You’ve been given the pink slip. Though the start-up where you worked had seen rough times before, the company always managed to weather crises. As you were part of the core team, or at least thought you were, you didn’t really expect to be fired. Not like this. Without any warning. In fact, this is possibly the first disruption you’ve experienced in your ten-year career. You’ve changed jobs before, but that was your choosing. For the first time in your working life, you’ve been caught off guard.
In Tiny Experiments, Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes that disruptive events can feel like a “direct attack on who we are and our place in the world.” Though we don’t have control over many stressors that hit us, how we navigate turbulence in our lives can make a significant difference to our ability to rebound, and impacts our long-term well-being. When faced with situations beyond the pale of our control, there are two modes of acceptance that people resort to. Resigning acceptance involves throwing up our hands and giving up hope. On the other hand, active acceptance entails recognizing the current difficulties and dealing with them constructively and hopefully. Rather than becoming distraught or passive, active acceptance allows you to meet challenging circumstances with an adaptive agility.
Two steps
According to Le Cunff, practicing active acceptance involves two distinct steps. When we are met with bad news, like being fired from our job, it’s natural to feel a gamut of negative emotions from anger to grief to shame. The first step is to pause and watch these emotions course through your mind and body, like it is happening to someone else. Stepping back from your own experience is not easy but is a skill that can be cultivated with practice. While you may be inclined to evaluate these experiences as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ you need to resist this tendency and simply observe what is happening within you. If you can accurately label your feelings like ‘worried’, ‘vexed,’ ‘scared’ and ‘tense’, that itself is a form of emotional regulation.
After you’ve gained some distance from your feelings, when you are not embroiled by them, you can move on to the next step. This involves considering the short- and long-term consequences of the curve ball that hit you, and then determining which aspects need to be addressed. If you lost your job, you would first need to figure out whether you have the financial wherewithal to support yourself for the next few months. If not, whom can you turn to for support? Can you move back in with your parents to save money? Then the next task that confronts you is finding a new job. Would you like a job similar to the previous one or are you ready to try something different? What avenues can you tap to help you figure this out?
Of course, new challenges may crop up when you start your search. Once again, you may experience a tizzy of emotions when you fail a job interview. Instead of getting mired by your emotions, you may engage in the two-step re-set of active acceptance. If you keep doing this every time you hit a roadblock, this way of navigating crises will become second nature to you.
Acceptance doesn’t mean passivity
In a blog post on PauseMeditation, Christopher Miller delineates the difference between passive and active acceptance. The former is “disempowered, apathetic” while the latter is “empowered, curious.” Passive acceptance involves a hopeless resignation whereas active acceptance coaxes us to take responsibility for our feelings and helps us take appropriate steps to alleviate our distress, including seeking help.
Likewise, Rachel Landman writes in a blog on Humantold, that though the word ‘acceptance’ has connotations of passivity and helplessness for many people, we can practice an active form that allows us to deal with the inevitable hardships and misfortunes of life with graceful equanimity. Landman emphasizes that this is not a state that one achieves but an ongoing practice we need to continually engage in every time we are met by a hiccup, roadblock or a tsunami.
About the Author
Aruna Sankaranarayanan is the author of Zero Limits and the co-author of Bee-Witched along with Brinda S. Narayan.