Guy Reams (00:00.174)
So, today's day two 18, the four pirates boredom and patients, fear and confusion. So I've been really sick this last couple of days. my daughter brought home something from school and of course got us all sick. So now I'm, I've been sick for a couple of days. So I've been just laying in bed. So I decided to, you know, I was binge watching some show about pirates, a documentary on pirates.
And so the restless sitting in bed, laid in bed and the combination of learning about pirates in between my delirium led me to this blog. So, the setter would look up and paraphrase what I consider the four pirates of my progress in life. So throughout my life, I've had four.
pirates that have stolen from me and have arrested me and have prevented me from making progress. So the first of those dastardly pirates is boredom. So boredom is something we think of as a child. Like when you're a kid, you're bored. Hey mom, dad, I'm really bored. But boredom is actually much more, is actually an adult feeling.
Kids when they describe boredom don't really understand the emotion. Adults when they experience boredom also don't understand the emotion and that comes at a great cost. Oftentimes when we're learning something or trying to adopt new things, we have to engage in monotonous activity. Sometimes it may lack novelty or maybe uninteresting.
And so sometimes that repetitive task or whatever, or that lack of stimulation can cause boredom. And if we're not careful, boredom can lead us to take different paths, right? Sometimes boredom can be good. I mean, maybe we do need to change jobs, or do need to change paths and go a different direction. But on the negative side, boredom can lead to feelings of frustration, anxiety, depression.
Guy Reams (02:26.893)
can make us unproductive. It can cause us to change jobs or change what we're doing simply because we don't like the hard parts.
The second pirate that has come to visit me occasionally is impatience. Impatience is also an emotion. When we think of emotion, we think of more of the harder emotions like fear or joy. But we don't think of impatience as an emotion, and it is. People that are impatient or experience impatient will have a lack of tolerance for delay, difficulty, or frustration. They want...
A desire for immediate results, immediate action, and then you struggle to endure any periods of waiting. So you can become irritable, restless, have a short attention span. All of this comes because of impatience we have. And that can happen in our work life as well as our personal lives. We want things to progress faster and they're not doing so. So impatience can be a very dangerous emotion.
It's probably best to learn to establish the opposite, which is patience. Developing the ability to tolerate delays and setbacks, to be calm, to maintain composure, to be mindful of your stress management, and then change your perspective. Maybe you're just being impatient for silly reasons. The third one is the big one. This would be the worst of the pirates, and that is fear.
Fear is a basic emotion. It's one of the most basic emotions we have. And it's really powerful. I mean, fear is obviously something that we need. It's a psychological, physiological and psychological response to danger. Now, oftentimes, there is things that we should be fear of. Like, suddenly a car comes around a corner and could hit us. We have to jump out of the way. So fear can be very powerful. It's something that gets us moving quickly.
Guy Reams (04:23.661)
The problem with fear is although it's normal to respond to danger, sometimes we can respond to things irrationally and we can have the same level of anxiety and stress over things that are not going to cause us any bodily harm or injury. We can let this fear mechanism get in our way and become too powerful and overreact to something that's really not that fearful.
So I've spent a lot of time in my life dealing with the impacts of fear when I needed to have a much more mature relationship with it. Now I've learned to overcome that and I think that a lot of my management of fear in my life has helped me be more positive about what I'm doing in life. Finally, the fourth pirate, which is kind of a sneaky one and that's confusion.
Confusion is a mental state which is characterized by lack of clarity and understanding of a situation. Or you don't really quite understand your own thoughts going on. It's usually temporary and usually very situational. Sometimes we can cause confusion on ourselves like drinking too much or taking too many drugs or whatever. Doing things that we're causing self -harm.
But other things can happen too. Like you can have a lack of nutrition or be eating wrong or things like that which can cause a temporary confusion. Mostly I've noticed that confusion comes when I'm fatigued, I'm stressed or I have an illness or some major nutritional deficiency. Those are the times that I've experienced the most confusion in my life. And confusion can be very sneaky.
you'll be working and then you'll start to have confusion feelings and you won't really know why. And then it takes you a while to figure out what the cause is. And once you've identified the cause, the source of confusion goes away and you're back to operating normally. So anyway, confusion is something that hits you all the time. I mean, it's not like you're always in a state of confusion. You just, you sometimes get into confusion when your brain is being taxed unnecessarily or something like that. Anyway, those are the four pirates.
Guy Reams (06:40.909)
I think all four of these pirates need to be dealt with pretty quickly or they'll disrupt our processes. They'll disrupt what we're doing in life. I think you should take them head on. You should understand that they're there. You should understand when they come up. You should understand what triggers them to come. You should understand what attracts them to come into your life and try to avoid that as much as possible. Obviously, if you have chronic issues with this, seek professional advice, but most people ...
These come up all the time and we need to learn to adapt and adjust our lives so that we can We can deal with these pirates when they do come on to our doorstep. Thank you You