We can work around a lot of things, and still make it work, can't we?
This week a friend and I caught ourselves laughing at how much bad behavior around a particular topic that we had tolerated in a certain workplace.
This disrespectful behavior was usually prefaced with the comment, "It's not personal...".
That should have been our red flag.
Anytime someone says, "It's not personal"... it's gone over the line. ("It's not personal that I'm yelling and blaming you for a hard message." "It's not personal that every time you do your job we gang up and vent our frustration.")
We both agreed that now that we have clarity and are outside the situation where we felt (for some reason) it had to be tolerated, we will never ever allow that type of behavior to be tolerated again.
The things we tolerate are surreptitious. Sometimes they sneak in slowly.
At other times they arrive with a shocking surprise.
We are faced with a choice: Reject or Adapt.
Right now, you might be tolerating something small or something big. But, I guarantee we are all tolerating something at this very moment:
- A pile of papers you need to file
- Your inner-critic beating you up day-in and day-out
- A repetitive relationship conflict that you now tip-toe around rather than address
When you allow yourself to elevate to the mountain-top view of your life, and you become present in your day, you'll notice the eggshell walking, the friction points, and the places where you're morphing your values and boundaries to accommodate something that is less than what you deserve.
To get yourself past tolerating, the clearing needs to be done.
- Clean things up (literally and figuratively)
- Remove the friction
- Address the problem
The act of tolerating is a choice.
You're allowing something negative to remain in your world.
And, negative is not positive...it's not even neutral.
Remove it.
Stop wasting your precious joy to tolerate something.
Get free of what's weighing you down.
Because even though you can bloom in the desert, we're not made to tolerate. We bloom our brightest when the soil is sustaining, the environment is nurturing.
The goal is not to adapt to pain, bad behavior or soul-sucking friction.
It's to LIVE.
So, the question, my friends...
What are you tolerating?
