MONDAY MINDSET: INSIDE OF US ARE TWO CHIHUAHUAS
WEEK OF 4/22/24
Inside of us are two Chihuahuas.
You’ve all heard the “ancient wisdom”: inside of us are two wolves. One wolf good, one wolf bad. Which one grows? The one you feed. Blah blah blah.
To distance myself from this kind of TikTok brand of 15-second life hacks, I prefer to think of it as two Chihuahuas. A good little pupper, and a naughty little guy. Why? Because it’s funny, first of all (and humor has a way of making hard things a little easier to digest). And whether it’s a wolf, a chihuahua, or an antelope is kind of irrelevant anyway.
As cliche as it sounds, it’s true. At every step in our lives we are faced with choices on how to proceed, and we should regularly participate in the exercise of taking complex situations and boiling them down to a simple decision making process.
That is to say, in any given situation, do our impulses and actions take us closer to our values, or further from them? Which Chihuahua do you want to feed – the one that moves you closer to who you want to be, or the one who doesn’t? It’s really that simple.
The human mind is incredibly clever and efficient at making our immediate worldview better fit our desires and habits and not the other way around. So it can be helpful to take a step back and audit how we are interacting with others, with our thoughts, and with the world at large. Are we acting in accordance with what we truly value as a whole? Or with what we feel and desire in the moment?
By the way, it’s ok to be imperfect. It’s ok to feed the naughty Chihuahua sometimes. It’s part of us, and this duality is at the core of what it means to be human.
However, we find greater overall happiness and joy by being aligned with our values despite the paradox that moving in this direction often comes at a greater immediate discomfort.
The point here is simple: allow yourself some time to regularly evaluate your behavior, and ask yourself whether you are overall guiding yourself closer to your goals and values, or further from them. You may be surprised at what you find and which behavior and excuses don’t stand up to actual, honest scrutiny!