You have the right to defeat your monsters.  Monsters represent the many evil things that oppose your efforts.  These are the social issues you fight for, the grind of stressors that you seek to relieve or the inconveniences you work to change.

Similar to our favorite Disney Movies:  you are the hero in your story and the good guys always win. Right?

Nope, the Disney storyline will not save you. To grow, you must accept that some monsters are worth dancing with, others you must embrace before you can overcome and there are those that are not going anywhere, you need to learn to let them ride along with you.

I’ll show you how to navigate each below.

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Monsters to dance with

There are monsters that don’t want you to be great! They show up when you try to accomplish something important or focus on something you deeply care about. These monsters tend to look like procrastination, distraction, overwhelm and disappointment.

Their intent is to delay, Delay, DELAY! Until the moment passes or the ultimate mission is abdicated.

Bad Strategy #1: Avoid them at all cost, stay away from the task that invokes these feelings.

Result: Nothing gets done. Ultimately the frustration from feeling unfulfilled will stagnate you.

Better Strategy #2: You fight through the feeling and get things done regardless.

Result: Things get done but the cost of the fight is going to make the next effort much harder. This is called Chronic Fatigue and can lead to the ultimate abdication which is Burnout.

Best Strategy: Dance with these monsters. Don’t see procrastination, distraction, overwhelm and disappointment as a disease. They are dance partners that are trying to highlight your current cadence and rhythm. Notice the rhythm. Take the cue. Ask yourself these questions:

• Why is this important to me?
• What is the next right choice I can make towards the mission?

Results: You are getting things done with a lot of self compassion and awareness

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Monsters to embrace

There are monsters that were given to you. You inherited them from unresolved histories or broken experiences.  These monsters represent things like shame, anger and fear.

Remember this: These monsters helped you survive a difficult moment in your past. Though they are dysfunctional, they filled a gap that got you through it.

Examples:

Shame serves because the pain is easier to bear if you had some origination point to assign its cause. Shame emerges because hating yourself is the most controllable option for assigning that blame.

Anger serves because paying attention to insecure hurt that feels misunderstood, unseen, and invalidated is not satisfying. Anger is a powerful consuming fire which offers the user more control.

Fear serves because the thing you fight is perceptually much bigger than you. Fear takes away your conviction to act but still offers a validating container to hold the intensity of what you are up against.

So what should you do about them now?

Critical to winning with these monsters is to remember that resisting them serves as fuel. The longer you regard them as tormentors the stronger and more consuming they become.

Remember that these beasts are rooted in the memory of what went wrong.

They hold intimacy with events and experience of the past, they haven’t been exposed to is the maturity and experience of your present self. They need to come into intimate contact with all of who you are right now and hope to be in the future.

How do you do this? Adopt a practice of therapeutic journaling. Don’t worry, I created an entire course to teach you step-by-step on how to do this effectively.

Journaling Through Therapeutic Storytelling: A Practice for Daily Authenticity

Another option is working with a professional that can help you navigate your toughest historical moments.  

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Monster to serve you

Despite their destruction, there are some monsters that actively make you better. They act as helpful agitators just like bacteria that serve our digestive process. They are the circumstantial stressors, failures and agitations. Though at times they constrain you, it’s better to ride with them and allow the situation to create solutions for you.  

Many fields of study arrive at the same conclusion: constraints keep you moving forward.

Here are some of my favorite examples:

Biology- Theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman highlighted how cells do not simply hold and store information. They actively build structures only to destroy them until the needed information emerges. (Constraints invoke necessity)

Economics- Carnegie Mellon economics and statistics professor Robert A. Miller coined the term multi-armed bandit process to explain the natural process of expediting failure to generate better decisions on how resources can be used. (Constraints expedites failure to improve outcome)

Spirituality- In Luke 16:8-9, Jesus shares a story about a shred manager who is about to be fired from his job. He deals with this particular challenge in an innovative and slightly crooked way. I like how The Message translation shares Jesus’ lesson from this story: be crafty for what is right, using every adversity to stimulate you to creative survival. (Constraints inspire creativity)

Psychology- Prevalence-induced concept change is a term coined by David Levari, psychologist at Harvard University. Conducting a series of studies, Levari found that instead of becoming more satisfied as you experience fewer problems, you lower your threshold for what you consider a problem. (Constraints provide stability)

Let’s remember this: Sometimes you strive better with some monsters.

Dance with your monsters so you can grow with self compassion and awareness.