3 Tough Questions to Ask Yourself on a Tough Day

Two thousand years ago in ancient Greece, the great philosopher Socrates was hiking around a public park when a neighbor approached him and said, "You will never believe, not in a million years, what I have just heard from one of our common friends."

Note: This article is taken from the writer ANGEL CHERNOFF, in which she talks to us about the most important questions that we should ponder in our difficult days in order to overcome them and move forward in our lives.

But Socrates interrupted him by raising his hand and saying, "Your words must pass the three-stage test before you complete this story," which made his neighbor stare and not know what to say.

Socrates added: "The first stage is the truth; that is, are you absolutely sure that the story you are about to tell me is true?" His neighbor replied: "I am not really sure; actually, I have heard it from someone I know," which prompted Socrates to respond to him quickly, saying: "So let's move to the second stage; is what you will tell me good in any way, form, or content?" His  neighbor was about to say no.

Before he could complete his words, Socrates interrupted him again by saying, "Then your story may not be true, and it is certainly not good," which the neighbor already confirmed. Socrates said, "Well, maybe you can still save your stance, so tell me if anything related to your story is useful or beneficial to us"? The neighbor stared again for a moment, not absorbing anything he had been told.

Socrates ends the conversation by saying, “So you want to tell me something that may not be true, that is definitely not good, that is not useful to know, and so you have no good reason to tell me this story or to believe it yourself,” prompting the neighbor to look at the ground and nod his head away with sadness and silence.

Tough Questions for Tough Days:

Many things have not changed since the era of "Ancient Greece" in many respects, especially regarding the stories we tell ourselves and others. We waste much of our precious energy and time telling stories and conveying gossip and rumors. In addition, many of us are used to connecting to the Internet and browsing social networking sites in the morning before doing anything else for reasons that are not even good for us, away from the benefit of others around us. We usually do this to distract ourselves.

If we live in a comprehensive and wide-ranging universe and have ample opportunities to discover the right, good, and valuable things, we would be able to know the wrong, bad, and harmful things to do. Although those compromises that we resort to through many distractions and tedious things are acceptable for a short time, they will become unacceptable in the end. We find ourselves paying the price of our neglect and complacency, and we begin to feel pain. Then we begin to feel severely broken inside in our challenging days when stories and rumors are no longer enough to distract us from the pain accumulating and gradually increasing within our minds.

So you should not fall into the trap of destroying yourself and collapsing in that way unnecessarily. Still, you should take the advice of "Socrates" instead by simply focusing on the right, good, and valuable things that have succeeded and yielded promising results in Socrates life two thousand years ago. I assure you that it is still successful for many people today. It is time to avoid distractions, become aware, and raise your focus and understanding of what is going on in your mind, especially on days that are much harder than your expectations. So you should ask yourself the following questions:

1. Is the story that resonates in your head right now completely true?

The stories we tell ourselves change what we see in front of us, in every sense of the word. When we have an experience and a particular tale inside our minds about how life is going, that experience tends to become exactly like our story and the perspective we see life through, even with a lot of evidence to support otherwise, as was recently reminded to me by one of the attendees of my conference entitled "Think Better, Live Better".

She compared her current marital problems and psychological pressure to an old proverb or tale about a group of blind men touching an elephant for the first time in their lives to discover how it could look. Each of them sensed a different part of that elephant's body, such as its leg, hose, side, or tusk, without touching any other part of it at all. Then those men compared their observations eagerly and enthusiastically, quickly discovering that they were entirely at odds with regard to the shape of the elephant. A lot of unnecessary tension and dialogue occurred between them quickly.

Something similar happens through our various and wide-ranging past experiences. Some of us are heartbroken due to deep sorrow; others have lost parents, brothers, or children due to accidents and diseases; and some have been betrayed, endured it, or got expelled from the job that secured their livelihood.

Some of us are discriminated against because of our gender or race. When we enter into a new life experience that awakens our unique memories related to our painful stories from the past and raises them in our souls, our current outlook on life changes and becomes severely limited and narrow because of those memories.

Usually, the narrowness and limitation of our current perspective due to a negative experience in the past are just defensive mechanisms. Every day in our lives, we suffer from a certain degree of doubt and uncertainty, which our innate defense mechanisms do not like at all. Therefore, our minds try to fix this imbalance by filling the information gaps in our minds by clinging to the stories we feel comfortable with.

We subconsciously try to better understand everything in the present by using old stories and past experiences as short news to fill those gaps. While that method sometimes works, our old stories and past experiences are, at other times, completely inappropriate and have nothing to do with the present moment; they end up hurting us and harming the people we love.

So I will challenge you to raise awareness through the story you tell yourself whenever you feel tension and sorrow. You have to deliberately distance yourself from it and better understand reality; you have to not be a superficial person who cares about simple things; you have to explore and investigate what is behind those things and investigate them and monitor everything without having proactive assumptions.

I also want you to ask yourself if you can be absolutely sure that the story is true and accurate, think about how you feel and act when you tell that story to yourself and listen to it inside your mind, and then think about other things that you may see or go through in the present moment if you take that story out of your mind.

Then do your best to improve the way you think and develop it to live a better life in the end.

2. What good thing would you appreciate now if you really want to?

Michelle-a new trainee who reads one of my books, sent me an e-mail which I will discuss in the following paragraph: “My 10-year-old patient will undergo her 14th surgery in three years to fight a rare and aggressive type of serious cancer, and I have never seen her frown, furrow her eyebrows, or miss a single moment of happiness even after suffering so much and undergoing all these medical procedures and surgeries, and although the chances of survival are not in her favor and are still very small, I am sure that her behavior, presence, and acceptance of her disease are the main reasons that made her live well until she reached this stage.

She is still positively engaged in living her life to the fullest by laughing and playing with her family and friends. She has realistic and intelligent goals to implement next year and is already working to achieve them. The presence of children like her who can withstand all the suffering she has suffered and wake up daily despite all this with great enthusiasm and passion for their lives is why I enrolled in your training course and bought your new book.”

Her words caught my attention and intrigued me for obvious reasons, so I shared them after getting her consent. Michelle continued, "My conversations with this wonderful little girl opened my eyes to the truth and made me realize all the self-destructive illusions in my mind and that I have a perfect life. I am very lucky to be alive and well, for example, and yet I sit in my house most nights, and I think the exact opposite.

Although I don't necessarily do it on purpose or focus on it, I simply do it, thinking long and hard about how my life should be different from what it is and how everything in it should be better, more accessible, more joyful, more fun, and so on. At the same time, these illusions spoil my behavior, outlook on life, and ability to progress in essential areas of my life.”

Her words must be a great reminder to all of us not to allow our fantasies to take over our lives and spoil our pleasure. In fact, most of us come to similar perceptions at some point in our lives; the older we get and the more tragedies and challenges we experience in the real world, the more we know about the blessings that overwhelm us and realize how lucky we are, and how many  times the illusions in our minds prevent us from enjoying those blessings.

So today, I ask you to live your day and practice seeing and accepting life as it really is without listening to any illusions in your mind. I advise you to do what you must do without worrying or fearing the worst, grieving or feeling sadness for what may happen, or worrying too much about how difficult your life is. You have to be present in the present moment, accomplish your tasks and dreams step by step, and always give your best.

If you have no idea where to start, you simply have to look at life around you and look for blessings in it, and be immediately grateful for the blessings of good health, family, friends, work, and home. Nothing lasts forever, so enjoy what you have now.

3. How can you view things more productively now?

A framed passage in our office, taken from the memoirs of my great-grandmother, writer Marc Chernoff, dated September 16, 1977, reads: "Today I am sitting in my hospital bed waiting for a mastectomy, but I feel strangely fortunate that I have never had any health problems in my life. I am a 69-year-old woman sitting in the last room at the end of the corridor before the beginning of the pediatric department at the hospital. Over the past few hours, I have seen dozens of cancer patients being pushed in chairs or wheelchairs, none of whom are over 17 years old."

Her words were displayed in our home office to remind us that we always have something we should be grateful for in this life. We should do everything in our power to wake up each day grateful for our lives, no matter what blessings we get or problems we face, because other people elsewhere in the world are fighting desperately for their lives.

My husband Mark and I recently attended the 35th birthday party of my childhood best friend Janet. She was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer in stage 2 four years ago, which is devastating news for anyone, especially at this very young age. Still, she is fortunately in a state of peace with her body, which has been free of cancer for the past two years.

When we were having lunch, she told us, “I love my thirties more than my twenties; I feel more confident in myself and know what I really want from life, as well as discovering my actual abilities, and I also know that life is short and limited and that I only have one chance to live it, so I do my best to make the most of every day I live”.

Hearing her words was fascinating to see how her perspective on her condition allowed her to see the complicated ordeal she was going through as an opportunity to understand what she wanted from her life and what she wanted to achieve. Her situation reminded us that happiness does not lie in the absence of problems and difficulties in our lives but in having the ability to use and invest in problems as opportunities to change our perspective on life for the better.

So I advise you to think about your own life and the joy and opportunities you can see more clearly if your mind is not firmly attached to the disappointments and difficulties you have experienced. Remember that it does not matter what the world takes from you or underestimates you; what matters is what you do with the remaining blessings and opportunities you have.

Truth be told, you begin to have inner peace the moment you take a deep breath and decide not to allow an event beyond your control to control you in the long run. Your personality does not determine the difficulties and problems that happened to you; you are actually the person you decide to be in this moment, so take a deep breath and start again.

Know that most people make themselves unhappy and depressed by the impossibility of accepting life sweetly and bitterly, so don't be one of those people. Forget the past and forgive; forgetting doesn't mean not caring about something or someone anymore; it just means realizing that the only thing you can control in the present moment is yourself.

Often, forgetting and forgiving means simply changing the category or description of the situation—that is, looking at the situation itself with a new perspective and a willingness to accept all new ideas—and then moving on to the next stage during which you can devote yourself to achieving your goals and ambitions.

In conclusion:

You can completely control the way you look at life. Then you can look for lessons learned through the difficulties you encounter instead of anger and resentment. You can also feel admiration for the achievements of others instead of negative feelings of envy that will hurt you in the first place, or act and take action on something that matters to you instead of just worrying about it.

You can also replace your inner doubt with feelings of confidence and faith; your outlook on life is always stronger than your circumstances and situations. I advise you to speak silently to yourself throughout the day, and you will find that part of you will believe every word you say. Hence, it is essential to maintain your full vigilance on complex and challenging days and take time to reflect on the previous three questions.