Friday, March 11, 2011

What if?

By Ricardo Andorinho

If you haven’t seen the movie “Letters to Juliet” please be warned that you might find it to be just another romantic comedy somehow similar to most of its genre. For us however, it is an enchanting movie about love, and therefore, we believe it is worth wasting a couple of hours on it. And here is why.

Actress Amanda Seyfried plays the role of a young American fact finder, who travels to the Italian city of Verona, home of the doomed Juliet Capulet of “Romeo and Juliet”, where she joins a group of volunteers who respond to “letters to Juliet” looking for advice about love.
Answering one of these letters, Amanda elaborates as follows: “‘What’ and ‘if’ are two words as non-threatening as words come. But put them together side-by-side and they have the power to haunt you for the rest of your life: ‘What if?’”
“What if” is nothing more than an indication of the human mind’s annoying predisposition to worrying! Have you noticed that your mind is constantly flooding you with questions such as: “What if I lose my job?”; “What if I lose my eyesight, my hearing or my ability to speak?”; “What if no one hires me because of my tendency to overreact?”; “What if no one marries me?”; “What if my family or friends stop loving me?”; “What if I die young without having enjoyed life?”; “What if I do not have the capacity to support my children?”.
And, the cliché, “What if the world ends tomorrow?”
What if, what if, what if...


Keep it simple

Are you close to a nervous breakdown? With this simple exercise of imagining what is behind people’s tendency to worry so much, we already feel overwhelmed! Don’t you? Does such an illustration make you feel more human?
It is not only you who thinks about this “stuff”. The key question is: do you let those two non-threatening little words bother you?
Such words indeed have the power to haunt you for life, but the good news is that they only haunt you if you let them! So, if you feel you want to get rid of some of your worries, here are a couple of tips inspired by Dale Carnegie’s book “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living”:

1. Don’t allow the small things to ruin your happiness;
2. Don’t waste your time revisiting your past over and over again;
3. Live your daily life rather than worrying about the future;
4. Learn to relax at home and at work;
5. Be enthusiastic about your life and your work;
6. Once you discover a problem, work on getting rid of it. Write it down and try to answer some simple questions like:
a. What is the problem?
b. What is its cause/root?
c. What are the possible solutions?
d. What is the best solution for the problem?
7. Avoid “floating paper anxiety”: file and organize paperwork (especially post-its) that might be needed in the future.
8. Decide how much anxiety and worry you should give to a particular matter, and refuse to give it any more.

We hope you will soon be able to say you are living a purposeful, fulfilling and stress-free life!

2 comments:

Cristina Falcão said...

I never let those two little lethal words threaten me.
Have you noticed how people generally complain about life? It is incredible, but there are only miseries to tell, it seems nothing good ever shows up, like good health!
But, if they remember something they did, someone already gone, they wonder in reverie “what if”, and all “what if’s” are pink rose, gold, whatever, they never have negative faces.
I always ask people “what if”, the husband, dead for some years, instead of leading to so much unquestionable “what if” romance, had he lived, had rather turned into a drunkard?
I am still waiting for the first person to answer me such a difficult question.

MBUintelligence said...

thanks Cristina. I don't know if I am able to accurately understand your profound thoughts. May be in a table drinking a coffee?