Unlimited Horizons

Author(s): Hermann Kuhn
Publisher: Crosswind Publishing Germany

Page 97

Challenges
97
How to Neutralize Challenges Neutralizing is different for each single challenge. The next chapter deals with their specific mechanisms.
Yet three basic strategies apply to all challenges:
1 - Knowing the Game To dissolve a challenge we often only need to know that this particular theme is active in our life. Once we become aware how unwittingly we engage in ever the same (annoying) events, we can easily end our automatic response.
This can be compared to a magic trick that fascinates us each time for as long as we are unaware how it is done. Yet once we know the trick, our automatic fascinated reaction dispels completely.
Example: When we stumble over a brick in our path and get hurt, we impulsively tend to blame the brick, the person or the circumstances that put the obstacle there. Yet it is basically our own inattention that made us experience pain. As long as we continue to blame outside factors, we lay the ground for innumerable further negative experiences of this kind. Yet once we realize that it is us that needs to be more careful, we fundamentally free ourselves from this blind mechanism.
2 - Direct Confrontation Other challenges are not as easily dissolved and require courage in a confrontation. Here it pays to plan well and define clearly what we aim for.
Example: If building up courage is a theme of life for us, this does not mean that after neutralizing the challenge we are