Many of my clients are firefighters. Not actual firefighters, but metaphorical firefighters in business settings. Their job is to manage the crises that often occur day in and day out. Needless to say, many of them are just wiped out from putting out fires all day. One of my clients recently said to me, “What’s the fire going to be today?” Interestingly enough, that question led to an epiphany for both of us.

What if his job is to expect fires and respond to them, versus dreading fires and reacting to them? What if firefighting is the job, versus an aspect of the job? How would he feel then? My client sat there for a minute and then said, “I’d actually feel better, because I keep waiting for the fires to stop and they are here to stay.” And he’s right, not just for him but for most of us. Stuff happens. (Feel free to insert a swear word in place of stuff. I’ll keep it family friendly.) Work, and life outside of work, is often a series of fires. Some of them are like friendly campfires and some of them are pure chaos, and yet all of them are part of life.

Ultimately, we can ask ourselves, “WHAT’S THE TERRIBLE FIRE TODAY?” Or, “I’m curious. What fire is going to show up today?” The first will have us constantly on edge and anxious. The second will have us curious and open to whatever heads our way. Is it easy to get curious about fires? Nope, it takes some retraining of our brains. When we tell our brain that it’s a scary fire, our brain puts us into fight/flight response in order to protect us, but we don’t need protection from those daily fires. We need to reprogram our brain to not panic, but rather get curious and calm. It takes some practice, but our old brain can learn new tricks!

Fires are inevitable, but misery isn’t required. Start to address the fires in your life and you’ll probably start to see that they are a continual burn and just pop up periodically. Most of the fires we see are pretty consistent, which means we can plan on them and we can choose how we want to respond to them. We can let our nervous systems take a break by not looking at every fire as a crisis, but rather as part of life. Real firefighters learn how to manage their stress as they literally walk into fires. They are certainly super heroes. What if we could also be super heroes by calmly walking into the metaphorical fires in our lives?

Love,

Lisa Kaplin Psy. D. PCC