Mental Poo (PUH)
One of the most influential minds of the modern personal development movement (that you maybe have never heard of) is Phil Stutz. He’s a psychologist and therapist for celebrities as well as a high performance coach for some of the world’s most successful people. I’ve been diving into his work more recently and wanted to share some of his best with you.
Stutz says that 3 unavoidable, universal aspects in life are pain, uncertainty, and hard work. He finds that a lot of people find themselves in conflict because they don’t have the right relationship with these things and therefore, they become negative influences.
To quickly define each - Pain is an aversive response you have to emotional, physical, or psychological strain. Uncertainty is the doubt and fear we experience around an unknown future. And work, in particular hard work, is the mechanism that changes any circumstance.
Put them all together in an acronym and you’ve got PUH - Poo!
If we want, we can choose to treat these things like poo. The default response is to be disgusted, avoidant, and dismissive of pain, uncertainty, and hard work. I think we can all agree that feces are nasty... and similarly we default to relating with PUH a bit negatively as well.
But here's the opportunity. From a different perspective - poo is a fertilizer! It is the ingredient you need to support growth, development and proliferation. In that way poo is a great thing and a catalyst to things changing and improving.
In order for this PUH to serve you - pain, uncertainty, and hard work - you must choose a positive way to relate with it.
Instead of feeling like a victim in pain, get curious about where that pain is coming from and what you have to learn from it.
Instead of being paralyzed from taking action by uncertainty, use it as a training ground to experiment and get better at predicting how things will be.
And instead of being allergic to hard work, find more value in the ways you’re investing your time so that you can build the life of your dreams.
I don’t mean to be grotesque - My aim is to get your attention so that you can improve your life. If you feel like this insight was interesting or helpful for you, it will certainly be helpful to other people you care about.
Sharing is caring! Forward this along to someone who you think would be curious to learn about it.
