Maybe you watch “Stranger Things” and maybe you don’t.
Either way, (Running Up That Hill) is a great song. Especially on Mondays.
Mondays often feel like running up that hill but with a whole bunch of problems.
Things that maybe floated away over the weekend seem to settle back onto your shoulders for the new week.
Maybe on this particular Monday, you would even like to trade places with someone.
Or maybe you wouldn’t.
But either way, chances are somewhere along the way you have thought about making some sort of deal with God to “swap our places” and maybe be someone else or have someone else be you.
And this is pretty normal.
Because at the end of the day the sentiment of the song boils down to one very human thing.
Being Understood.
We all want it. And more than that we need it.
But often we feel we don’t get enough of it.
For any number of reasons.
And this often causes pain. For ourselves and for others.
And we don’t have to look very far to see the results of this pain.
It drives a lot of people to make poor choices about themselves and those close to them.
Maybe you’ve experienced this first hand? Or maybe you’ve just observed it in others.
Either way, chances are you have been affected by it.
Chances are you have felt it even if it’s just a negative comment from a co-worker who is having a bad day.
But the goal here isn’t to get you focusing on this pain,or how bad Mondays can be, the goal is to help you handle it.
And there is one great way to do this.
And that is by making an effort to understand someone else.
By giving them the time of day.
By trying to really see them.
By trying to really feel what they are feeling.
And in my experience doing this does a funny thing.
In making an effort to understand someone else, I start to almost feel like I have traded places, and then I feel better understood myself…
I guess its the old “giving so we can receive” paradox.
It’s the old lose your life in order to save it trick.
So it’s worth a try.
And maybe that’s the only deal we need to make, and that’s the way we really change a bad place for a better place, simply by solving someone else’s problem
Maybe that’s the only real way for us to be running up that hill with no problems.
Yours in hill running,
Ben
“Oh Come on baby
Oh Come on darlin’
Let’s exchange the experience”
P.S. This same approach seems to work in business. I’m no expert but it seems like the more we can make others feel understood the more readily they will want to support what we are doing, and the more they will want to “facilitate” aka fund our efforts.