It’s time to drop the verb “fight” from our language.
Stop fighting. Start dancing.
Whatever you fight, you strengthen. And what you resist, persists. (Eckhart Tolle)
I’ve been using this quote as one of my recurring mantras for a couple of years now: I have gained a lot of inner peace as well as practical guidance from it.
These words are at hand when I need to cool down different degrees of negative emotions like anger, fear, frustration and the likes.
When I heard them the first time, they sounded somewhat counter-intuitive: if you fight, you will end up weakening whatever you’re facing, be it an opponent, your fears or your challenges.
Isn’t it obvious?
As it turns out, most of the times, the opposite is true.
Now let’s begin a short cultural journey in the realm of the word ‘fight’.
The context (Or the battlefield?)
Here’s how the word “fight” has been trending in literature, according to google Ngram.
Unsurprisingly, the peaks of the 20th century correspond to the two World Wars. The curve declines steeply after WW2, and then, to a lesser extent, across the 70's.
The relative “tranquility” of the 80’s and the 90’s in the graph is followed by a clear upward trend. Unfortunately Google Ngram doesn’t go beyond 2008, but it’s interesting to notice that this last data point is actually slightly higher than the relative peak that we can observe in 1968 (Vietnam War).
I’m no statistician so I’m not going to make any scientific conclusion from these data, however I’ve long been under the impression that “fight” is the primary semantic option we have when we want to express concepts such as desire to win, pursuit of goals and visions, and having our rights or ideas respected.
Fight for your rights.
The fight against drugs. The fight against cancer. The fight against…
We have only 24 hours left… This is a fight against time!
Fight every single inch.
This is a paradigm that we come across over and over again, in all contexts of life: in the dressing room before the game, in the office, in forums and inspirational speeches, in schools, even in religious settings.
We all use this verbiage.
We don’t even dare question it: we actually cherish it.
We’re all-in with ‘fighting’. Streams of adrenaline flow when we hear the second most popular “f” word. It motivates us. It drives us.
I wanna challenge this narrative.
It’s an old, rusty write-up, soaked with negative energies.
We can do better than this.
There must be a different way to express the desire to pursue goals, to compete, to resist injustices, to claim our rights back.
Here are a few ideas.
Fighting as a defense mechanism
“Whenever you are confronted with an opponent. Conquer him with love.” Mahatma Gandhi
What happens when we are attacked?
From an evolution standpoint, self-defense has an intrinsic value and a legitimate justification: we have been equipped with the instinct to preserve our physical and psychological integrity.
Today, however, the vast majority of the sources of stress, fear, anxiety and negativity in human relationships are purely psychological, i.e. there’s no real threat to our body.
This means that anytime we feel threatened, it’s because there’s an underlying and often unconscious belief that the perceived attack could weaken us, hurt us or deprive us of something that (we believe) is vital.
In a nutshell, we feel there’s a real attack going on. The primordial defense mechanism we received from evolution says: if you don’t protect yourself, you’re gonna get hurt. You’d better fight. Or flight.
The instinctual reaction generally manifests as rage, hatred or violence.
So the following question arises: how do we learn to handle situations in which our seemingly automatic response suggests that we need to defend ourselves even when we are not in physical danger?
I love what A Course in Miracles says on this:
We shall look at any interaction between two or more human beings as an expression of one of the following basic behaviors: an act of love or a request for help.
Any form of unconditional support, care, empathy and the likes, with no drawbacks, is clearly an act of Love.
Anything else must be interpreted as a request for help. Including perceived attacks.
Here’s the catch: we can work effectively on our perceptions only if we are willing to question the premise that attack is real.
Someone will object that there are situations in which people’s behavior has the clear intent to hurt, belittle, offend, even humiliate. It’s undeniable that these circumstances are objectively tough to handle, emotionally speaking.
But even here, the border is quite individually determined. What one perceives as an offense, another might be able to dismiss with laughter. It’s all about our inner narrative. Whatever the intention of the “offender” is, we always have a choice to see the offense OR the underlying request for help.
How can we see a request of help where there was a clear intent to attack? Here’s how I do it: anytime I interpret a behavior as aggression, anytime I feel any sort of stress or anger generated by someone else, I look inside for the source of it and I attempt to isolate the related thought of being threatened and re-interpret it as a request for help. I remember that:
Everything is either an act of Love or a request for Love.
How could you possibly believe that someone shouting at you, calling you an idiot or showing you the finger is actually asking for help? Well, because if the person in front of you seems to believe that you’re somehow a threat to his/her integrity, he/she needs your help to let-go of that belief (because that’s not what you wanted, right?).
And how can you respond to the request for help? Simply by not reinforcing the belief that attack works, hence not reacting with a counter-attack or with a defense.
So many times the best response is to do nothing and simply stay present, accepting the situation as it is. Other times, you may even offer an act of kindness and compassion instead. This way, you do not reinforce the belief that attack works: you break the chain of anger, hatred and separation.
The point is: what you do in response is a product of your inner state. You can explore that state by asking yourself questions like: How do I feel inside? What signals is my body giving me? Am I able to accept that this person feels threatened even if it was not my intent?
If you feel fear, anxiety, anger or rage while attempting to respond to a challenging situation, it means you believe you’re being attacked. Once you recognize that this is happening and you acknowledge it’s often detrimental to achieve your goals, you’re ready to work on your response.
With enough practice, through a more “controlled” reaction as well as using a different narrative to describe the situation to yourself (“I’m asked to provide help” vs. “I must defend myself”), you can experience a slow but steady shift in perception that can truly help you quit the “fight” mindset.
Acceptance and compassion will then become your natural responses.
And that’s a totally different paradigm.
Fighting as metaphor for pursuing goals
“Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.”
― George Carlin
We don’t only fight against. We often fight for. At first look, it feels more positive, more empowering, more proactive. But is it really so?
Some years ago, a few weeks into a relationship that seemed promising, I was googling on my girlfriend’s laptop (with her approval, of course).
The search history accidentally popped up and this sentence appeared: “Fight for your love”.
I figured out it was about me: our relationship had gone through a difficult start. I thought to myself: WOW, she must love me so much.
Our relationship went on really well for a couple of years, but interestingly enough didn’t survive the first big shake.
In fact, I ended up devastated by the break-up. Thankfully, after the intense pain, I could recover quite quickly: sadness and desperation were gone in a matter of weeks. I wasn’t completely healed though: a lot of anger was still there.
It took me about a year to get to the point of complete forgiveness.
Oh boy! What a relief! It felt like a liberation from the inner fight I had been dwelling on all along. Forgiveness had healed me.
Here‘s what ’ I’ve learned through this process:
Forgiveness is the ultimate healer.
“Fighting for love” is a contradiction in terms.
We make space for Love. We nurture it. We allow it to unfold.
With acceptance, empathy, sacrifice, support, and suspension of judgement.
Similarly, we often find ourselves fighting for victory, fighting for the right cause, fighting for our company to gain market shares, fighting for… you name it.
But the problem is, the “fight” narrative carries the negative energies of thousands and thousands of years of epitomizing fear, death, destruction, war. It is inherently violent.
Reality is that attacking never leads to win-win solutions. And this is valid both at the individual and collective level.
When we enter conversations or negotiations with the ‘fight’ mentality, we’re going for win-lose, never for win-win. And that creates the premises for the actual fight, for violence in intentions, mindset, words.
How else, if we go in with win-lose mindset?
I’d propose we take another look at the way we talk about some of the challenges that we face in life.
Standing up for your rights and for your entitlement to express your ideas or opinions does not require fighting. It requires courage and consideration.
In sports or any sort of competition: going all-out is not fighting. You can see it as the natural strive to expand your own limits and do better than the team or the individual who’s competing with you. The “opponent” is there to help you stretch your performance and unfold your best self. Can you be grateful for that?
Working hard with the goal of selling great products on the market at a competitive price, with integrity and environmental and social responsibility doesn’t entail fighting your competition. It’s creativity. It’s purpose. It’s striving for a better world.
An alternative narrative.
What verbiage to use, then? Here’s my proposal.
“If you don’t think it’s fair, dance for your rights.”
“Now I want you to go back to the pitch, and unleash all the energies and the desire to be your best selves. Use your opponents as if they were doing all they can to coach you to be more astute, more subtle, more determined, more focused. Dance with them.”
“We have only 24 hours to complete the job. It’s a dance with time!”
“Our competitor came up yet again with a new product. They are dancing with us. This shows us there’s a way to make our products even more efficient.
Here’s what we’ll start to work on, right now. Let’s show the market we’re in the dance.”
Dancing makes us focused and present.
We are self-aware as much as we pay attention to what our partner does. We allow ourselves to lead or follow. It makes us test our boundaries and explore territories out of our comfort zone.
It holds positive energies: flow, determination, resilience, motivation, inspiration.
If we want to change the World, let’s begin with changing the Words.
Stop Fighting. Start Dancing.
Will you join the dance?
