Week 9 - The "can't" Word

Hey everyone!

Well, this was an interesting week to be sure. It had it's ups and downs. I was under the impression that I had a week and a half to prepare, rehearse, and polish a presentation that was worth a lot of my grade. Turned out I had two days. That didn't go super well... but there's a chance for me to redeem myself with the next and final presentation coming up in a couple of weeks, so I'll be sure to do my best and learn from this mistake. Otherwise, I'd say it was a good week! Very busy and very rewarding in many cases. 

Also I bought a longboard so that's cool. 

For this post I want to focus on something that my dad always told me: A Dean never says they can’t. I would say that I can’t tell you how many times I heard that as a kid but that would be breaking the rule so I won’t. My father oftentimes told me that whenever I told him that there was something that I couldn’t do, something that was difficult for me to do. You know what? He was always right.

In the first half of the week, we went over the ABCX formula, created by Reuben Hill. To explain this formula simply:

A (Actual Events) + B (Both the resources and the response) + C (Cognitions, or the family’s definition of the event) = Total Experience.

What was most stressed to me was the fact that though we cannot choose what actual events come our way as a family, we can choose how we define that event more than anything. For example, say someone loses their job. We can define it as the end of the world, the end of financial stability and the end of a marriage in many cases, but that wouldn’t help our situations much. Instead, if we define it as a bump in the road, an opportunity to find a better job, or even a brief intermission where you can spend more time with your family, things start to take on a different tone, right?

This much also impacts how we walk away from the situation. If you make it though intact as a family thinking the whole time that this is the end, you’ll continue to look at it that way for a while. This perspective, this new experience that we just molded like so will play into different aspects of our daily life, changing the way we see anything that is remotely related to this experience. This effect can be for better or for worse in our families, and the best part is that we choose how we respond to it.

Another topic we talked about was anxiety. My professor shared two things that I want to share with you now. First, anxiety is a natural, normal, and healthy response to danger. Second, an anxiety disorder is perceiving a danger where none exists. These two ideas were very interesting to me, as I hadn’t really considered this before. It’s normal for people to feel anxiety in response to stressors, but it isn’t healthy to dwell on that or feel it over everything. When someone deals with anxiety inducing situations and perceives that there’s no escape from it, or no solution, that’s when it develops into depression.

This brings me back to what my dad told me: we never say we can’t. Both of these situations can be controlled by our perspective. In the ABCX model, I have control over how I define situations. When dealing with anxiety, I have the ability to find that solution, preventing a descent into depression.

This is one of the things I love most about life. We have the ability and the power to choose not only what we do, but how we perceive things. We have agency and accountability, two elements that grant us the power to act for ourselves. We can determine how our lives play out and how outside events affect us. I’ve been blessed to be able to take a step back and gain greater perspective on a lot of things because I came to understand that I simply can.

Hope this helps. As always, thanks for reading. Hope you all have a great day!

-Caleb