today, and I didn't go looking for them.
A couple od days ago I got an email about vegan options that really upset me. Not that I want to push vegan food on everybody, but if your main mission is sustainability, and you have great displays, and people are all motivated and stuff to do the right thing, but then the restaurant offers not a single vegetarian or vegan option, but all it serves is meat and fish, then the message is really inconsistent, and it does more harm than good in some ways. Basically, the message was "Do the right thing! Just not here, it's just too hard..." The "vegetarian option" I was offered was a Tuna salad. So I made a suggestion to maybe add one or two tasty vegan options to the menu, to at least give people the choice and was told it was impossible.
Well, if you can relate or not, it upset me, because I knew it was factually wrong on so many levels, even Burger King advertises with a vegan burger right now, and I knew it would hurt the very creatures I cared about, and by people I had thought were my natural allies, so I got incensed and looked for all the ways of how they were wrong, how vegan and vegetarian food wasn't all perishable, and boring, or unaffordable, so suddenly I saw vegan options everywhere. Including in a podcast. So I set out to buy oatmeal and blueberries today, to replace my less than healthy breakfast, which had replaced my fruit & veg juice when I couldn't use the juicer anymore.
I walked out of the store with EUR 80 worth vegan food, most of which I hadn't even been aware of before, lots of which I had loved before ever being aware of the fact that there was such a thing as a vegan diet, all of which made me want to get home asap so I could sample it. Fruits that I had loved as a child, which I had forgotten about, veggie dish options that I had previously dismissed because I had found out that I was so tired all the time because I was allergic against cheese, forgetting that there are vegan cheese options now, and a variety of veg, local and Asian foods that easily made up for my protein needs.
And then I looked at the cart and thought, why did I not buy this stuff before? And then it dawned on me. Because I had had the same limiting mindset as the people I now wanted to prove wrong. I had had a great vegan food plan and options in the old place, but when I moved to the new place, instead of sampling all the new healthy vegan options and extending my range, I had sampled pretty much everything new on the unhealthy range, from waffles, to pizza, to patatas bravas (fried potato veges with mayonnaise) but had hardly explored what was healthy and assumed I had to stick with salad and apples then, if I wanted to eat healthy. So I ate the same pré-prepared salad with hummus and guacamole EVERY SINGLE DAY until I was so sick of it that I resented healthy food and the need to eat it and slowly but surely added so many unhealthy options, that at the end I was glad to find a token salad leaf in my diet.
And I wasn't fully aware of it, I just felt like crap.
And then came the email and I wanted to prove them wrong... That email may have annoyed me, and if they keep holding on to that mindset, others will get hurt, humans and animals, so I hope they won't, but they sure made my personal life better. My personal diet has improved no end, I feel much better, have much more energy, and love the food!
And the admin hurdles? I made a point yesterday of not getting upset about something I was sure was superfluous, and to not let the person feel it, but to instead understand where she was coming from and going above and beyond to make her feel good. Not only did it improve her experience, and I didn't run into another obstacle I already anticipated, but I felt like a million bucks coming out and sailed through the next admin hurdle without a problem, although there were numerous objections to deal with in a language I still don't speak well enough.
This could have gone very different and would have, as it had on other occasions, had I been in a low energy state and cranky, rather than on top of the world after the first truly healthy morning routine that worked, with the help of that podcast and a very helpful coaching session last night. It just drove home the point of how incredibly important energy is in one' s life, which reinforced the healthy life style again...
It was two incredibly important lessons, which I would not have learned without resistence.