Join me as I discuss facing life as an explorer vs. survivor.
Eric Schwartz: Do you see yourself in different circumstances in your life, being more the survivor or the explorer? What ways can you test the waters of exploration and the various scenarios that make up your life? Look forward to seeing you next week.
Here today. Just reaching out to you on this topic of wellness again, as it's such a central theme to likely why you're here in the first place. As a reminder, my name is Eric. I'm a clinical mental health counselor and here to bring affordable, accessible and effective mental health tools and information right to your phone. And today I want to paint you a picture of kind of these two states in which we can find ourselves. And I like to call this the survivor versus the explorer. On one hand, we have the survivor and the survivor is out in the wilderness.
I'm not sure why he's there in the first place. And he looks around and around every corner seems to be a possible opportunity for danger, something out of his control that may lead to the end of his journey. And so he spends his time categorizing, avoiding, researching before he takes a step forward, constantly ready to run at the sight of something that comes along his path that's new or uncertain. Now, we have, on the other hand, the explorer, the same exact forest, same exact place, but the explorer is there intentionally.
And in fact, the explorer also doesn't know exactly what or why this forest exists or even why he was curious about being there in the first place. But the explorer's mindset is focused on discovery, on curiosity, on being open to what he does not already know. And so when he encounters something that maybe the survivor would see as a potential threat, he's patient. He looks for ways in which it could be this or it could be that. He's curious about how this plays a role in the journey that's being created each and every moment, not thinking five steps ahead, but present.
The explorer has a mission that has an unconcluded destination, knows that the journey is going to go somewhere, and he knows that the journey is going to have some struggle in it. But that's exactly why the journey exists. It's exactly why he finds himself where he is. And with that, he's open to what is to come, flexible with the changes that come along his journey without spelling it out. I'll let you think about that. Do you see yourself in different circumstances in your life, being more the survivor or the explorer?
What ways can you test the waters of exploration and the various scenarios that make up your life? Look forward to seeing you next week.
